Are you ready to thrive in the new year? Or are you elbow deep in deadlines and still digging yourself out from the holidays? Finding time to reflect on what worked in the previous year is one thing. Knowing what to review is another. Set aside time to reflect on your progress over the past 12-months and boost your writing income in the months ahead.
No, really. Set a reminder now.
Add an alert, so you know it’s time to focus on a 30-minute data-gathering session. If you can squeeze in another hour to sum up your findings and address next year’s strategy, sweet. If not, then schedule a second alert to complete the reflecting part of the year-end reflection.
All set? Then let’s look at what you’ll cover during your year-end reflection and how reviewing your writing business sets you up for a fabulous new year.
Prepare for your year-end reflection.
Chances are you’ll be diving into numbers after bedtime when your mind is a little fuzzy. Make it easier on yourself by gathering supplies and transferring the data while your mind is clear.
Gather your supplies. Grab any notebooks, folders, or other low-tech tools you use for your writing business. If you use spreadsheets to track stats on your website, social media, or client income, then open those up on your devices.
Transfer your data into your year-end report. You need one spot where you can view all the numbers across your various platforms and income-generating avenues. In my first year of writing online, I used notebooks. For my second year, I used spreadsheets, like my job board tracker. So, do whatever works for you. You can keep it extremely simple (which is what I’m talking about below) or take it to an intense level.
If you need help determining which metrics to use, then Elna Cain offers a fantastic starter guide on Google Analytics for bloggers and Hootsuite provides an excellent guide to social media metrics. If you’re time-strapped like me, then use these steps to move through your year-end reflection and goal-setting session.
- Prepare stats beforehand,
- Review analytics and brainstorm,
- Make sure your goals are reasonable,
- Prioritize your workload, and
- Schedule time for each step towards meeting your goals.
Grab stats on your writing business.
For the most part, you’ll be looking at whatever stats are available and meaningful to you. As both a freelance writer and a blogger, I review stats that cover all aspects of my business. I rely on a few writing and blogging resources to gather info. Here are some examples of what to track:
Blog. How many people visited your website in the past 12-months (audience)? How did they get to your site (acquisition)?
Email. How many subscribers did you add? How many unsubscribed? What is the final total of email subscriptions at the end-of-year?
Social. How many followers did you gain or lose across social channels? What is your overall engagement rate?
Income from all sources. What was your total revenue for the year? Did the majority come from one-off clients or anchor clients?
Expenses. How much did you spend? What are the totals for regular monthly fees and one-off costs?
Clients. How many clients did you work with? How much of this writing work was one-off versus ongoing work? What types of clients did you get? Where did your leads come from? Use the job board tracker for the valuable insight!
Hours. How many hours did you spend on client work? Blogging? Administrative? Personal business development?
The idea here is to get an overview of what happened over the last 12-months. You’ll use this information to create reasonable goals for your writing business and define your strategy. My preference is to view this information in one spot. I use spreadsheets to track my monthly and quarterly goals, but for the year-end reflection, I cut and paste my figures into a simple one-page spreadsheet.
Review your numbers and brainstorm.
Glance over your list of year-end data. Does anything stand out to you? Maybe you’re surprised by high numbers in one area, like a boost in Twitter followers. Perhaps you’re disappointed by email unsubscribers.
Review each category and brainstorm a goal. Type it right into the spreadsheet or put it in your notebook. For example, targets could include,
- Doubling your blog traffic.
- Increasing social media following.
- Adding 12 new clients.
You’re brainstorming, so dream big, because we’ll validate these soft goals next. If any actionable steps come to mind, then add your ideas right into your notebook or spreadsheet.
Are your writing goals reasonable?
Now it’s time to hunker down and deliberate a bit. What steps do you need to take to hit each goal? How much time is involved in each step? Is this time you have? Let’s say that your goal is to increase your blog traffic.
You might list steps like adding a content upgrade, posting more on Pinterest, or reposting to Medium. Add these steps in the box next to your goal.
Next, write down a time estimate that it’ll take you for each project. So a content upgrade (or freebie) on a website might take as little as 5 hours or as much as 20+ hours. Perhaps it’ll take an hour each week to pin on Pinterest and repost your best blog content to medium.
Now, look at those numbers and add 20% to each time estimate. Humans are notorious for underestimating the time it’ll take to complete a project.
Glance over your list after you finish the above steps. It’s likely that it’s substantial and time-intensive. In fact, it’s probably overwhelming. That’s ok. This is the reality-portion of goal setting. Take a deep breath. Let’s do this.
Prioritize your workload.
If you’re a writer balancing client work, a day job
That doesn’t mean that I don’t have goals for my blog, like adding an eCommerce page and additional freebies. But, the reality is that I can’t do everything. Instead, I hammer out explicit intentions for my prioritized areas first, and I do what I can with the rest.
So, if your schedule is similar, then pick your top three priority categories. Look at the tasks and time estimates, then revise figures into hard goals for your business.
Schedule time for your goals and boost your writing income.
Yep, we’re back to setting up a reminder. The thing is that as business owners, we nail our client deadlines, but when it comes to our self-imposed deadlines, we often fail to meet our expectations. Hopefully, by addressing this above and making sure that each goal you’ve set is realistic and attainable, you’ll achieve better results. Whether you do it now or later in
For example, I schedule ahead a couple of evening hours to review my editorial blog and social content schedule each month. But since a goal of mine is to add an eCommerce page, I’m setting aside an hour each month to complete a task towards this goal.
If inspiration overtakes you and you turn your end of the year reflection into a story, then it’s even better. Use your thoughts and words to motivate yourself into the new year.
If you’re lacking inspiration or feeling overwhelmed by balancing it all, then send me a message. Sometimes you need to bounce your ideas off someone else to get your writing mojo back and start kicking ass.
