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Every blogger knows they need to be setting goals. It a crucial part of your overall business plan. Especially with the New Year fast approaching! But what type of goals should you set?

Today I have for you 3 types of goals you need to set for 2023!

-Long-Term Goals

These are the ultimate goals you want to achieve. The “big dream, 6-figure business” you want to run. Or maybe you just want to quit your day job in the end. Not everyone needs to run a huge company (and that’s okay too!).

When I set my long-term goals, I like to think of them more like dreams rather than “goals”. This will help you dream big without fear of wondering how you’re going to reach these dreams.

Calling them “goals” may seem scary and you’ll have no idea where to start, but a “dream” seems almost less real, making your mind free to wander.

For example, when I was running a crochet blog, these were a few of the dreams I had set;

• Have my patterns published in a magazine
• Publish my own monthly crochet magazine
• Create my own yarn brand

And of course, you’ll want to set the more common “Be successful, make money, quit the day job” goals. (If that’s what you’re going for!)

But, while they are important, they are pretty much a given. That’s obviously what you want to do when starting a business. The other dreams are physical things you can do to bring you closer to your ultimate success.

Now, personally, if I was thinking in terms of “goals” I guarantee you I would never have come up with those things!

Frankly, those dreams scare me and I had no idea how I was going to reach them. But now that I thought them up, I could break them down and work towards them.

What you should do:

Come up with a list of dreams and goals that you want to hit. Dream big and write everything down. Don’t be afraid to hit them, just dream! Big goals that scare you and excite you are goals worth working towards!

-Short-term Goals

Now that you have your list of big dreams or goals, it’s time to begin breaking them down. Some you’ll have to break down more than others and some you may not even know how to break down yet.

Which is fine, that means you‘ll have goals to save and break down later when you have more experience. It’s okay to write goals down and not have a plan or way to achieve them yet! You always need goals.

So let’s say I take my goals for creating crochet books. It’s a book all about how to crochet dinosaurs.

For that I would need, an idea of how to publish a book, how I would publish my book (publishing house, or e-book), I would need to design enough patterns to put in a book and get a few testers for each pattern.

Now that I know the steps I need to get to the big goal, I can break those steps down even more to daily goals.

What you should do:

Take each long-term goal that you can and break it down as far as you can. What general steps do you need to take to get closer to this big goal?

It’s okay if these steps are vague just like the ones I’ve mentioned above!

-Daily Goals

Daily goals are the tasks that you would put on your daily to-do list. These are the baby steps that bring you to the small milestones you hit in order to reach the big goals.

Basically, your daily goals and tasks should bring you closer to your short-term goals which should align with your long-term goals.

So let’s take the crochet book short-term goals that I set. What would be the daily task I’d need to begin this adventure?

Well, the first step would be creating patterns. So first, if I was completely new to this, I would research how to create a good pattern. I would practice looking at other people’s patterns and figure out all of the steps that went into it.

Then my goal for the day might be to work on a pattern a day, or a week, depending on how long it took me to make.

If I wanted 100 patterns for my book, and I created one pattern a day (it would be a miracle) but I could theoretically have the content for my book in 100 days.

Now I can move on to getting patterns tested, final drafts written, pictures taken and sent off to a publishing house or drafting it myself as an E-book.

What you should do:

Each day, take a step in your process from the short term goals and break them down even further to create daily goals. What tasks can you get done in a day? Make a to-do list and start working!

Related: How to Write a To-Do List you’ll Actually Complete

Long term goals can seem impossible to hit when you’re starting at step one. But if you take one step a day, you’re closer to your goal than you were the day before.

Breaking down big goals into small, actionable steps is definitely the way to go. So don’t be afraid to dream big and shoot high! Everybody had to start at step one.

What are your big goals for the New Year? Let me know in the comments below!