April has finally arrived ushering in a new season of warmer weather and new goal-setting opportunities.

Frankly, I wasn’t sure how many more of these dull, energy diminishing, bitter cold days I could possibly handle.

I was walking home the other night and a cold gust of wind caught me right in the face.

Seriously! It nearly forced me in to a violent rage. I was mf’n ticked!

Fortunately, though, the weather has been slightly more sunny over the past few days.

However, that’s not even the main reason why I’ve been walking around with more of a positive vibe.

Nor is the reason related to my birthday happening to be this month. (Better deactivate my Facebook profile soon though!!)

The reason I’ve been a little bit more jovial lately is because I’ve got a over a weeks worth of vacation coming up!

You know what that means? More time to catch up on the blog and a chance to replicate my year off.

Although I’d like to use the time to travel, this upcoming time off will be used to spend more time on the blog.

Since I will have more time, here’s the personal development plan for this month.

[bctt tweet=”Goal-Setting for April” username=”reversethecrush”]

---

💻 Update and rewrite the top ranked search traffic pages for SEO purposes.

Since I’ll have extra time to visit coffee shops and work on the blog in April, I plan on optimizing the older blog posts that have been driving the most search engine traffic. I was fortunate enough to receive an SEO tip from a commenter on the blog numbers for February post. The commenter, who happens to be Grant of Millennial Money, was kind enough to share his wisdom on optimizing for SEO. Given his level of success with blogging and SEO, it’s probably a wise idea to pay attention to Grants advice. Nevertheless, I plan to spend a day or two editing and updating some of the older content on this blog in April. Expanding on older content and making older content current is a fantastic way to get pages to rank higher.

✍🏻 Publish 4 Blog Posts

As you will see below, I failed to reach my goal of publishing 5 blog posts in March. Since that is the case, and seeing as though there are certain categories to cover each month already, the goal is to publish 4 blog posts in April. I believe this to be a highly achievable number even with my full time schedule.

Be that as it may, the real reason for 4 blog posts in April is quite simple. It’s because there’s 4 main categories I want to cover on this blog — Goals & Personal Development — Blog Reports — Dividend Investing — and financial independence, which is the category that covers more of a creative journal.

The other categories are fairly self explanatory, however, I do want to point out that although I’m tryna simplify the categories on this blog, they’ve also been narrowed down to the only categories that make sense.

As you will continually hear me repeat on this blog, these categories fit in with what I want to do in the long run — blog and dividend invest.

💰 Save 10% of my income

If I want to eventually become a full-time dividend growth investor, I will have to come up with the seed money to get the ball rolling.

To begin construction of my “more fulfilling life” portfolio, the goal is to save a minimum of 10% of my current salary.

Minimum is highlighted because that is the key word here. Every single dollar saved is an extra dollar that could be used towards the dividend business.

📲 Read and Comment on 1 Blog post per day

Although I missed my comment mark in March, I’ve been making up for it over the past couple days.

After more than a full year of blogging on reversethecrush.com, I still find commenting on other blogs to be one of the best ways to network and grow readership.

Sure, there is faster ways to get page views such as knowing what you’re doing when it comes to SEO and social media. However, engaging on other blogs is a great way to find like-minded people and get inspired.

📊 Purchase an additional Income Stream for the Dividend Business

Last month I set the goal to purchase an equity for the dividend business and succeeded by adding a dividend payer that pays in excess of 4% annually.

For diversification purposes, and also to have dividend income be paid out each month of the year, the plan is to initiate another small position.

Now, for the record, there are a certain category of equites that I will never discuss on this blog for conflict of interest reasons. I do want to include the income earned from my employers stock sharing plan in the dividend reports, however, I will not be mentioning the company or any of its competitors by name on this blog.

For all other categories, from time to time, I do plan on publishing content related to how and why I purchased a particular equity.

That said, as mentioned above, the 5th goal of the month is to purchase one additional dividend paying stock.

👨🏻‍💻 Update About and Blogroll pages

It’s been on my list to update the about and blogroll pages for the past few months now. I have a better idea of what this blog is about now, so I will continue to update it to align with RTC values as appropriate.

The about page and the blogroll page are next on the list.

---

Review of the Goals set in March

✅ Increase dividend income by purchasing a new equity: Pass

❌ Publish 5 Blog Posts: Fail — Only 3 published

❌ Update Blogroll and fine tune branding: Fail 

❌ Comment on 1 blog per day: Fail —Left 26 comments in March

✅ Save 10 % income earned: Pass

❌ Read on the subway: Fail

❌ Exercise 4 times per week: Massive Fail

Total: 2/7 = 28.57%

---

📜 Concluding Thoughts

In conclusion, I performed poorly by failing 5 out of a possible 7 goals last month.

Although it looks worse than it actually is with all that red on the page, April has got to have a higher rate of success.

I write these goal-setting posts with intentions of getting closer to my dreams of becoming a dividend investor and blogger.

While it’s important to pursue your passions, it’s also to important to achieve some level of success in ones lifetime.

That’s why it’s important to discover the “why” of what you’re tryna do.

The more I discover my why, the easier my life becomes.

‪Everyday is more purposeful‬ when you’re working towards something.

Questions: What is your “why” for what you’re doing? What goals are you working on in April? How successful were you with your goal-setting from March?