Last year I blogged about 5 reasons I wanted to be a better blogger and today I’m finally putting down some thoughts on easy blog improvements.

Months on and those reasons still resonate but they just aren’t motivating me to blog as regularly as I’d like.

Aspirations are important but when it comes to blitzing goals, small, practical steps always seem to lead to results faster and easier.

So here are 3 tangible blog improvements I’m going to make to This Geek’s Goals in 2012.

I hope they’ll help me unleash the inner power-blogger and also make the site a more useful site for readers like you.

1. Sorry, it’s not all about me?

I spent most of 2011 blogging about myself.

About my habit of being sidetracked. My running injuries. My failures. My successes.

Me, me, ME, MEEEE!

I can’t help but think that all those self-interested updates would have been, well, boring.

I know the blogs I most enjoy reading aren’t self-gratifying journals. Rather, the blogs I frequent are the ones that give their readers a little (some, a lot) to use, recycle, ponder, share, benchmark against and put in to practice.

I wonder, if I can make my blog more like that?

Am I saying I think I’m going to become the next Tony Robins overnight? I really hope not.

I’m not planning on flicking a Guru Switch and posting homilies about how to improve your life. I wouldn’t know where to start.

But what I think I can do is make my posts a little more useful, practical, and connected to other cool stuff I find so that they might become more useful for you.

You can expect to see some stories this year about the top bloggers who entertain and inspire me. You can also, expect to find clear links to the geeky gear, resources, online tools and ideas I reference in each post.

In 2012, it’s still a little about me. But it’s about you now too : )

2. Click!

This one seems so easy and simple, I don’t know why I didn’t do this last year.

Well, I mostly did but I didn’t realise and now that I have, I’m going legit!

1. I spend too much time thinking about an image for each story I post
2. I love using Instagram (and if you do too, say hi. My handle is SeeMarkGeek :)
3. I enjoy blogs that use creative images to illustrate stories.

So this year, I’ll ONLY use Instagram photos that I take on my site.

Of course, I might still chuck in a graph or two.

And bar charts.

Bar charts are hot.

I’m already excited about this mini-challenge.

3. What’s next?

If you don’t already know this about me, you might find it interesting to know that I’m a procrastinator.

Without a system in place, I’ll put off anything I can until the last-minute. When it comes to blogging, I can tie myself in knots thinking about what my next post should be to the point I don’t end up posting anything for weeks.

Partly, starting this blogging project made so much sense as I knew that promises to myself were easy to break but public commitments wouldn’t be so easily dodged.

So it makes sense that the easiest way to stop myself from dithering about what I’ll blog about next is to pre-commit by finishing each new blog with a statement about just that:  What I’ll do next.

There we have it, three dead simple blog improvements I know I can commit to.

So, what’s next? Stay tuned for a post about my plan to gamify my goals.

*Cue Green 1Up Mushroom and Mario theme*

Keep well,
M

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