Blogging 101: Creating a 5 Year Blogging Plan

That awful interview question “Where do you see yourself in 5 years?” always give me a sense of dread. I passed exams, finished uni and got myself a job that I actually love… and now I don’t quite know where I’ll be next year, let alone in 5 years. 

Despite this, I’m very conscious that me getting to my current position in life is because when I was 16-17 I decided to create a 5 Year Plan. Funnily enough, this wasn’t a sit down and make a plan kind of plan. It was a very vague “well I want a job that I’ll actually enjoy and can live off – so I also need to ace my A Levels and get that Marketing Degree and undertake multiple internships and part time jobs to get to that”. I’m currently in the stage of life where I’ve basically gotten to the end of my ‘5 Year Plan’ that I created in high school – and now I’m flailing around. 

So, because that somehow worked in my favour and I’ve read up online that planning ahead can really help in multiple ways I’ve decided that I’m going to create a 5 Year Plan for Uptown Oracle. Basically, I currently can’t plan my career, my relationships or my life in general – so I’m going to be putting more effort into blogging to create the benefits a long-term plan can give me without making plans that will be too complex to achieve.

Why You Should Have a 5 Year Plan

A plan can help you focus on what your priorities are. In order to reach your ideal, you need to know what it is and work on getting there. You can’t really work towards a goal without knowing what it is and how to get there (unless you get super lucky), so the focus is important. 

An addition to this is that it can help you plan specific tasks which help you directly meet your goal. If you know what you need to do, you can identify what needs to change on your blog, and what doesn’t need to change. You can also decide whether these changes are possible in the short or long term and plan your tasks accordingly. 

Having a plan can help you stay motivated to reach your goal. If you have dreams but no plan to get there, you can often get stuck in a rut in life as you get stuck in one place. If you don’t work on improving your blog and content, you may start to get bored with aspects of blogging or your audience may start to get bored. Being motivated, focused and eager to grow helps you get better and to commit truly to your goals. 

Having a plan also allows you to know when to say no to tasks which may not be conducive to your goals. If you focus your time on tasks which aren’t helping you, then you won’t be able to reach your aim within your time frame. 

Additionally, tracking your achievements, tasks and goals helps you to reactively alter your actions to better meet your plans. As time goes on your life around you may change in ways you can’t anticipate – which means you need to change your 5 Year Plan to better fit in with what you can do. For example, writing 500 words a day may be impossible next year if you get a new job, but you can alter this to write more words on the weekend or to alter how often you post which means you can write less. 

Why 5 Years?

A 5 Year Plan is a long term plan which helps you to develop a part of your life into what you envisage it to be. You could potentially change this to 2, 4, 10 or 15 years – it all depends on what works best for you. But usually it needs to be over 2 years to really utilise long term thinking. 

1 year plans and goals can work similarly – but a plan is more than setting resolutions and yearly goals. In theory a 5 Year Plan will include an overarching goal or achievement in your life which your yearly goals and resolutions can feed into. 

A 10 or 15 year plan can also work, but these will take a lot more reactive changing whilst you grow and adapt to new experiences you can’t control. The longer the plan – the harder it is to correctly guess achievable goals for yourself. 

How to Create a 5 Year Blogging Plan

So I’m sure you’re thinking “But how do I actually create a 5 Year Blogging Plan?” and I’ve got some helpful questions to ask yourself. Take time to write down your answers to these questions and start to form the basis of your own 5 Year Plan. 

What Do You Want your Blog to Become?

You may have already answered this question when you first started your blog, or your vision may have changed to a completely new one since then. But really sit down and think about the big picture. What do you want your blog to be? What do you want to achieve? What quantitative results do you want to achieve? 

This will inform and create the Strategic Aim of your blogging plan. Write down an overarching aim and purpose of your blog to start off your 5 Year Blogging Plan. 

Possible Strategic Aims:

• Create a platform to express my opinions and thoughts on *subject* in a unique way
• Build credibility of my content and build authority in my personal brand
• Create a behind-the-scenes look of my chosen hobby/industry
• Build a community and connect with people
• Build an email list through consistent and informative content

How Do You Work to Make This Happen?

Once you’ve thought of your Strategic Aim you can think of milestones you need to hit and tasks that need to occur in order to meet it. Think of specific tasks you need to do in order to reach your aim. 

For example, to “Build a community and connect with people” you may need to do tasks such as blog hopping, twitter chats, join group chats etc. Or other tasks mentioned in my community post. 

What Do You Wish Were Different Already?

On top of what you need to do – think of parts of you blog you wish were already different and how you may need to change it. For example, if your aim is “Build an email list through consistent and informative content” you may already want to change how consistent you are at posting. Or you may want to work on creating more informative content. 

Utilise these differences to add to the tasks you’ve already wrote about. Remember you can also add it to changes which may not directly relate to your aim, but may add to the tasks you’ve chosen. Blog hopping may be something you’re not very good at so far, but improving your commenting game may help your blog hopping game and therefore help you build a wider community. 

Setting Blog Goals and Blog Milestones

After you’ve thought of you aim, your tasks, and the changes you want to make you should have the information you need to create SMART goals. SMART Goals need to be Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, Time-bound. These will lead you forward through the next few years and can be altered as time goes on to better fit with your tasks. 

Goals can be further split into different types for blogging: Creation, Performance and Optimisation. It’s often important to use a selection of each type to best optimise your performance to meet your goals. 

Creation Goals: 

• Write 300 words a day this week
• Create 3 unique blog series in a year
• Publish new content in a new way (Podcast, Youtube, Medium article, etc.) in the next 3 months

Performance Goals:

• Increase blog traffic by 100% in the next year
• Publish 3 blog posts a week for a month
• Increase social media followers by 30% in the next quarter

Optimisation Goals: 

• Set up an SEO audit and optimise old posts in the next quarter
• Utilise Google Analytics to measure performance weekly

What Experiences Do You Want to Have?

So far this plan may seem very logical and not much fun. But you can also include experiences that you want to have whilst aiming for your goals. This can include experiences to inform your content such as PR events, or it can be more relaxing experiences like holidays which allow you to improve morale before you come back to your plan and tasks. 

What Tools Do You Need to Reach Your Goals?

Think about what tools you may need to reach and achieve your goals. This can be as simple as needing time to create – or it can be more complex like knowledge needing to be gained through courses. Will you need money to help fund your venture? Maybe something more external like an accountability buddy? 

Tools could also include finding the right plugin or analytics programme to track your progress. Learning new skills to improve on your blog could mean learning how to use new software, which could include free online courses or following youtube guides. Making sure you write down what you need can help you save time later on as you set yourself up for success.

How to Follow a 5 Year Plan

Write down your goals and put them somewhere you won’t forget about them. Even better, keep them somewhere prominent (like on a pinboard!) where you’ll keep them at the forefront of your mind. 

Don’t juggle too many goals and tasks at once. If you try every single goal you’ve thought of in one week, you’re going to burn out fast and not achieve as much as you can. Split goals into time frames and start what you can and do it well. 

On top of this you should try not to take on tasks that aren’t a priority to reach your aim. Doing too much that doesn’t affect your blogs creativity, performance or optimisation can take time, money and resources away from actually trying to achieve. 

Revisiting your 5 Year Plan

Once you’ve created your 5 Year Plan, it’s important to revisit your plan often to make sure you’re staying on track. When you revisit your plan you should make sure you’re reactive to goals and tasks which may not be important anymore, or add more tasks that may be more helpful.  

Tracking your progress

Once you’ve created your SMART Goals you will have multiple goals with times already attributed, plus tools, knowledge, and tasks that you know you need to complete within this time. Break down these goals into time periods – longer-term goals will be given a yearly review time frame, then quarterly, monthly and weekly. 

For example, writing 300 words a day can be tracked weekly, whereas publish 3 posts a week will be tracked monthly or quarterly. Yearly you can track your yearly statistics to review if you’ve increased that blog traffic enough, or social media followers. 

Reactively changing the plan as you change and grow based on this progress also helps you in the long term.