Well if you are at all like me then you are probably not as well on your way as you would have liked to be by now. I have been struggling to reach all the goals that I have set for myself in the past. Now this could be attributed to me setting up quite an extended list of goals or the more likely reason is because I don’t set up a plan of how to reach them.

Defining your goals consists of much more than just writing down what you want to achieve. You need to set out what exactly you would like to achieve and the steps needed to accomplish those goals. I recently started implementing project management techniques such as divide and conquer to break down my goals into smaller more manageable tasks. By doing this it has allowed me to clearly define the steps I need to take to reach my goals.

This principle shouldn’t only apply to yourself but also to your business. You need to define goals that you wish to reach with your online marketing this year. These could include online brand awareness, stimulating the conversations with your customers, increasing website traffic and direct sales.

If one of your online marketing goals were to improve brand awareness then how would you achieve this? Well social media is definitely the hot topic in 2010 for businesses, so you might want to look at how you could leverage this to increase brand awareness. Investigate what you would like to achieve this year and set out a plan to reach these.

Planning your goals is only the start, as you will need to measure the results by monitoring. In the blog posts to follow we will discuss using Google Analytics and other technologies to monitor your efforts. So please visit our site this week to keep up to date or follow our twitter account.