This is a Guest Post by Andrew Rondeau. Andrew is a full-time Internet Marketing Specialist and blogger from the UK. At his blog he shares all his knowledge and experience on how to make a blog.

The New Year is a great time for sitting down and reviewing your business.

While everyone around you is setting resolutions and making new challenges for themselves to achieve over the coming twelve months, you’re in an ideal position to review how you got on last year, and set new targets for yourself and your business.

There’s something about January that is ideal for this exercise – the Christmas festivities are over, and there is a stretch of time before anything else interesting happens, which is perfect for filling with business goals and targets.


So, how did you get on last year? 

The chances are there are a few things you would have done differently if you could play out the course of 2011 once again.

Many of us make a few false starts in different areas of our online business before we seize upon the right path, and reviewing these can give us a really clear set of guidelines for moving forward.


Some of the most common mistakes for business owners include: 

• Purchasing software which was expensive, but brings little value and limited return on investment
• Making a decision to head off in a certain direction without analyzing the impact or accurately judging the success of our existing activities
• Starting new projects with enthusiasm, only to let our passion wane as the task becomes too onerous
• Having a period of lapse where we lack enthusiasm and can’t galvanize ourselves in to action, losing money and valuable time
• Missing out on key opportunities that would have brought increased revenue, either through networking, advertising or blogging. 

While none of these mistakes are critical to the overall safety of your business, they do detract from our primary goal as online entrepreneurs – making money.

One of the biggest positive steps we can do to make sure we don’t repeat the same mistakes again is analyze each action we take before making the decision to go ahead. To do this, we only have to ask ourselves some key questions to really establish whether or not a proposed plan would bring value or not.


Try questioning new initiatives by assessing them with the following criteria: 

• Will this bring me a positive return on my initial outlay?
• Have I truly considered the long term impacts of what I am about to do?
• Am I missing out on any potential opportunities that could enhance my customer base, develop relationships or broaden my business proposition?
• Am I happy in my work?
• How does this fit in with my strategic planning for the year?
• Am I looking for a quick fix, when only a long-term strategy will achieve tangible results?
• Is this simply a quest for something new, different or appealing that won’t actually bring me closer to my business goals?

If you haven’t got a business plan for the next twelve months, now is a brilliant time to sit down and draft one. Consider where you are now with your company, and where you want to be in twelve months, two years, and five years.

This provides you with the ideal foundation to map future activities against your key goals, and make sure there is a great fit between where you aspire to be, and where current tasks are taking you.

It is only by fully understanding your past mistakes and seeing how you could have done something different that you can prevent yourself making them over again.

This is a really positive time for business, and right now you have a fantastic opportunity to establish where you want to be online, and map out the right steps to reach this destination.

What are you going to do differently in 2012 compared to 2011? Please share your views in the comments below.