What’s the point of writing this bloody thing?!

Before I get into the meat of this post, let me say that it is written in response to repeated jibes and ferocious attacks* from a certain blogging buddy of mine, Dave Doolin of Website In A Weekend, after I replied to a blog post of his without providing a link to my own goals page. Tsk tsk. Let this blog post be the correction to that horrible mistake.

Starting points and redesigns

After reading a lot about providing people with a starting point, setting goals and even writing about setting goals myself, I find myself flummoxed that I don’t really have my own goals sorted out for this website of mine. I have them sorted for my other sites (which will remain under wraps for now), but this very blog you’re reading has been drifting in and out of my subconscious for the past two years not really going anywhere special.

In January I conducted a redesign and in the process rewrote my about page which looked like it was previously written in the dark ages. A little better, but still not really what Dave was talking about here. Where the heck is my goals page and, by the way, what’s the point of writing this bloody thing?!

Correcting my horrible mistake

Let me first say that writing a goals page isn’t the easiest thing in the world, especially when you think you sort of, kind of have that already sorted. But then you really do re-read some of the stuff you’ve written and can see how blindingly obvious it is that you don’t have a clear direction.

My overarching goal for this site is to become a resource hub for programmers to learn about making money and leveraging marketing, product creation and most importantly their own skills in building a viable side business for themselves which can optionally lead to full time entrepreneurship. As such this blog is about entrepreneurship and all the things that go along with it.

Secondary goals

My secondary goals for this site are basically summed up in the section off to the right of the menu bar titled “Projects To Get You Started”, which may or may not be renamed in the future to something more sensible for the Code My Own Road brand.

Each section which was, up until this point, previously un-published as a holding place for the core topics I’m writing about on this site. They are being filled in with blog posts about the topic in hopefully some sort of comprehensible order, starting with (if you didn’t notice by what I’ve been covering lately) Code My Own Freelancing.

But, since things usually don’t reveal themselves to me in the order that most makes sense for others to read, they will probably end up filled in in a haphazard order which means it makes sense for me to release a product that will encompass all the posts and expand on them when the time comes to wrap up a section or when a section is mostly (like 80%) covered.

This is be available for you to purchase and will not only be nicely formatted but guaranteed to make sense because it will be heavily edited and expanded. That said, if you troll the archives of this site at that point you’ll be able to find the core points covered for free.

Therefore, my secondary goals for this site are to fill in each section with blog posts and release a complete product based around the content created for that section to help people with that topic.

Oh and by the way, I reserve the right to change up the projects to get you started section, so while I’ve published the list there in the menu publicly for accountability purposes it may change over time.

Secondary secondary goals

My second set of secondary goals (thirdary?) are to release useful plugin and theme products based extension products of which I’ve already released two, Stylesheet Per Page and hCard/vCard Generator. These are based on things that I want personally, or that people have expressed to me are a need that hasn’t been filled adequately by other products out there. And, I just like coding – so this soothes my inner monkey.

They’re also a great way of attracting more coders, which are my primary audience after all. In the immortal words of someone I used to work for “up here for thinking, down there for dancing.”

A long slog

I know it’s not exactly a small goal what I’m embarking on but it has been somewhat validated in that since I’ve started talking about the new topics my traffic has increased over 50% on daily views and I’m finding more and more references to people sharing what I’m saying.

Setting long term goals such as these is one of those “necessary evils” when it comes to blogging. But, keep in mind that blogging is a long term activity and not something you can have “overnight success” in and it makes a lot of sense.

I suggest everyone who owns a website to do this via my Teach Yourself Websites eCourse, and it’s something that is echoed in the words of many other “I will teach you websites” bloggers.

Oh and if you’re in the “I’m gonna school ya” field of writing like myself, then perhaps you should kick your own ass like I have if you don’t have a similar page to this.

*he wasn’t really that ferocious, I’m being a sensationalist

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