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As with everything else, in order to accomplish something big, you need to take small steps to get there. Determination and a plan to take those steps each day are necessary. The same goes for blogging. To develop a blog that has substantial content, qualified visitors and possibly a bit of income, incremental steps need to be taken.

Read any productivity blog or book and you will hear this over and over. Set goals. Take action. Measure progress. Adjust direction. Rinse and repeat.

A while back I read about a system set up for freelancers that helped set up a point system for important tasks. Each day the freelancer would have a set amount of points assigned and by completing tasks might reach that goal. The neat thing about it was that it wasn’t so much about getting everything done. Larger, more important tasks had higher points. So doing things that were more important meant you didn’t have to as many tasks.

David Seah developed this system and even came up with fancy looking printouts to help keep track. I was fascinated with the idea but wasn’t able to figure out how to implement this system in my everyday life. But recently, on BloggingExperiment.com I was reminded of this idea in the form of a point system for bloggers.

This system assigns points to, of course, writing posts as well as lesser known task like commenting on blogs, e-mailing other writers in your niche, answering commenter questions, and even brainstorming. The tasks have different points attributed to them based on their importance and the purpose isn’t about completing each of them every day. It’s about reaching a goal and maintaining some balance. A blogger could spend all week commenting on others blogs and reach the goal everyday but having not written anything for their blog would possibly loose loyal readers.

Other bloggers, like Eve, have taken this idea and made easy to use charts to help themselves and other bloggers. Many have adjusted the tasks and the points to better suit their blogging needs. I have a revision to add to the list as well. I liked Eves system but prefer a daily list rather than a form. So I took Eves spreadsheet and elaborated on it.

The other systems I’ve seem list “writing a long blog post” 10 points and “write a short blog post” at 5 points.  I’m unclear though if this is for published posts or for just for writing the posts. I didn’t feel it was necessary to have two so I condensed the two into one and gave it 2 points per 100 words written.

I’ve also added, at the bottom, a place to enter the number of visitors my site has had as well as feed subscribers and revenue. I put a chart on there as well to see progress, but I couldn’t figure out a very good way of showing it. I set it up to show daily peaks and valleys base on a percentage of the months totals. This is sort of strange, but was the only way I could think I don’t think this is the best way to show a range of, say, 2000 visitors, 50 points, 20 subscribers and $10. Such a broad range make the $10 look like a tiny bump. Any ideas?

I’ve made the spreadsheet available for anyone who wants to use it. I’ve tried to make it as simple as possible to use but there will always be issues. I’ll set it up in revisions to be able to keep track of changes. These changes can be tracked on it’s own page.

If you have ideas for making this better, please let me know.