I started blogging 3 months ago. And since the day I started it has been a roller coaster ride for me. I started as an absolute ignorant guy stumbling at every step. And there were so many questions and challenges and so few resources to tackle each challenges. I was challenged in terms of time, knowledge, ideas to create content, marketting my blog, enabling advertisements etc. to name a few. And the list goes on and on and on. I think all you fellow bloggers must be facing the same challenges. Isn't it ? And yet we find lot of successful blogs coming up so often and urging us to pay attention to them, book mark their RSS feeds, subscribe to their mailing lists and so on. And just like me they are also challenged in terms of resources and they have a goal to create a successful blog with x number of page hits, y number of RSS subscription and z $s of advertisement revenue within 6 months of launch.

This is where the management of a blog as a project comes into picture. And we all consciously or uncounsiously managing dream project to the goal we have set for ourselves.

Here are some important considerations I am facing while Project Managing my blog -

1. Goal - What is the goal of my blog? What is it that I want to achieve from my blog? If I am not clear about that then I do not know what I should expect from my blog. The goal of my blog is to be able to get 5000 hits per day, generate 200 $ in revenue and have atleast 400 RSS subscriptions in a span of 4 months starting today.

What is your goal for your blog. The goal is important as it will define the time and effort that I have to put into my blog. Eg.

To achieve my goal I estimate that

- I need to write articles @ atleast 3 articles a week.

- I need to market my blog and spread a word around physically or via internet, social websites, emails, etc.

- I need to invite readers to comment my articles so I need to respond to their comments and listen to their feedback. If I want to encourage my readers to comment me I need to reciprocate and participate in popular and upcoming blogs to show my presence to viewers.

2. Estimate of effort -

All these activities demand my time. For me to achieve my goal in 4 months what is the amount of time I have to provision towards my blogging activities. Here is my estimate -

3 articles a week will take me atleast 2 hours per article as I am such a novice and I like to research my articles and edit them again. I am also buffering in some time here.

Marketting my blog will take me atleast 30 mins a day. And commenting and responding to comments will take me another 30 mins a day.

So if I do the math it will demand a weekly commitment of atleast -

2 * 3 + 0.5*7 + 0.5 * 7 = 13 hours per week.

Here comes our first project Management decision. Given my present commitments can I afford to spend 13 hours a week on my blog. That gets me to the third point of Project Managing my blog.

3. Feasibility - With my goal set and an idea of the effort needed I have to arrive at a decision that is this goal set by me feasible? I mean can I achieve this is the given time frame.

I am a person with a full time job which takes 9-10 hours of my week days. Then there are other commitments like all of us have. Here are some of tips which can help us decide whether the goal is feasible in 4 months estimated by me -

- Are there low priority activities that I can avoid to provision time for the passion of mine ?

- Can I offload some activities that I spend time doing regularly to save me time for blogging ?

- I can do with my current schedule but what happens if I come across some roadblocks that I did not provision for in my plan ?

- Can I use the help of a friend or get in a partner with a similiar passion and work together ?

Given these consideration the project Manager in me tells me that I can provision for these resources to achieve my goal in the given time.

I am sure you also think about similiar considerations when starting to blog.

I will build more on this post on my coming posts.

What are your personal considerations? Do comment on my blog with your views and opinions about the subject. I will be very happy to hear from you.