It is no secret, I am not a fan of setting goals and stopping there. I am more of an action planning kind of guy. Goals in my opinion get you no where. Actions do!

I also firmly believe 2010 is going to be a year full of possibilities and opportunities for those willing to take action. And 2010 is going to be a kick butt year for those who take the tools available to them to push their businesses or professional service firms out the door too. Too many people would rather sit around and complain about the so called bad economy we are suppose to be in. I can tell you that 2009 has been nothing but a great year here at Blog For Profit and Headway.

As we quickly wide down 2009 and look to the future and 2010, I wanted to give you my list of actions you should consider doing to really make 2010 a great year. However, let me give you a warning. If you want to sit on your hands and wait for opportunity to come knocking, stop reading right now and go find something else to do. Success takes work and some of the actions I am suggesting do too.

In addition, since we focus on using a blog and social media to promote and market your business here at BFP, the list below will also focus on blogging and social media.

• Start Screaming Out Loud About How Great You Are I am serious. Use those tools available to tell people about your brand, your business and how passionate you are about them. Your customers and/or clients will appreciate the fact you have such a positive attitude about what you are offering them to help them answer their questions or solve their problems. Why sit back and be quiet about it? Talk about your business. Tell your audience about your industry, product or service. Stand up and scream. Speak and write passionately about all of these things and your ideal customer/client will respect you for it.
• Give your site or blog a make over for 2010 Has it been more than 2 or 3 years since you updated your website? Have you started a blog yet to promote and market your business? Its time to something. While I won’t tell you to throw your static website away. What I will tell you is, web sites and blogs are almost interchangeable these days. Using the power of WordPress and our own Headway Theme, you can build a blogsite. A blogsite is a site that looks and feels like a web site but has the power and usability of a blog. With this type of site, you can add content as you want and carry on a conversation with your target audience as you want too. You can use the blog function of this type of site to communicate with your prospects and customers. Use it to tell them about your products or services. Your customers or clients will appreciate your willingness to give them the information they want and need, in a form and fashion they can use and understand. If you do this, prospects will have a reason to choose you over those businesses who are not blogging.

Already blogging, consider these actions

1. Posting Frequency: Perhaps one of the most overlooked and most important actions bloggers need to do is to remember to post regularly to their blogs. If I had my wish, everyone I talk to would post daily. However, I know this is not possible. You need to pick a weekly schedule which works for you. Whether that is daily or 2 to 3 times a week. The important thing to do is to pick a frequency of posting and stick to it. What you need to remember is your readers are going to come to expect some type of frequency. And once you establish this, you need to stick with it.

   If there is one area that might just affect your blogs success more than another, it just might be consistent posting. Don’t overlook this in 2010 and you will be well on your way to reaching those blogging goals.

2. Blog Design and Brand: Have you considered if your blog’s design and layout will help or hurt you as you strive to reach those blogging benchmarks you have set for 2010? We touch on this above too.

   This might just be the year you need to get that new design done. Whether you decide to hire a firm to do this yourself or you look at getting a new theme, take a step back and look at your blog. Even better yet, ask some of those individuals you trust to give you an opinion of your blog’s design and layout. Is it easy on the eye and easy to read? By getting a fresh set of eyes to look at your blog, you will get a clearer picture of whether you need to get that redesign ASAP.

   Additionally, is this a good time to not only get a new design, do you need to get a whole new brand. If a new design is in order, now is the best time to get a new, fresh brand. Get something unique to you and what you are trying to project to your target audience. Does the blog’s appearance match up to what you are trying to project with your business? If not, get it done and get it done before the end of February so you can hit the road running.

   If you are struggling with the whole process of hiring a designer, get Michael Martine’s great book, How to Start a Business Website and Hire a Web Designer.

3. F.L.E.E.: Ask yourself if you are doing those activities you need to be doing which will make your blog successful. Revisit our ongoing series on Building a Successful Blog. (By the way, be watching for some new things with Building a Successful Blog for 2010).

   Re-evaluate whether you are following the F.L.E.E. process of blogging.

   • Find the conversations
   • Listen to the conversation
   • Engage in the conversation
   • Enpower or Eable your readers to get involved in the conversation too

   Make sure you are doing all of those activities and providing the means for your readers to do the same. The F.L.E.E. actions will help you get your blog noticed too, which is also important to your blog’s success.

4. Start a Newsletter: If you are not using an opt-in on your blog to build a mailing list, do it. And in the process, start a newsletter to provide additional information to your target audience. You need to make sure you are providing value to your readers. Value that will keep them coming back for more. Additionally, setting up and starting to collect a mailing list is a great way to build a list of people who know and follow you. A list you can even market to and best of all, they actually expect you to.

   One of the best tools I have found for setting up and sending out an email newsletter is Aweber. Aweber is very cost effective and it works great.

5. Use Social Media: I started to use twitter roughly a 1 1/2 years ago. And I can honestly say my traffic to this blog has more than doubled. In fact, twitter is now the top referrer of traffic, even before Google. Don’t overlook the effectiveness of social media tools like twitter. Twitter is certainly one of the tools you can use to grow your blog and get just one more step closer to meeting those blogging goals you have set for 2010.

   You should also be looking at the other social media tools like, FaceBook and LinkedIn. Neither of these take a huge amount of your time and you can even take advantage of the tools they offer to streamline your efforts. You can feed your blog post to both of them. Which will expand your sphere of influence even more. Not only that, you can set up a “group” or a specific page to promote your blog and your business. Social media is a powerful tool, use it.

I could really go on and on with actions you could take to kick butt in 2010. However, we can save those for future blog post here at BFP. We will be doing some things for 2010 and beyond to make BFP better and to expand the community here. Some of them will be actions we have done before and strongly believe in. Others will be new for BFP and you our readers. Be watching and don’t be afraid to think outside the box as you move into the new year and your marketing.

Also don’t forget to subscribe to the Blog For Profit Newsletter. We include information in the newsletter we don’t feature here on the blog. And when you subscribe, you get a free copy of our eBook , Blogging Tips to Help You Blog.