Be SMART with your 2010 Objectives

It’s that time of year where we all reflect on the progress of our online businesses through 2009, and begin the process of setting our 2010 goals and objectives. I’m working through that now and will share it with you. But for today, I want to offer you some help with setting your own.

I’ve been setting SMART objectives for so many years that I can’t remember how or where I first came across them, but Wikipedia tells me the term first occurred back in 1981 in an issue of “Management review.”

Image: Salvatore Vuono / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

SMART is a mnemonic which stands for:

Specific

Objectives need to be specific – “I will make $10,000” isn’t. “I will make $10,000 dollars by selling 500 E Books at $20” is.

Measurable

An objective can’t work unless you have the means to measure it. “I want to be a famous blogger” won’t cut it – you can’t measure how famous you are. But “I will be a Technorati top 100 blogger” will do it.

Attainable

It’s obvious really – any objective you set should be achievable. By all means stretch yourself and shoot for the stars, but add a touch of realism.

Relevant

Check each of the objectives you set against your overall goal to see if they are relevant to it. It might be nice to win a blogging award for example, but will that help your overall goal of earning enough from your blog to move full time into blogging?

Time Bound

Every objective must have a time set against it – it’s the only way to get your creative brain working away in the background on achieving it.

And the Extras!

In recent years the original mnemonic has been added to – it has become SMARTER!

Evaluate

Even if you’ve set a year long objective, you need to check progress towards it during the course of the year. If your target is to hit 10,000 visitors a day by year end, then you need to see if you’re getting half of that halfway through the year.

Reset

On checking progress, if you realize you’re not going to hit the original objective, you need to change something! In some cases that may mean setting a more realistic figure.

Does anyone else use this? How are your plans for 2010 coming along?