Are you a successful blogger? Success, it seems, has different meaning for every person. For some, managing a low traffic blog is a success in itself. For others, it means a lot of traffic, subscribers, and comments. The majority, however, does not know how to determine whether they are successful or not, and what exactly it feels like to be a successful blogger.

Every blogger is full of inspiration and motivation when starting a blog, but this elated condition seems to wane as time passes. The interest simply peters out and the once fun task of blogging seems more like a chore. This all happens because the bored blogger is not familiar with the sense of success.

Usually, since blogging is supposed to be a lifelong adventure, the formidable challenge of blogging overshadows the initial enthusiasm. To get a sense of definite direction and ultimately a sense of success, you need to set down several goals to help you stay motivated along the way.

Determine what success means to you

First, let’s get the meaning of success sorted out.

Answer yourself the following questions:

• Why did you start your blog?
• What do you plan to do with your blog?
• Has the initial purpose of your blog changed?
• Have you made significant progress in blogging?
• Do you think you have improved a lot?
• Do you think you are a successful blogger?

If your answers to all of these questions are not clear to you in the first 5 seconds, you probably haven’t determined why you blog, and you don’t know how it feels to be successful.

Blog with a goal-oriented approach

When you ask most bloggers what they want to do with their blog, they say they’ll write some articles, build some readership, create some buzz, and eventually make some money. When asked how, they usually stare at you as though you were stupid. Well, no comments.

Note the word ‘some‘. Some is the confusing part. Some can be as low as 2 and as much as a 100K and more. You need to involve numbers to see your course of action clearly.

This is where you’ll set down smaller and achievable goals to give yourself a sense of success and achievement, as opposed to being intimidated by the formidable ‘Some’.

If you have managed to answered the above questions by now, you probably already have quite a few ideas broiling in your head. So, to stir things up a little more, let me ask you a few more questions, this time a bit more focused on the nitty-gritty.

• How many subscribers do you want to have?
• How many comments do you want to get for each post on average?
• How much buzz do you want to create? Do you want to appear on Digg front page as often as Smashing Magazine and Tech Crunch?
• How much money do you want to make with blogging?

Already excited to get a clear sense of purpose? Great!

I know different people answer differently to this batch of question. To some, $10K a year would be a huge achievement, and others will be dying to earn this much money every month, or even everyday! But let’s not get ahead of ourselves. There is no way you can make so much money only by knowing that you want to make it.

Confused? Of course I didn’t promise that a sense of purpose will make you filthy rich.

Tackle the ‘how’ questions

The real trick lies in determining how you will achieve it, and create as many little ‘how to’s’ as necessary. The giant task of earning $10K per day can only be achieved if you get closer to it one step at a time. And these smaller steps not only involve not only determining why you would take them, but also how you would take them.

Suppose you want to get one thousand subscribers by the end of the year, and to get to this impressive milestone, you need to know how many you would be able get every month. Say, getting 100 new subscribers every month is well within your reach. But, the real task of getting so many subscribers in such a short period looks intimidating.

Here’s how you’ll go about outlining your goal and all the steps involved:

Goal: Get 1200 subscribers by the end of this year.
Smaller goal: Get one hundred subscribers every month.

But how do I do that?

Steps:

• Write guest posts on 5 main blogs in your niche (or at least five smaller ones)
• Create 5 well researched pieces of linkbait, target Digg and StumbleUpon traffic
• Start a competition, give away something for free, go viral!
• Start a project that makes others subscribe to your feed for updates
• Send out emails to your social media friends to help you spread the word about your top posts this month
• Be the odd man out in your opinion about a currently talked about news

And so on.. sky is the limit when it comes to finding new ways to create buzz.

Now, of course, you may surprise yourself and achieve your goal in half the intended time, or you might just stop short of your goal when the year ends (which is very unlikely, if you do all the steps properly), one thing is for sure: you’ll get many moments of rejoice coming from the sense of success. This is the precious feeling you want to keep with you when you are going through physical and psychological bad times that threaten to dampen your confidence.

With clearer and smaller goals to keep you motivated, and the knowledge of exact steps you know you would take, the fun side of blogging comes back with all the pre-launch determination.

Your thoughts?

What are your blogging goals? Do you consider yourself a successful blogger?