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As a new year is just days away we have been both reflecting on our six short weeks writing for this website and we have been planning what we would like to do with our blog for the upcoming year. We feel that if we put our ideas, dreams and aspirations in writing we can better track our progress while achieving a sense of accomplishment if we follow through with our resolutions. Here are our goals / resolutions for the new year for our site.
Keep Writing
The key to a successful blog is content, plain and simple. We have received a lot of great feedback from bloggers and our readers regarding our writing style and the nature of the content we produce. We make every attempt to write meaningful articles regarding balancing our financial goals with our ethics and morals regarding sustainable living and we try our best to include financial data to show our readers that our approach to our personal finances often saves us money and at the very least does not cost us more than a less sustainable option. Our goal is to write 3-4 full articles per week.
Challenges
We hope to complete the Yakezie challenge, with work and a bit of luck, by late January. We will continue to produce content and network and hopefully get our rank below 200,000.
In the new year we plan to post every day listing 365 Sustainable Lifestyle Tips. These tips won’t be nearly as in depth as our articles and we will likely expand on many of them in subsequent articles. We feel we can give our readers a reason to check in regularly and provide some useful green / sustainable lifestyle tips!
Mrs. SPF and I are strongly considering attempting the 100 Mile Diet during the summer months and possibly part way into the fall. For those of you who do not know of the 100 Mile Diet it works I will be posting a book review in the next month or so on the published book. Essentially, we will endeavour to only eat food that is produced within 100 miles (160 kilometers) of our home. It won’t be easy (coffee and sugar aren’t grown in Canada!)
We may consider writing an eBook chalked full of sustainable living and personal finance tips. Time will be the biggest hurdle to take this project on.
Lastly, we are floating around the idea of running a series of contests where the reader will be able to pick a charity and we will donate $50 to it. We really feel charity donations are invaluable.
Guest Posting
In the upcoming year we plan to embark on increased guest posts. Our goal is to participate in guest post exchanges where we will guest post on a fellow bloggers site and they reciprocate by guest posting on our site. By approaching guest posting this way both parties will gain excellent content and keep up with our busy writing schedules. Readers from both sites will be exposed to quality content and perhaps venture to the guest posters site to read more from the writer. Our second strategy with guest posting is to provide a one way guest post on some popular sites in order to gain exposure to a larger audience.
Networking
I have worked quite hard this year to reach out to other bloggers for advice, support and friendship. I think that so far this has worked out quite well and I want to keep this up. Part of this relationship building has been accomplished via Yakezie, following bloggers on Facbook and Twitter and by subscribing to RSS feeds. We are very appreciative of the bloggers who have decided they are not above helping new bloggers out. Good karma pays dividends.
We are also exploring a relationship with socialfinance.ca where we have been invited to share our practical take and style with the readers and writers on that site. Peter Deitz, the managing editor of socialfinance.ca appreciates how we write about how we apply sustainability principles to our personal finances and would like us to write for his site regarding some of our investment decisions and other similar topics. We’re very excited to explore this partnership.
Making Money
The goal of our blog is not to make money but we do incur costs (hosting etc) so we do use some advertisements right now. We will look to expand our blog’s monetization in the new year and will research strategies on how to turn our project into a small business. Hopefully our Alexa rank will help to get advertisers.
