Seeing as the year 2007 is about to come to a close I thought now would be a great time to go back and reflect on everything I’ve accomplished throughout the year. Like I always like to say, reward your successes and learn from your failures.

Successes

LandlordMax

• LandlordMax sales multiplied last years, which is much better than a percentage increase!
• Traffic to LandlordMax Property Management Software has also multiplied.
• We’ve released several updates of LandlordMax for version 3.11, including several new features and reports
• LandlordMax now fully supports Windows Vista
• We’ve contracted a great publishing agent to help us promote LandlordMax, FollowSteph, etc. which has resulted in several articles in the papers so far (and more scheduled to come in early 2008)
• We broke our one day sales records several times
• We broke our monthly sales record
• A lot of progress has been made in getting another major upgrade of LandlordMax out the door for 2008
• We’ve started to work on a networked and multi-user version of LandlordMax
• We’ve started to work on a browser based version of LandlordMax
• We’ve had some great support for an upcoming Mac version of LandlordMax which we hope to offer in 2008
• We’ve received more customer testimonials this year than all other years combined
• We’ve re-opened up a discussion forum on LandlordMax
• We’ve started working on a significant redesign of the LandlordMax website (mainly the front page)
• We completely redesigned and rebuilt the purchase pages to make them much easier

FollowSteph

• Traffic to FollowSteph has greatly increased!
• RSS Feed subsribers is growing at a very good rate
• Increase the direct revenues of FollowSteph by about 800% (from advertising, affiliate links, etc.)
• I was interviewed on StartupSpark.com
• Many articles have had very high search engine placements
• Many articles have received high numbers of comments
• Many articles rank very high in the search engines

Others

• I started to write a book interviewing several of the most prominent bloggers online (for which I’m almost done compiling all the interviews and will be sending it off for editing very shortly). A lot of very prominent bloggers accepted to be part of this project which is great (I need to update the list). After reading all the interviews and compiling them, I can tell you this is definitely going to be an amazing book to read. There’s lots of great advice!
• I’m in the process of creating a new website called FindYourWeddingDress.com. We’ve already hired one part-time person to assist us in this task. We’re hoping to fully launch it within the next few months.
• We released the website WhichJar.com

Failures

• We had an issue with our SSL certificate on the LandlordMax purchase page. We always maintained 100% security, it’s just that we somehow didn’t renew our certificate on time and therefore weren’t officially certified for a few days. This was quickly rectified. It won’t happen again!
• Although we released the website WhichJar.com, there is currently not enough data in the database to really make it viable (we only have a few hundred open source projects stored so far). Therefore this project has been sidelined for now until I have the available resources and time or until I can find someone to partner up with. The failure is that I didn’t appreciate the data population effort that would be required
• I started an Online Sales and Marketing book which I didn’t complete. The good news is that it successfully transitioned this effort to the blogging book, which is a great success! I’m hoping to return to it sometime in late 2008 if time permit but for now it’s on hold.
• I had quite an experience with Telus with my cell phone service

This is what I can remember by just going through the blog. All in all a pretty busy year. For next year I expect to achieve even more.

Here are my goals for next year:

Goals:

• I expect the book to be available in bookstores such as Amazon.com by the Spring of 2008.
• I expect to sell over 100,000 copies of the book by end of year 2008
• I expect to more than quadruple LandlordMax sales revenues by the end of 2008
• I expect to multiply my RSS feeds on FollowSteph by end of the 2008.
• I expect to release a new major version of LandlordMax by spring/summer of 2008
• I expect to release the Mac version before the end of 2008
• I expect to release the networked/multi-user based version of LandlordMax by fall/winter of 2008.
• I expect to release the browser based version of LandlordMax by end of year 2008 or early 2009
• I expect FindYourWeddingDress.com to be fully functionning by spring/summer of 2008
• I expect to appear several more times in the media (newspapers, tv, etc.) for LandlordMax by the spring of 2008
• I expect to multiply the traffic of FollowSteph.com by at least five times before the end of 2008
• I expect to break several LandlordMax sales records this year, and again receive more testimonials than all previous years combined.
• I expect to fully complete the LandlordMax website redesign before the end of 2008
• I expect to give FollowSteph.com a significant face lift before the end of 2008
• I would like to release a cash flow analyzer software application as a complimentary product to LandlordMax before the end of 2008. We currently offer a free online cash flow calculator on the LandlordMax website, but I’d really like to expand this offering.

This is my list of successes/failures for 2007, and my goals for 2008. And because I publicly stated them here today, I’ll review them same time next year.

What about you? What are your big successes? What are your goals for next year? Did you know you increase your odds of achieving your goals if you publicly state them, especially if they include concrete terms and timelines.

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