With less than one month remaining until 2008, here are six tips to insure you eBay business hits the ground running in the New Year.
1. Develop your goals and action plan for 2008 during December. Don’t wait until January 1st arrives. Too often we have good intentions of doing this early in January, but February 1st arrives, and we shrug our shoulders and think - ‘I’ll do it next year.’ Don’t let yourself get caught in that trap. Put the remainder of December to good use.
2. Set specific goals. ‘Make more money than last year’ or ‘list every week’ doesn’t cut it. Be specific about dollar amounts; number of listings each week; how many hours a week you will spend on research; how much time you will devote to inventory procurement; etc.
3. Define monthly checkpoints for each of your goals. Break each of your 2008 goals down into smaller, bite-sized, monthly goals. These smaller short-term goals will act as checkpoints to help you determine how you are progressing toward your longer year long goals. Without these its too easy to ignore your longer 2008 goals. Again, this needs to be done in December before 2008 gets here.
4. Develop a step-by-step, week-by-week plan for the month of January now. Many people set goals for the upcoming year. Unfortunately, too often, when January 1st arrives, they are not sure what to do. The result is they do nothing and within a few weeks the goals they spent time developing are forgotten.
Having a step-by-step plan for each week in January does two things. It allows you to know exactly what actions you need to take to start achieving your goals; and, it gets you in the habit of working toward your goals on a weekly basis. By the time February arrives you will have developed the habit of doing something each week to reach your longer-term goals.
5. Find someone who will hold you accountable for your goals. When you are the only one who knows what your goals for 2008 are, it’s way to easy to slack off and let what you need to do slide. The solution to this is to find someone who will hold you accountable for them.
Check in with them on a regular basis (monthly is good, weekly is better) so you don’t fall behind on your journey. An ideal situation would be to find someone who also has specific goals for 2008 and each of you can be accountable to the other.
6. Start now! Use the remainder of December to get your goals in place and you will be ready to hit the ground running when 2008 arrives. When everyone else is trying to recover from the Holiday hangover, you know that you are ready to take the first steps toward building a more profitable eBay business in 2008. You will be thankful you did it.
Photo by Jonathan Whiteland
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