You know the Universe/God works in mysterious ways when you find your first neighborhood friend via Instagram because you ended up following them on Twitter to enter a giveaway on their blog (or maybe someone they sponsored blog, who knows really…) and then you recognize a rather unmistakable landmark in the background of a picture of their child which prompts you to ask the obligatory first getting to know you NYC question, “What neighborhood do you live in?” Turns out, the same one.

This is how I met Courtney of Baxtron Life.

After scheduling and rescheduling a coffee date a couple of times based on shifting commitments and thunderstorms, we finally met up on Tuesday evening for coffee and people watching and talking about blogging and about a billion other things.

One question that she asked really stuck out to me days after we met… What are your blogging goals?

It was a pretty apropos question considering that a rather large women’s blogging conference called BlogHer kicks off tomorrow and it’s probably a question that I’ll get asked about a million times while I’m there on Saturday because.. well.. That’s totally a blogger ice breaker type of question.

I was caught a little bit off guard by it and found myself saying, “Um… uh… I don’t know.”

It’s not like I’ve never thought about what my goals are for my blog, but more like… My blog is my hobby, it’s fun time for me, and really my only real goal with it is to just keep on writing content that’s hopefully good and people are interested in reading. I don’t really have any aspirations for greatness.

Okay, yeah… sure… It would be nice if my daily pageviews would be in the hundreds instead of being somewhere in the 80-100 range for a day when I post and in the 20-40 on a day that I don’t (though, it’s an improvement in numbers based on what it was a few months ago) and I watch my stats with curiosity to see what sort of topics people respond to and what people don’t. (Apparently, everyone loves Sunday Confessions and when it talk about blogging and working from home but don’t give a shit when I talk about music.) and it would be nice if some day my Feedburner stats would climb into the hundreds (right now it’s fluctuating between 40 and 50). However, I don’t really let any of that dictate what I do and don’t post… I just write what I want, and hope for the best. If one of my posts is good enough to be passed along, I hope people do so.

I also don’t tend to have a whole lot of interest in participating in a lot of the popular self-promotion activities that bloggers seem to do… I don’t have a shop of handmade goodies for giveaways to bribe you to follow me and I don’t really charge for advertising slots because I don’t care about the money because I mostly swap. I mean, I guess you could pay me… but I’d rather swap than have the money. Half the time I miss being put in my sponsors featured posts because my inbox is so full I miss the call to write up anything self-promotional about myself and while I have good intentions to write guest posts for people, I usually end up backing out because.. well.. I barely have enough time to write my own posts, never mind posts for you, too… and sponsored posts? I’m only marginally interested at this point. I’m super picky about that sort of thing.

I mostly try to just grow my readership base by trying the best I can to reach out to people with the time I have. I’d much rather make friends with people and inspire people to do what they want to do with their lives than have lots of readers or make money.

All of that out of the way, I was a little intimidated to pull the trigger to go to BlogHer. Not like that’s unusual, most all of the first timers are publishing posts this week about how they’re nervous and everyone who’s been before is all reassuring like, “You’re going to have an amazing time!” It was more sticker shock. In the midst of getting ready to move, let’s just say… Dropping dough for the Saturday day pass kinda hurt a little, granted I keep telling myself that I’m paying way less than most everyone else who’s going to be there because they’re all on a little conference vacation and have to pay for a hotel and stuff… which, I won’t lie… I’m a little jelly because conferences are so much more fun and retreat-like when you’re not running home to sleep in your own bed.

And there’s the fact that most of the conferences I’ve attended in the past are tech conferences, not blogging conferences so I’m a little more used to being a woman in a sea of men rather than a woman in a sea of women… which means I kinda care what kind of shoes I’m going to wear and that’s a little weird.

But it’ll be cool. I’m not worried.

If you’re going and you want to meet up on Saturday, feel free to hit me up on Twitter (@nikkiana) and if you happen to have a +1 to a party on Friday, feel free to invite me as you’re date.