It’s that time of the year to review our successes and missteps in business – and what a humdinger of a year it was. While post-holiday slump sets in and everyone settles into 2009, take a few minutes and list your business resolutions – your own road map to a successful new year.

Ask yourself:

• Did my marketing plan get me where I wanted to be in 2008? Evaluate your tactical marketing plan for hits and misses. Use the hits as a jumping off point for creating a new, evolved 2009 plan. In a year where competition for consumers’ attention will be fiercer than ever, your plan should include new and updated creative to ensure you rise above the fray. Don’t back away from your goals of growth in a recession economy, but do take cautious measures to be sure your messaging is exactly on target – you can’t afford misses.

• What challenges are my clients going to meet? Few industries are immune to today’s economic struggle. Anticipate what your customers are going to find most valuable from you and focus on building that aspect of your business. It’s a perfect time to introduce new timely and relevant offers on your web site.

• Where can I trim my budget and where should I maintain? It’s more important that ever to win and keep your clients’ trust. You don’t have to undergo an entire redesign of your web presence to reassure your consumers that your business is healthy and thriving. The simple addition of personalized communications, such as a weekly blog, gives you a vehicle to speak directly and with authority to your target market about topics that have immediate impact in their organizations. Likewise, a Virtual Spokesperson — full-motion video representative whom you designate to deliver a spoken message — adds a personal touch without demanding a complete site overhaul.

Trends in online business, Internet marketing and email marketing are constantly shifting. Stay alert to the latest and you’ll be keyed in on how the competition is spending their marketing dollars. Those businesses that maintain their integrity and poise will emerge as leaders in 2009.

Before you know your competition – know your customers. What do your existing customers value most about your business? Identify the top three drivers that motivate customers to choose you. Then look at how your competitors meet those demands.

It’s not just what “they” are doing, but what they are doing well. You may not like the competition’s web site. You can definitely come up with a better design, better content, but can you beat them on search engine rankings? Are they utilizing pay-per-click strategies to draw a targeted market? Determine what works for them, and if you have a comparable plan for online marketing.

How does your competition respond to the market? You know what’s going on in your business arena. Take a look at the key issues in your world and check out the rival’s response. Every website needs to be fluid and ready to react to current trends in your industry. Be a leader.

Evaluate your own success – why is it working? Some strategies are keepers – before you ditch what you have for what you think is working for your competition, be sure to give yourself credit for what you’ve done right. Above all, you want to make sure you are producing happy clients, listening, and learning every step of the way.

Finally, keep an open mind. Reacting to the market, responding to a tough competitor or upping the stakes in the online battle for visitor-share doesn’t have to mean a huge investment in a website redesign. If you are on a tight budget – and who isn’t these days – you may want to make smaller, incremental improvements while investing in a plan to drive targeted traffic to your site, bypassing the competition.

The main function of the web is to provide information and connections among human beings – what a perfect scenario for marketing! One of the best things about the web is how it serves as an incubator for new ideas and applications. Just as quickly as we become accustomed to applications for grabbing attention, like Twitter, a new service comes along to bolster the benefit and make it more effective. Blogs, like this one, and social networking services like Twitter, Facebook, and so many more are loaded with conversations and feedback about everything you can imagine.

If you could only aggregate the comments by topic and get a look at today’s buzz on your favorite topic – say, your product. How valuable would that be?

You guessed it – someone already thought of that. Amidst the onslaught of marketing messages now flying in all directions, people are creating applications to sort out the stuff they actually care about. One such application is Backtype. This is a nifty, simple tool that allows you to track conversations through more than a dozen (yes, there are more than that!) applications including Twitter, FriendFeed, Digg, Reddit, Blogger and WordPress. Backtype is basically a search engine that crawls social media networks and offers a simple interface. Enter a search term, like “social media marketing” and you’ll see, in this case, over 500 comments, which you can filter by date to get the freshest perspective.

Another spinoff of the social media frenzy –- use it to understand your audience, your product appeal, and enhance your web site marketing strategy.

The feds finally made official what most of us felt early last year. Marketing experts wrote about “How to run a business in a recession” in January 2008. Now, a year later, we are all looking at the world through recession-colored glasses. Marketing budgets are slashed or eliminated. We know; we work in marketing.

Take off the glasses and come out of the fog. Web marketing remains the most cost-efficient tactic you have in your toolbox. It’s time to squeeze the most you can out of the web – in fact, there is no better time than now. Your clients and customers need to hear from you now, more than ever.

One way to reach out is by adding a blog to your existing web site. Just like this one. A blog can be about any aspect of your business, updated frequently (once a week is ideal), and as fresh as this morning’s coffee. A blog gives you the chance to speak personally and directly to your audience about what is going on in any aspect of the world in which you do business. Blog updates also give you an excuse to contact your email-marketing list with a message, which drives traffic to your site.

Plus, a well-crafted blog will help elevate your search-engine rankings. An experienced business blogger will include key words about current topics that your customer base may be searching for. That’s the blog bonus.

Here’s one consequence of not keeping in close touch with your clients and customers during a recession. An email recently made the rounds discouraging people from buying gift cards for their holiday giving, listing a number of stores that it claimed were going out of business by the end of 2008. Much of the information in the email was bogus or incomplete – in fact, it neglected to clarify that some of those businesses were closing locations while opening others. (Read the email and the Snopes.com report).

Bogus or not, imagine the impact if that email was the only communication your customers had about you during the holidays?

Anytime in the month of January is the appropriate time to post a 2009 message on your own business blog. Remind your customers that you are there for them, recession or not.

So much about the Internet is rooted in anonymity. Much of that is out of necessity for the preservation of privacy, because as marketers and business owners, we want to know as much as people as we can. But they don’t want us to know them, unless, of course, we are friends. Friends will tell you about their habits and preferences. If they like you enough, they will tell other friends about you. So how do you convert strangers to friends to customers? Here are a few tips to sharpen up your web site marketing to make it “friendly.”

• Show you care by listening. Sure, you have a lot of really important things you want to say about yourself on your web site. How great you are at this and that, what a big success this last product release was, etc. What are your customers saying about it? Your current customers are your best resource as you go friend-shopping. Find out from them what they like and don’t like about your products, your web site design, or your customer service. Use those comments to put strangers (aka, new web site visitors) at ease – assuring them that you are a trustworthy ally, not a cold, unresponsive website.

• Be accommodating. It’s not about what you need, it’s about what they need. What information does a new visitor need to feel welcome and part of the club? Treat them like a guest in your home. Offer them a drink (i.e., a one-time discount or a free consultation). Take them on a tour, for example, dedicate a “first-time user” space on your web site to orient them to your way of doing business and show them why you are better than the competition. Even better, add a feature like a virtual spokesperson, who is literally the host or hostess of your front door.

• Invite them to come again. This goes along with another tenet of friendship: remember their names. Create an opportunity to capture their name and email address (maybe when they sign up for that free consultation or discount) then politely invite them back with a casual message. Don’t be too pushy – you just met.

Once you’ve established a connection with a new visitor, offer them incentives to bring their friends along, too. Remember the precepts of human relationships don’t change just because you are online – rather, they become even more important.