Customer Relations

New Year's Resolutions For Internet Marketers

The New Year's holiday is a great time to take look at your Internet marketing resolutions for the coming year. However, as everybody knows, the problem with making New Year's resolutions is that few people actually keep them. Very often New Year's resolutions are too vague, or focus only on the negative.

One mistake people make is to inadequately set out their resolutions. When you make a resolution, you are usually promising yourself that you will behave in a certain way in order to achieve a certain goal for a particular reason within a certain timeframe. In other words, a resolution, to stand any chance of being effective, should include four elements: behaviour, goal, reason, timeframe. What you want to achieve? Why do you want to achieve it? When you want to achieve it by and what would you do in order to achieve it?

With that in mind, here are a few tips to help Internet marketers set better business goals for the coming year.

1. Evaluation: Take a long hard look at the progress your Internet marketing business made in 2009. Did you achieve your goals for the year? If not, why not? Perhaps your resolutions were not well defined and lacked one of the key elements I have just outlined. Or perhaps they were not really the best goals for your business. Take some notes, or even write a letter to yourself and analysing your business achievements and failures. By taking the time to analyse your progress, you will prepare the ground for setting some good resolutions for the coming year.

2. Goal Setting: Now think about what it is that you really want to achieve your business in 2010. Write your goals as clearly as possible. Exactly how much money do you want to make in 2010? Or how many sales do you want to make? By what percentage you want to increase conversions? If you are aiming to improve certain skills such as designing web graphics, then state clearly what it is that you will design using your new skills in 2010. The more specific you can make your goals the better.

3. Purpose: Why do you want to achieve these particular goals? You must have a clear reason or purpose, a strong "why", and you must state it with passion. Napoleon Hill called it a "consuming obsession" and a "burning desire".

4. Timeframe: Successful marketers always set time frames for their goals. You must do the same. Give your Internet business resolutions clear time limits and immediately you will have improved your chances of achieving them. It is also a good idea to set down on paper how much progress you want to have made towards your business goals within each quarter of the year. When you set a time target for achieving your goals, you will always be aware of how much progress you are making towards them. It is a great way of keeping yourself in check.

5. Behaviour: What will you do, or how will you behave, in order to achieve your goal? This is where the firmness of purpose behind every successful resolution comes into play. For every goal you set, there are things you need to do and things you need to avoid doing. When you evaluate the previous year's achievements and failures, think about how your behaviour helped or hindered your progress towards your goals. Achieving your goals requires adopting certain habits of action and thought. Before you can begin to do the right thing, you need to start thinking the right thing. Every action begins in thought, and so you need to get your thoughts under control, cut out negative thinking, and develop the habit of positive, goal oriented thinking in order to do what you need to do.

6: Write it down: Write down your resolutions and refer to them several times a day. Write them as clearly as possible. Make sure each resolution answers all four questions that I outlined earlier in this article. A strong resolution will read something like this:

"In 2010 I will do (X behaviour) to achieve (Y goal) by (Z timeframe) because I would love to/so that I can (ABC reason)."

Keep a copy of your resolutions in a handy place, such as your wallet, or notebook, or pinned up on your wall where you will see it often. Repeat your resolutions out loud, make them your own, obsess over them, keep yourself to account because of them, believe in them and in 2010 you will stand a good chance of achieving your Internet marketing business goals.