What is your purpose of blogging? Making money? Sharing your personal thought about something that happening in this world? Or become a Mr Nice Guy who spend his time only to share information to others? Whatever your purpose of blogging is, it is very necessary to set up a target to your blog. Of course what the target is depending on what your purpose on blogging. But I'm sure the first and main target that you should make is getting certain amount of Traffic.
why traffic must become the main target
I can answer this question with one simple sentence: "No Traffic No Money". Well, even if you don't monetize your blog, Traffic is still important. Without Traffic your blog seems dead, few people read your post, and you can not dig out the potency of your blog. The worst thing of getting few traffic to your blog is sooner or later you become bored with your blogging stuff. Seems you just talk to yourself, with no one hear you, and it will drives you crazy! (no i'm just overact)
::. Getting Traffic is easy, but make' em back is difficult
There are lot of ways to produce traffic (i mean REAL traffic) to your blog. For rookie blogger, i suggest to optimize the power of referral system to gain traffic to your blog, it could be Entrecard Drop Exchange, Advertise your blog to other blog which is more popular, or use LinkReferral.com to gain traffic + review from some expert bloggers. Those are the easiest way to gain traffic for your blog. Most of them have something in common: "If you want to recieve you have to give first". Give them traffic first: it can be done in many ways, besides entrecard or linkreferral system, you can be active on popular blogs, keep reading their posts every day and post relevant comment on those. And with little luck you will get noticed by the blog owners and that's a good news for your blog.
::. SEO your blog, should it done?
This is the most tricky part : SEO. It's like a two-edged-swords . On the one side it can really boost your traffic, but on the other side it is harmful if you make a bad move on it (usually bad technique they read from awful SEO blog, or excessive link building). So how we deal with SEO? Well, if you are new with SEO stuff, you should try to pratice the fundamental things, such as adding meta tags to your blog, choosing the right domain name to your blog, and learn the concept of keywords.
::. Now, start to set up realistic target
Now it comes to the phase of set up realistic target. How many Unique visitors you can achieve in the next month? is it 100,200,500 or 1000 per day? It depends on how long have you been on blogging. Few months old blog seems hard to achieve 1000 Unique Visitors per day, set up more realistic target like 100 readers per day, or even 50 readers per day. Keep in mind that our target builds up our dream, if you dream to have a blog with 5000 Visitors per day, start your target little by little with 100,200,500 and so on. With more realistic target, it is easier for you to catch your dream in a proper time.