One of the areas I struggle with every year is creating a consistent stream of content, especially here on this blog.  Invariably, at the first of the year I have more time to post because work is slower, and then when work picks up in the Spring, Summer and Fall months, I put the blog and really all of my social media activity on the backburner.

I bet you are the same way, right?  When we’re busy with work it just makes more sense to focus ON the work, right?  I’m the same way, but every year I watch how my blog will start out strong for the first 2-3 months of the year then lose momentum as I stop posting due to being busier.

I am determined not to let that happen this year, and I want you to help hold me accountable.  To this end, I have set some pretty lofty goals for both my blog, and my podcast.  I’ve decided to share these numbers with you, as well as my goals to not only hold myself accountable but also because for whatever reason a lot of bloggers don’t like to share their traffic numbers, so I wanted you to see what they can look like.

But above all else, I am hoping that this year-long project will prove this point: That it’s not enough to have a blog or a podcast, you have to consistently create content.  You can’t create content whenever you want, building an audience takes time, work and consistency.  I’ve talked to fellow bloggers and podcasters, content creators that are hammering out great content on a consistent basis, and they are killing it from an audience standpoint. I talked about the importance of not only building but sustaining momentum on #FanDamnShow last week, and am applying this thinking to my blog and the podcast this year.

So here’s what I am going to do: The first week of every month, I am going to write a post like this one, recapping whether or not I met the previous month’s goals, and talk about what the goals are for the next month.  Here’s this month’s goals and the yearly goals:

For the Blog, I want to reach 50,000 visitors for the month of January, and by December I want to be averaging at least 100,000 visitors a month.  I think I can reach January’s goal pretty easily as I am already on track to hit it, but it’s going to be tough to have at least 100,000 visitors in December.  The only way I have a chance of meeting that goal is to write new posts here every single week in 2015.

Now those sound like big numbers, and they are.  But you have to realize that I started this blog at the end of May in 2009.  So it’s almost 6 years old.  For reference, here’s the average monthly traffic here for each year:

2009 – 2,131 monthly visitors

2010 – 5,428 monthly visitors

2011 – 12,426 monthly visitors

2012 – 13,719 monthly visitors

2013 – 21,239 monthly visitors

2014 – 37,626 monthly visitors

As you can see, I will have to at least double my average monthly traffic in 2015 vs 2014 in order to reach my goals.  Not gonna be easy.

Unfortunately, my goals for the podcast are even more ‘ambitious’.  #FanDamnShow really never had a chance to get off the ground last year.  I launched it in May and then in June I had some medical issues and didn’t restart it until the end of July.  I pieced together about 4 episodes through August but then hit another wall when work got busy and I didn’t put up an episode in Sept, Oct or November.

Here’s what downloads of the podcast have looked like:

A spike at the left when the podcast launched, then traffic fell in June and July when there were no new episodes.  Traffic went up a little bit in August when I got some episodes up, but really low in Sept, Oct and Nov with no new epiosdes.  But traffic did go back up over the last couple of weeks as I’ve gotten new episodes up.  My guess is if I had been able to stick with getting a new episode up weekly from launch back in May that monthly downloads would now be at a couple of thousand instead of a couple of hundred.  But I did get up an episode last week, one this week, and the goal is to put up a new episode every week throughout 2015.

As for my goal…..the goal for 2015 is to hit 10,000 monthly downloads of #FanDamnShow by December.  For reference, last month the show was downloaded 133 times.  You do the math.

Here’s this month’s goals for the blog and podcast:

Blog – 50,000 visitors

Podcast – 750 downloads

After the first 7 days, I am on pace to hit my goal for traffic for the blog, and I am almost on pace to hit my goal for downloads of the podcast.  Since the podcast is having to build its audience, I think after another 3 episodes this month of the podcast, I should be able to hit my goal.

So those are my content creation goals for 2015.  For the rest of the year during the first week of each month I’ll write a post like this one recapping how I did the previous month, and talking about my new goals for the next month.  I’ll also talk about why I did or did not reach my goals and any tweaks or changes I made or will make as a result.  Hopefully this will serve to keep me honest about my content creation goals, and also be helpful to you in building an audience for ether your blog or podcast.  Or both!