By clearly defining the expectations for a blog or site, you are in a better position to act coherently towards achieving them, as opposed to writing content in the vague hope people will start reading it and visit regularly.
Business objectives can vary depending on how you intend to convert and monetize traffic. For example, the primary business objective for an e-commerce site is generally to get customers to make a purchase or, more likely, to make repeated purchases. Whereas, the objectives of an affiliate marketer may be to drive targeted, high quality traffic to their affiliate partners.
The abstract case that applies to any blog or site is as follows:
Attract highly relevant traffic
Engage that traffic
Get that traffic to take action (such as sign-ups, subscriptions, purchases, and so on)
The last step is one of the most important. For example, you might decide to create a newsletter that keeps readers informed about the latest on-going activities in your particular niche. One of your primary business objectives is, therefore, to get visitors to take action by signing up to the newsletter.
Getting visitors to sign up to a newsletter may require slightly different methods than getting them to donate $100 to a non-profit organization. The point being that effectively planning your objectives can encourage you to precisely analyze visitors' needs and provide focused and relevant content, rather than wasting time on content that doesn't convert.
Finally, an important aspect of any business (whether it is a blog or hardware store) is to become highly regarded and widely known in its niche. Becoming an indispensable part of the fabric of a niche community is immeasurably valuable. As a result, at least one of your business objectives should focus on the blog or site's standing. You will learn all about this in Chapter 4.
Make sure you visit the exercises for this chapter for a bit of practice with creating business objectives. You can find them in the download pack on www.packtpub.com/support. First click on the selection box as shown in the following screenshot, and select the title of this book:
Then enter your e-mail address or log in to your Packt account to download the exercises. Make sure you select the newsletter option to receive news of frequent offers!
By the way, can you see what the publishers have done here? They are doing what we have been learning in this chapter—getting the reader to take action, monetizing, and engaging with the reader by offering extra content.
Alternatively, you can also go to my site where you have access to marked online quizzes, community involvement, and extras at www.siteprebuilder.com and look in the BOOKS section.