Having started this blog in June, I realised that I have so much to learn. Reading through some other blogs and their posts, the content and photos really helped to inspire some ideas, but it also made me think about how I could learn and improve on what I’m doing.

So, looking for help, I came across the Daily Postarea on Word Press and signed up for the Blogging 201 challenge.

Today’s challenge is to write down 3 concrete goals about what I want to accomplish by blogging.

Here goes:

I started blogging because I wanted to deep dive into Content Marketing and Social Media.

After my kids were born, I realised that I needed to spend more time with them, so within a year of returning to work after my 2nd maternity leave, I decided to work from home and set up a marketing consultancy to help other parents, mainly mums with the same like-minded ambition of setting up a business.

During this time, I learned a great deal, I worked with designers, developers, creatives, freelance PR professionals and got to understand how to set-up and create websites, primarily for my clients to help them develop their e-commerce businesses.

I realised through this experience that the only way to truly understand digital and give advice that I felt comfortable giving, was to dive in at the deep end and learn about running a business;  setting it up and challenging myself to learn about building websites.

So I learned about Site IA, User Experience, front end and back-end development, hosting, e-commerce platforms and how to find the right resources to pull it all together for my clients.

Having done this, my personal circumstances changed and I went back to salaried employment.

The experience made the transition back to working full-time in office world, easier than I expected, because I was able to offer something unique.

Very few of my peers had gone as far as setting up their own businesses to learn a new skill.  I learnt through this process the value of constantly challenging myself to learn something new.

My primary reason for setting up the blog, is to learn how to create great content, so that when I am speaking with clients or colleagues, I am not just advising them based on information learned from other people’s experiences, I am able to give advice based on my own experience.

My second reason, and this is more personal than professional, for creating the blog, is to express how I feel about some things that I love, such as what I’ve learned about family life and how music, scent, food and beauty are there to inspire me.

Oh and by doing this, I am also using it as a way to connect with my kids and hubby at the weekend with somethings that we can all be involved in.

Since starting, I’ve noticed my husband being even more creative with cooking, my kids are quizzing me about my plans for the next project and we talk a lot more, we’re exploring things we wouldn’t otherwise do together as a family and I’m really enjoying the process of creating.

If at some point in the future the blog exceeds my wildest expectations, and I actually become not just good but great at writing and a respected blogger, it may just become something more than just a hobby.

Part of today’s challenge is to set 3 specific goals that are time based and focussed:

• Spend at least a couple of hours each week from now until 1st October, reading other people’s blogs to understand their writing styles in order to develop and improve my writing style and tone of voice.
• Increase traffic to my blog by 50% by the end of the year.
• Find a subject that I can post at the weekends and stick to it every week, e.g. Foodie Saturday or Sunday Spa day where I can write about a recipe that’s been developed by our family or a beauty ritual that will help unwind, de-stress and prep for the working week ahead perhaps.

I’d be grateful for any advice or feedback on this post and any thoughts about the subject for a regular weekly post.

Thanks for checking this post out.

(Originally posted 20th July as a page).