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It should come as no surprise that on the last day of 2011 we would post an article about setting your blogging goals for the coming year. It is during this time of year that most people are talking about resolutions rather than goals. I have found, however, that resolutions tend to be rather vague, which is why I much prefer the setting of goals. Where resolutions typically read “I resolve to write more blog articles in 2012,” goals are more precise, “I will write 5 blog posts per week.” As you can see, a goal is a clear and precise direction for which actionable steps can be made to achieve them.

Before one can make a set of clear and positive goals for the next year, it is important to examine your accomplishment of the goals you (hopefully) set for 2011. This is an important step because doing so will help to better identify your own strengths. Not only in setting and achieving goals, but in determining what strengths you have had and what weaknesses you need to work on.

Have you been making regular and relevant posts to your blog? Have you achieved the financial needs you set for yourself this year? How about getting the kind of traffic you had hoped for? There are a great number of ways to increase your readership in 2012, but if you are having difficulty identifying what you succeeded in during 2011, your first goal should be to set real and tangible goals.

All successful businesses thrive when they operate from a business plan and a clear set of business goals. If you are trying to profit from your blogging efforts, you have a business. Today, being the last day of 2011, is not too late to set the right path for your efforts in the coming year, but don’t put off doing so any longer. Even if you set a hard goal target to develop a list of goals by the end of the week, set a specific day and set your mind to making that a priority.

For those who have not set goals in the past, it may seem petty to try to do so now, but I would be willing to bet that at the end of 2012, you will be glad you did!

One of the hottest topics I have written about in regards to blogging for profit has been site up-time. It simply doesn’t matter how much time, sweat and money you put into your site if it is down more than it is operating properly. Unfortunately BlogConduit has been the recipient of a string of hostile attacks by a relentless hacker.
This unfortunate series of events led to a woefully high incidence of site downtime as well as being temporary labeled by Google as a distributor of malware. If you have never had this experience, it would be in your best interest to never allow such a thing to happen to your site. Not only does your readership decrease, you will lose valuable return visitors and if your blog is monetized, forget any income during the downtime.

Thankfully the good people at Google are  responsive and as soon as all of the malicious code was detected and eliminated, it only took a few days for a site review and all was past. At least that is what I thought. As soon as the hacker attack was solved on my individual site, some catastrophic failure plagued my web host and the servers fell offline one-by-one. It does look like things have finally turned the corner, but months of potential income has been lost by them and their clients. Safe, reliable hosting is an absolute that cannot be compromised.

For those of you who are visiting BlogConduit for the first time, or return readers that have weathered the storm, we say thank you!

I know many of you have been wondering what has happened to this blog and I can assure you at certain points in the last two months I have been asking myself the same question.

Apparently I garnered the attention of someone with genuine hacking skills that for whatever reason doesn’t like my sites. I have been combating attacks against all of my blogs since August. Past attacks were a nuisance, but the attacker shifted his strategy in this latest round and did quite a number on all my blogs. So much so that Google had classified all of my sites to be malicious attack sites and blocked them.

The amount of time I have for blogging the last few weeks has been spent defending the site, cleaning up malicious code and making efforts to tighten security. I don’t know if all that I have done will be enough to keep this anonymous coward away from me again, but for now things are back to normal.