Yesterday I had a blogger catch-up down at the Little City co-working space and got to meet / catch up with some of my fellow Radelaidian bloggers; Alice from My Kitchen Garden (who also does the social stuff and marketing for Little City), Jenni from Styling Curvy, Kim from New Mumma Kim and Tatum from Hardwood Digital to do some blog work.

Well . . . I say "work". We pretty much just talked non-stop. Which was great, because I had plenty of take-aways from it and what blogger doesn't love a chit-chat about blogging with people who know what's up. Also my netbook wasn't working, so I couldn't do anything anyway.

So with all the blogspo buzzing through my brain, I thought I'd try and nut out some goals for the year.

1. Grow, grow, grow



My biggest challenge with Almost Posh is working out how to grow it nice and organically without a) irritating people b) selling out or having anything to do with the people who are constantly contacting me from Insta promising loads of free followers c) having to resort to writing controversial / clickbait type posts. I'm really happy with the small and engaged community I have here and every comment I get genuinely makes me thrilled. I'd just like it to be a slightly bigger small and engaged community!

2. Approach brands directly



Here's where I struggle because contacting people and essentially asking for free stuff or money makes me cringe and die and feel like the world's biggest scab. I have mentioned before that I like working with brands because I feel I give an authentic and real voice to their product and because I tend to put faith in bloggers representing products. In my actual work environment, we call that "trusted advisor status" and that's where I'd like to be. I've been lucky enough to do a bit of it last year purely by being approached and I would like to do more (providing it fits in with what I have going here).

3. Invest in the blog and my bloggy development



This involves things like courses and events as well as tools like planners and quite possibly templates. As a sociable introvert, turning up to things on my own makes me quite antsy but once I'm there and somebody throws me a bone, I am all up in that. And the more things I go to, the more people I know for next time. And it gives me material to blog about. It's a win all round. Personal development, YAY! Next up is the Bloggers United event in Adelaide in February and I'm looking forward to it greatly.

4. Attend ProBlogger

This is a big one so I am counting it as a separate goal from number 3 above. The financial commitment, the travel, the thought of being "alone" in a room full of 1500 people . . . but the feedback from people who have been, not to mention the potential learnings make it too much of an opportunity to pass up attending, at least once. The September date means I have plenty of time to save up and plan for it, while building my blog network so I am not that "alone" on the day!

I am already looking forward to revising these goals at the end of the year and seeing how far I've come. There are other things that I want to do like improve my images (I NEEEEED an iPhone 6s for reals) and work on behind-the-scenes stuff like SEO and indexing but this is big picture results-orientated goal setting.

What are your aspirations for 2016 - blog or otherwise?