10 Short Term Aims for The Frugal Cottage

I feel like I’ve got in a bit of a blogging rut lately; nothing I write seems to be good enough and although I have lists of potential blog posts to write, I never want to write any of them. There’s so many different angles I want to cover, that, in some ways, I don’t know where to start!

 

I also think I need to make some short term aims for the blog, to get my focus back and, as we all know, I’m a big fan of lists/aims to get me motivated to do more. I sometimes worry I do not utilise my spare time wisely, and it could be put to better use. However, there are moments where you just need to sit and do nothing, or watch some rubbish on the tv and switch off from the real world. But I appear to be doing that more often than not at the moment, so I need to find a happy medium!

 

So, to get me back on track and feel more happy with where the blog is going, I’ve made 10 short term aims that I would like to get completed in the next three months. Some of them will (I’m hoping) be straight forward and some will take a bit more time to implement, so I think that three months is an adequate time scale for what I want to achieve.

 

1) Tweak my blog so that it looks exactly how I want it. I have a free theme at the moment which I’ve changed slightly to fit how I want it to, but I’m not entirely happy with it. It just needs a bit of sprucing up, which when I’ve got more knowledge about html, I intend to put in place. One day, I’d like to pay for a total re-haul, but that’s a loooong time in the future.

 

2) Make my blog posts more Pinterest-worthy. I read so many blogs where they get huge amounts of referrals from Pinterest on a daily/monthly basis. Now, I’m still trying to get to grips with Pinterest and how it works but this will definitely help with getting more traffic through.

 

3) Grow my Twitter following and engagement with posts. I sometimes struggle with posting frequently enough, as I worry I may get annoying to those who do follow me, but with the speed at which Twitter moves, I think my posts often get lost within the mountains of tweets that appear every minute. I also want to work on getting more engagement with the things I do post, though I need to look at how to do this!

 

4) In the same thread as Twitter, I want to continue to grow my email subscription list. It is slowly plodding upwards, but not perhaps as fast as I’d like. I think I might look at getting a pop up box when someone is on the site, though I’m not sure how I’d go about that! I need to do some research on this, I think.

 

5) Set up a Facebook page for The Frugal Cottage. Now, I know this is simple to set up but one of those things I just haven’t got round to, though I’m not entirely sure why! This will then open a different audience that might find this site helpful and interesting to read. This should be done first I suppose, if it doesn’t take long.

 

6) Make up my mind regarding Instagram and setting up an account. I’ll be honest, I am totally on the fence about Instagram. Some of my favourite bloggers use it and I love looking at the pictures they post there, but there are an equal number of bloggers who don’t have an account. I cannot decide whether or not it would work with what I’m trying to do here or not. But then, if I did set one up and didn’t use it very often, would that have a detrimental effect on things? I just don’t know!

 

7) Go back and “quality control” some of my earliest posts. As I continue to tweak my theme, older posts can sometimes look a big strange. I need to get through them all and check the spacing is right and whether the pictures (if there are any) fit in the same way.

 

8) Add at least one image to every post. This is to link in with #2 so that I can Pin more images to Pinterest and hopefully grow traffic. Most of my earliest posts do not have any image on there at all, and have got a bit lost in the mix of all posts on the site. Although this will probably take quite a lot of time, I can worth through the list of posts slowly, so that I can get the right pictures to go with the posts.

 

9) Start to take more of my own pictures for posts. I’m not the best at photography, but this is something I’d definitely like to work on and get better at. This will be especially helpful for my Foodie Friday posts where I post recipes. The pictures do not do the recipe justice! I’ve been doing a lot of reading about food photography; I just need to practise. Now the nights are getting lighter, this will get easier to fit into my schedule.

 

10) For everyone who comments on my blog, go to their site and return the favour. When time is precious, commenting on other blogs can be put right to the bottom of the list. I read lots of blogs, but don’t bother to comment. Now, I absolutely love getting blog comments, so I presume other people do as well, no matter how successful they are. If people are taking the time to comment on my blog, I need to make the time to return the favour and visit theirs.

 

I think this is enough for going on with; I have a feeling that some of these may take me a while! It feels good to have written my aims down though – I mean business when it’s written down!