New Years Resolutions can be daunting.  Don’t let that stop you!!  They are an important piece of business success.  I have often told clients to plan on succeeding.  If you don’t, you make much harder work for yourself!  Resolutions do not need to be a complete overhaul, but instead incremental steps to reaching overall annual goals.

Bite the bullet and give them a try.  Make goals and plan the pathway. Here are a few resolution tips for business people:

• Create realistic goals that stretch you a little

Goal setting is valuable.  Setting goals that are achievable is important.  Of course, you can’t make all goals really easy… you need to stretch out of your comfort zone a little if you are to truly grow personally and professionally.  Dreaming is important, but unless you have a long-term plan to reach those dreams, you will find yourself frustrated and unproductive.  Start by creating a short list of business goals.  Do you want to thrill your current clients, expand your geographic scope, make more money, etc…  Once you have this list in place, you can identify the specific components of a plan.

• Promote your business regularly

Based on your goals, identify your audience, create a budget, understand existing resources.  Then…talk with your network!  Open two-way conversations with people– find out what they are working on and how you can help.  Everyone has a network– whether large and well-cultivated or small and untapped.  Both offer potential for positive publicity.  Regularly talk about your business in a public way– either in one-on-one meetings, through social networks or via publishing opportunities.

• Plan to work on Marketing

Planning is essential to success.  Book appointments with yourself, and members of your network, every week.  Commit to a set amount of time each week and make it non-negotiable time.  Whether you opt to do it all in one day (say, Tuesday afternoons you spend on marketing) or spend 20 minutes daily.  Whatever works best for you, just mark it in your calendar as ‘busy’ so that no one can intrude on it.  Also, track your time so that you may measure it quarterly– use your time-keeping system, on outlook, a spreadsheet or an old-fashioned hand-written log.

• Assess your successes and failures

You can’t always be successful in your initiatives.  Take time to evaluate the year that just closed.  What marketing activities worked for you, what didn’t reap the results you hoped for?  Did you spend enough time on those failed attempts?  If you feel you gave it a solid, old-college try, then drop it.  Move onto to more of the successful initiatives or try something new.  Just commit to doing it!