Nov 1, 2011

Setting Writing Goals and Meeting Them

Do you set goals for your writing?  Is there a dollar figure you strive to earn each month, a word count total, or number of articles each day or week that you hope to attain?

Setting goals can help you be more productive, but make sure they're realistic.  You want to stretch yourself, but you also don't want to set yourself up for failure right out of the gate.  Setting the bar too high is a recipe for disappointment, so take a look at your past performance and adjust from there.  If you currently write an article each day, you might stretch that to 10 articles a week.  If you find you're able to do that easily enough, you can always up the ante.



Photo by UmutKemal
If your goal is to earn a certain amount each month, perhaps to pay down a credit card or save for a vacation, divide that total by the number of days in the month for a daily monetary goal.  Determine your average payment per assignment (article, blog post, etc), and you'll have an idea of how much you'll need to write each day to meet your goal.

If your goal is to earn $600 in a month with 30 days, you'll need to earn an average of $20.00 each day.  If your average rate of pay is $15 per piece and you write one each day, you'll have to make up the extra $150 by cranking out an additional 10 articles during that month.  If you can do a few higher than normal paying assignments, you might be able to maintain the pace at one article a day, but if some pay less than the norm, you'll have to take on more of them.

The same formula can be used if you have a word count you're striving for in order to get that novel finished.  Keep a simple excel spreadsheet to track your progress -- be it number of words, articles, or a dollar amount -- so you'll known when you need to kick it into gear, or whether you can afford to take a full day off from writing.

My goal can be met this month by averaging one article per day.  Have you set a goal for yourself?  Do you have a plan for how to attain it?

5 comments:

  1. My only goal is to find more time to write. For the past several months, it seems all I've been doing is watching children, dealing with health issues, and being frustrated over computer problems. But today, FINALLY, I discovered the problem with my computer. It wasn't a computer issue at all, but a Firefox problem. You can't imagine how relieved I am to know that I no longer have to deal with the chronic frustration of waiting for pages to load that never load. The time wasted every day was phenomenal. Finally it's solved. Now back to the grandkids ;)

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  2. I agree with Theresa, my problem too is finding enough time to write.

    These days I barely write 2 articles a month on Yahoo, since the traffic is just dire. I write instead for my blog when a topic grabs me, and mostly I am creating new lenses on Squidoo.

    The nice thing about the lenses is that many of them are evergreen, and I can earn through their advertising payouts (based on traffic/ranking) as well as sales of products from them too. My earnings here are increasing monthly at least, and having created lenses I can often blog about topics related to them to give them backlinks.

    I would love to earn $600 a month! I must have reached about $500 in October, getting closer.

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  3. Interesting and motivating piece. I just might pass this along today.... Thanks for this. :)

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  4. Thanks for the tips. I just wrote an article and linked to yours. Keep the ideas flowing! :)

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