‘Tis the season to start planning the upcoming year. Unfortunately, most people end up giving up on their resolutions within a week or two of New Year’s, but it doesn’t have to be that way. Here I’m going to show you step by step how to set business goals you can actually follow through on.

Step One: Write Down Yearly Goals

Don’t make a neverending list. Pick 3-5 goals that you want to hit in 2010, by the end of the year. These are your big goals and these are what most people stop at . . . “Earn $5,000 a month” or “Have 1,000 subscribers to my email list”, etc. The key to actually reaching your big goals is to break them down . . . which takes us to the next step.

Step Two: Plan Monthly Goals

Take the first yearly goal you wrote down. Now you’re going to need to figure out exactly how you are going to reach that. Let’s say you run a freelance writing business and you want to earn $5,000 a month by the end of 2010. It’s a nice dream, but you have to take action to get there.

You have 12 months to reach that goal, so how are you going to do it? If you’re like me and write SEO articles, you aren’t going to hit that figure without going insane, so that means some things will have to change. You might need to change your writing focus and work on web copy instead of articles, for example, or move into sales letters which can be worth thousands of dollars each. If you have no experience in these areas, that means you’ll need to set goals for each month to first learn (ebooks, videos or even e-classes) the skills needed, then to promote and get experience and finally, raise your prices until you reach that goal of $5,000.

Now, let’s say you aren’t interested in writing for clients anymore and you want to move into your own stuff without losing income. You might start by doing your usual client work, as well as working on a website, ebook or e-course of your own on the side. Gradually, you would build up your own product list, promoting that more and more, and gradually easing up on work for others.

Set specific goals for each month. In this case, it might be something like this:

January: Take sales page copywriting course

February: Set up website and two sample sales letters

March: Article marketing and social media promotion for Sales site

etc.

Step Three: Break It Down Further

So, now you have your monthly goals and you know what you need to accomplish each month, but usually that isn’t enough. Now you need to figure out what to do each week and even on a daily basis. Whether you go as far as to plan out daily activities or not is completely up to you. If you DO decide to go this route, you may want to do this planning on a monthly basis. So, plan out the weeks now and at the end of each month, you plan the daily goals for the coming month.

Let’s take January’s goals here as an example. It may look simple, taking a course in copywriting, but you would want to include doing the homework, writing sample sales letters and having them critiqued, etc. If you are reading an ebook on copywriting, your goals might be to read a chapter every two days, then put it into practice, etc.

Step Four: Put It Into Action

Now that you have a plan, make it happen. This means you’ll need to actually do the actions you’ve planned out. Hang your daily or weekly goals where you can see them in your workspace and add them to your list each day so you will remember to actually complete them. You may need to take some time every couple of months to reevaluate where you are and whether you need to adjust things or not . . . not all plans work out perfectly.

All this planning is going to take some time. You have nearly a week before New Year’s Day, so get cracking!

Other Posts You May Enjoy

• Is Debt Strangling You?
• Planning for the New Year
• 3 Work at Home Lessons from Cars
• Getting Back Into the Swing of Things
• Follow Through On Your Goals