While you don’t have to make resolutions if you don’t want to for the new year, this is a great time of year to get yourself organized and decide where you want to take your business over this next year. Have you taken some time to prepare yet? These are some things you should do to get yourself ready for the new year.

1. Get Your Finances in Order

The end of the year means tax time is coming all too soon. If you’re paying quarterly estimated taxes, you have to be ready for those by January 15. But even if you don’t need to do that, you need to get ready for filing your taxes by April – although I’d recommend sooner if you think you’re getting money back.

If you use an accountant or bookkeeper, the sooner you get the financial paperwork they need over to them, the sooner they can take care of you. It’s just less of a scramble if you don’t both have to rush to get things done at the last minute.

2. Assess the Past Year

Was this a good year or a bad year for your business? What went right and what went wrong? Anything you wish you’d done differently?

This is an initial step in setting goals for next year. It’s hard to know where you realistically can go if you don’t know where you’ve been. You have to be sure that the steps you’ve been taking have been effective. If not, you need to figure out what’s been going wrong. Pay special attention to the things that went really, really right, and the things that just plain went wrong.

3. Review Your Business and Personal Goals

While I don’t do resolutions, I do like to have goals. It’s fun to meet them, even when they’re tough. Many relate to my business, but there are goals for me too, such as trying to get in better shape,.

Think about what you’d like your business to do over the next year, and make sure you consider how you’re going to get there. Saying you want to earn $5000 a month is a lovely goal, but if you have no idea how you’ll get there it will be much harder to reach. Make sure you include actionable goals, not just results.

4. Decide What Your Business Focus Will Be

You should always know what the main focus of your business is, and this is a good time to reassess what you’re doing. Do you need to change your focus slightly? What’s working for you? What isn’t?

5. Review Your Networking Strategy

How much do you interact with others in your home business? Are you taking the time to network with your fellow home business owners as well as with potential customers and clients? How effectively?

If it doesn’t come all that naturally to you, networking can be a pain. If it does come naturally, it may be one of those things you have to keep under control because it turns into excessive socializing that takes away productive work time. Or maybe you have it balanced just right. However things are going, take a look to make sure you’re networking effectively, whether online or in person.

6. Check Out the Competition

It’s a generally good idea to keep an eye on what your competition is doing with their business. While you don’t want to exactly copy their offerings, you do want to know how your own compare. Sometimes there’s inspiration in what others do, so long as you make it your own.

Consider the products and or services they offer, the look of their website, their website rankings, backlinks and so forth. You don’t want to be an imitator, you want to compare favorably to them.

7. Pick Something New to Try

Rather than stick to the same old, same old with your home business, settle on one new something you want to do with it. It could be video marketing, a new product or service you want to offer, a new place to network, a skill you’ve been meaning to pick up, something.

8. Par-tay!

Hey, it’s the new year coming up. Surely you get to have some fun.

One thing that works well for me is to have generic projects that I work on regularly. At need I switch them to focus on particular sites, or drop them entirely if something special needs to be done, but having regular things I do really helps keep things moving.

Write 5 Articles or Blog Posts Per Day

This is actually down from in the past when I could easily manage 7 in a day. But with a baby I have less writing time, and this goal reflects that.

At that, it’s a really challenging goal to reach right now. A lot of days I don’t manage it because time can be just so tight. That and the baby loves to pull up on my desk and pound the keyboard. Not a good thing when I’m trying to write. How I long for an office door some days!

Writing 5 a day means that I can get all the blog posts for one week, Monday through Friday, done in a single day. If I like, that means the rest of the week any articles written for that site can be for article submission.

Since I write for more than one site, it does not mean that I could write four times as much content for distribution as I do for my site. If I could do that, I’d probably just slightly up the blog posting frequency for a better balance.

10 Blog Comments Per Day

This one challenges me much of the time, but it is a bit easier to schedule. I can read through blog posts with my little Busy Bee on my lap, keyboard pushed in on its shelf under the desk, and figure out which posts I want to comment on later.

It’s nice to have something to do where I can spread the effort out a little. It doesn’t work all the time, and I think commenting earlier is better than later for actual views of my comments, but it helps.

10 Forum Posts Per Day

I’ve been slacking off on this one way too long.

Forums can be a huge time suck, but appropriate forums that allow signatures can bring in respectable traffic if you keep your posts interesting. It’s not so much about advertising as it is building a reputation as a helpful participant in the forum.

Other Link Building Activities

The trouble with blog comments and forum posts is that they can be no follow on many sites. That’s not that bad a thing if you focus on eyeballs rather than search engines, but you want a range of links coming in to your site.

Social bookmarking sites can be useful, and they go well beyond delicious. Seek them out and add your links as appropriate to the particular site. But pay attention to the rules so your links aren’t just dropped as spam.

I’ve quit doing link exchanges long since. They’re rarely worth the trouble. I had a small link exchange directory on this site for a time and the real link to random spam ratio was terrible and I finally deleted the whole mess rather than having to go in and delete spam submissions.

Finding the Time???

The worst of it all is finding the time for all of this. If you have the budget, I strongly suggest figuring out what you can put out to a virtual assistant. Link building can be a good choice for example… tedious, time consuming and really doesn’t need your personal touch. Let someone else have that headache.

Anything that you need to do on your own, figure out when your most productive hours are and use them! Turn off Twitter, Facebook and anything else that might distract you. Let TiVo get your favorite shows if you’d miss them.

If the kids are awake and the weather’s nice, send them outside. If it’s not nice, have them dress appropriately and send them out for a bit anyhow! Well, not into a blizzard or anything, but if warmer clothes are all that’s needed, they can play outside for a time.

These plans are of course only approximate, and will change regularly. But having a general outline has always worked better than a solid schedule for me.

What works for you?

I’m really focusing this year on building my business, and most especially my income. Don’t worry, that doesn’t mean I’ll start hyping whatever the latest big guru launch product is without even checking it out. That’s just not me.

But I will try to be more conscious of products I could be promoting.

I don’t mean just here. This isn’t all I do, you know. I have a couple of new sites that I’m working on that will be more about income. While still providing the kind of information that draws people in, of course. I’m just looking more at areas where people should be actively shopping with these ones.

And no you can’t know the niches. Mine! Find your own and get to work! If we happen to match, so be it but I’m not giving all my plans away. And I will be promoting things here too, of course, as appropriate.

For those of you also starting new websites, I’d like to offer some tips to get you started in this new year.

If You Want Some Help Getting Things Started

Creating your own website from scratch isn’t for everyone. As a matter of fact, even if you know the basics it may not be your smartest move.

That’s where a program such as SBI! can be such a big help. They take you through the steps, from picking your niche and domain name to developing content to monetization. It’s a bit more than basic hosting when you add it all up, but the tools you get compensate quite well, costing less than you would pay for all of it separately.

With their 2.0 version they’ve really increased your ability to take advantage of more of the web has to offer. That is, the ability to have users create content on your site for yo. That can be powerful.

There’s a risk to that too, and you have to monitor what people try to put on your site. That’s really not a hard thing to do. Just pay attention and you’ll be fine.

If You Want a Lot of Help Getting Things Started

SBI! sounding good but you want more help than that? You might want to consider their eLearning program. They’ll take you through the process of getting your site and business started in a 12 week online education course.

The course isn’t all prerecorded stuff. You’ll have weekly live sessions to guide you through the process that SBI users go through to build their sites.
It will cost you more, of course, but if you need help getting things going or just need that push to ensure you keep working at it, this could be a very worthwhile investment.

If You Don’t Need Your Hand Held or Just Want to Go Your Own Way

I’ll admit it. This is my way. I got my start online before hearing about SBI and while it’s a great system (my dad uses it), I enjoy creating sites on my own, in my own way.

In that case, please be sure you pay for hosting. Don’t go the free route if you’re serious about your business. You will come to need the freedom to control your site that comes only from owning it and paying for hosting and a domain name.

I like Host Gator. They’ve been good to me. Their $7.95/month plan gives you quite a bit.

Depending on your skills you can create your own site, hire a designer, start a WordPress blog… there are many options.

I lean mostly toward WordPress blogs. There are advantages and disadvantages, but for me the advantages are sufficient that I only do a little work with static pages these days. You can run WordPress like a blog or like a website with some of the advantages of a blog.

One disadvantage can be finding a good theme. It can be a bit tedious and I often spend hours adapting themes to my own preferences. You can buy themes if you like, and I’ll get into the free vs. paid themes another day.

On the plus side, WordPress is free and there are many plugins, both free and paid that can really increase its flexibility. That’s a topic that really takes some time to write about! Choosing plugins takes a good bit of time.

Some Ways, It Doesn’t Matter Which Way You Go

No matter how you go about building an online business, you’d better expect to work. Your average “overnight” success probably worked years to have that sudden burst of success. It almost never comes easy.

Choose how you get things started based on what you need. There’s nothing wrong with needing a little more guidance to get started. There’s nothing wrong with needing a big push to get started. There’s nothing wrong with winging it if that’s the way you work best.

Just remember that even the best marketers flop sometimes. Success is more likely to come if you keep trying, experimenting and working. If you start a site and give up when you don’t have visitors in a month you’ll never get anywhere.

I’ve spent a lot of time these past two weeks focusing on getting ready for the new year. Now that it’s here, let’s start planning to make it productive!

For me, the plan is to really work on getting more done with the time I have. Not easy sometimes with a toddler, but necessary!

I intend to do a lot more writing.

I intend to do a lot more blog commenting.

I intend to do a lot more social networking. Ouch, that one’s tough, at least for me!

I intend to work on building better income streams.

These aren’t New Year’s resolutions, as such. It’s a good time to start working on new goals. I don’t particularly care to call them resolutions. People are notorious for giving up on resolutions, and besides, these are long term goals that I’ve had for a long time. I just like to restate them once in a while and this is a good time.

Happy New Year!

I’ve been thinking on things I can do to help my readers in this new year, and one thing that came to mind is skill building. So many families are dealing with money problems, or facing the possibility of money problems, that now is a great time to really focus on coping.

For some, it’s time to really get serious about a home business. For others, it might be more about building job skills.

For me, it’s researching some of the best and most affordable ways to build these skills, so I can share the solutions I find.

And so I am of course curious as to what skills you would like to build up this year. Just leave a comment below.