Anyone can set goals for the New Year but the real trick is actually following them. I can admit, I never really set goals last year. I mean sure I mapped it out in my head how much money I wanted to make and how I wanted to diversify my traffic more but I soon forgot those goals in a couple of weeks which hurt my motivation. You can drastically increase your chances of meeting your goals by mapping them out specifically and reminding yourself of them daily.

By mapping them out, I don’t mean just writing an eight word sentence and then moving to the next bullet. You need to elaborate on your goal: how you plan to do it, and why you want to do it by relating it to what you’ve done in the past. Here’s the format I strongly recommend that you use for completing your 2010 resolution list:

#. List your goal.

How are you going to meet this goal? Be specific, give yourself multiple, reasonable methods to meeting this goal.

Why is this one of your goals? How has not meeting this goal hurt you in the past?

Here’s an example of part of my list.

1. To be more organized.

How?

Option 1: Order a moleskin notebook and start to write down my agenda.

Option 2: Sync MobileMe and iCal and start updating that to iPhone so I will have it everywhere.

Vow to update it every Sunday and sync it if going with option 2.

Why?

It cost us a lot of money in the past by overlooking IO dates with our affiliate marketing campaigns specifically. It also cost me some vital points for some of my classes because I turned in assignments late.

Notice how I gave myself two ways of completing my goal in a reasonable way. I know I can do both of them for sure because I’ve done it in the past but just gotten lazy. I’m looking at what it cost us by looking at how much money we’ve lost directly from renewing IO’s for media buys late and by doing calculations of what late assignments have cost my grades. Now that I have my list complete in this format I’m going to print it out on post it on my wall right next to my desk. I’m not going to add it to a stack of papers that will soon be buried and forgotten.

If you really want to help your progress then you can add a notes section where you can post progress. Knocking off one item at a time will help your motivation as well especially if you can put a big checkmark next to it. Happy New Year’s, everybody, and good luck with your resolutions!