Welcome to Part 2 of How To Create Your Personal Annual Report & Set Your Yearly Goals.
If you haven’t read Part 1 go check it out…don’t worry, I’ll wait here 🙂

By now I’m hoping you have completed or at least started your Annual Review. So here comes to fun part…setting next year’s goals and expectations.

Part of the reason I want you to have done part 1 first is because that’s going to be your formula for creating part 2.

First look at last year’s quantitative accomplishments.

If you have 500 Instagram followers how many do you think you could realistically gain in the next year?

Look at the numbers, can they be better? Set a realistic goal based on your accomplishments from the previous year.  If you gained on average 25 followers a month can you step that up to 30?
For example: Last year I published 200 articles and this year I hope to publish 262.

Look at your list of last year’s nonquantitative accomplishments.

Are they tasks you would like to repeat? Are they part 1 of of a 2 part accomplishment.

For example did you get accepted into an exclusive community in your niche? Would you like to hold a leadership role in the community? Would you like to produce content for them?

Last year I had the privilege of working with multiple brands and being published on different websites. Both of these did wonders for my traffic, naturally I want to do more in the new year.

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Come up with a short statement that reflects your ultimate goal.

In part one I asked you to answer 3 questions:
What do you want to do?
What do you need to do to get there?
How will you know you are there?
The idea isn’t that you will accomplish your ultimate goal in the next year (depending on the goal it may take longer) it’s to think about what steps you need to take in the following year to get there.

My goal statement is:

I want to grow my brand and business to not only work for myself full-time but to help and guide other millennial women towards success and balance.

Yours may look more like, “I want to do independent graphic design full-time and help spread beauty in the world. I want to help online entrepreneurs turn their concept into a tangible design.”

Once you have that statement think of things you can do in the next year to step towards that goal.

For me, that includes launching my first e-courses and webinars.
What would help you move towards these goals?
Do you need to gain more clients? How would you go about doing this? What tasks would you need to complete to make this happen? Do you need to go to go to more networking activities? Should you create a mastermind group?
Then put it all together and you have not only a plan outline but something to hold yourself accountable for next year.

It’s as simple as that!

Here is my 2016 Goals Report 

Now I want to hear from you:
What are some of your goals for the new year?
Do you make an annual plan?
How do you plan to accomplish your goals?

Don’t forget to check out this awesome tutorial on Canva, the tool I used to create my annual report and 2016 goals.

Do it for love,

Dia

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It’s the end of the year which means it’s the time for reflection and planning. Reflecting on what has happened in 2015 and planning everything I want to make happen in 2016.

While I am doing this based on the calendar year, you can perform a review at any time. Your business anniversary or blogiversary are also great times to re-evaluate where you are and where you want to go.

It’s important to look back on what you’ve done and what has and hasn’t worked in order to proceed.

If you’ve been using Facebook Ads and your traffic hasn’t increased that doesn’t mean you should quit blogging or close up shop. It doesn’t even mean you should stop using Facebook Ads, it just means you should re-examine your process and see if you need to try a new approach. If you’ve been using them to promote blog posts maybe use them to promote your e-course instead and reevaluate the demographic and keywords you select.

Because this is such an important process for establishing where your brand is, I wanted to break it into two sections so that it wasn’t overwhelming or daunting but before you start I need you to answer 3 questions:

These questions are pertaining to your career, blog or business. Think fast don’t dilly dally back and forth. Don’t talk your expectations down or think of all that could go wrong. Just answer.

What do you want to do?

-Think fast!  Do you want a promotion? Do you want to blog full time? Do you want to start freelance consulting?

What do you need to do to get there?

Do you need to grow your subscribers?  Do you need to try a new social media channel? Do you need to hire outside help? What are the stepping you have to do to get there?

How will you know you are there? (This will be important for Part 2 but start thinking about it now.)

Look at what you’ve wanted and look at your actions over the past year. Did you start contributing to publications in your niche? Did you increase your social media following tremendously? Have you done any work that contributes to where you want to be? Any trainings or courses?

Once you determine this then you can figure out the basic steps of how to get there. This isn’t going to be a detailed plan. That is important and should come later but this is just to help lead you in the correct direction.

Once you decide what you want to do look back over the past year (or however longer you’ve been consciously working toward your goal, if it’s less than a year) and think of what you’ve done to get towards that goal.

How to start your year-end review

This kind of depends on the way you work best. For me I’m a visual person so I picked out a format I liked and filled it in from there. You may prefer to figure out what you want to include and then do the visual part.

Make a list if things you accomplished: New partnerships, brand ambassador relationships, number of articles published, how your online engagement or followers have grown.

Try to stick to values you can go back and compare to or increase next year. Instead of saying “Business Grew ,” say “my monthly average page views are x” or “In the last year my  sales have increased 20%.”

As a Marketing director, freelancer, blogger, influenster, event planner and social media consultant (I just got tired looking at that list) I decided to share the things I completed in those categories. Imagine this is the accomplishment part of your resume, a lot of people update this depending on the job they are applying for. Select the accomplishments you had this year that would be impressive to a potential client.

If you do website design, how many websites did you launch?

If you are a video blogger looking for more brands to sponsor you and send you products to review track brands you’ve worked with or put how many YouTube subscriber’s you’ve gained.

Here is the annual review I created for myself and blog using Canva . Your may see what you feel is important to share is different than mine but that’s okay. You have to do what you feel works best for your brand and goals.

Thanks for visiting today and keep an eye out for Part 2. You can also subscribe here to have it come directly to your inbox.

Please take a moment to complete my 2015 Reader Survey 

For more on using Canva here is a great tutorial about it be Adam Warner.

In addition I welcome any fellow online business owners to reach out to me about this project. You can leave questions in the comments or go to my about me page and email me.

Do it for love,

Dia

You can check out How To Create Your Personal Annual Report and Set Your Yearly Goals Part 2 Here