According to Damien you set these 3 goals every month:
Circulation - the number of backlinks to your site
Analytics - visits to your site
Net - how much money your blog makes or income.

I have a little bit different of a goal set in mind, assume you are just starting a new blog and have not yet figured out how to monetize your blog. I only just won my first sponsored post a few days ago, so my blog has netted me $6 which is still in pending, but my blog is only 4 weeks old so I am off to a decent start.

I set realistic expectations for gaining sponsorship, viewers, and advertisers.

Note: Most pay sites and advertisers want to see the following as a minimum to consider advertising on your blog:
Must have IZEARank < 1000
Must have Alexa Rank < 1,000,000
Must have Google PR of 2+
Must have 100+ visits per day

Now, IZEARank, Alexa are very frustrating since you can drop or gain so much on a daily basis, you have to throw away daily ranks and ratings, and base them on 3 month averages. If you don’t have a blog that is 3 months old, for now don’t worry about these. You can just use weekly as your target, but don’t make my mistake and start fretting the Ranks right off the bat. I would watch my IZEARank be 7000+ one day, then 3500 the next, then 1700, then back up to 4000. Just ignore this temptation to track and micromanage rankings.

Some good goals to set for yourself as a new blog are the following:

At the end of your blog’s 1st month
<4000 weekly average for IZEARank
<2,000,000 average for Alexa Rank
25-30 average visits per day.

Set a goal for 10 backlinks for your first month
Try to set a goal for 5 RSS subscribers in your first month

Don’t worry about a money goal for your first month unless you are super ambitious and have more time than normal.

I set some lofty goals for myself, My blog started on August 21st 2008.

By September 30th I am am trying to achieve the following:

<1500 average weekly IZEARank
<1.5 million Alexa Rank average
50+ average visits per day
20 RSS Subscribers
10 backlinks from google

To check your google backlinks do the following:
Go to http://blogsearch.google.com
type link:
example link:http://www.dragonblogger.com will show you all of my backlinks

Then you click on “Past Month” to see your backlinks for the past 30 days.
I currently have 4 out of my goal of 10 as you can see in this snapshot.

Start small and use social networking sites to help you reach your goal. At first you will have lots of unique visitors and it will be hard to have sustained readership, don’t get too excited when you have 1 day with 90+ visits, but the next has 25 visits but don’ t get discouraged if your site only has 5-10 visits its first few days and weeks. This up and down spiking will happen until you can get backlinks and many posts out there. The more quality posts you have the more people will come to your site.

Stay tuned for part 3 which is promoting, linking and gaining readership.

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Before I write about how you can increase traffic and links, I want to establish my belief that content is more important than making money on blogs. If I stopped making money today, I would still blog because I love it. Having said that, you need traffic and links to make money with your content. That’s what this post is about.

I have learned to run my own race.

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