Our personal New Years resolutions may be made and quickly broken, but we’re certain that this set of digital goals for the New Year will not only be achieved with minimal investment, but will give the boost and return your business needs to hit unprecedented revenue goals in 2013.

While the term “monetization” might be a nice way for blog hobbyists to dream of unrealistic revenue goals with a poorly designed and functioning website, we find more excitement everyday in working with clients who are ready to take their digital projects to the next level to create real revenue goals. So, here’s what’s required to kick “monetization” out the door and start generating real business with real revenue with minimal investment in time and money in 2013.

Prefer to outsource any part of the techniques discussed here to a company of professionals? Contact us for a risk-free proposal.

Take Analytics Seriously: Set numeric goals, especially for social networks and conversions

It might seem obvious for businesses, but remember that numeric goals and analysis–known as analytics in the world of digital marketing and advertising–are the key to success for any digital project. The reward and satisfaction from hitting these types of goals with your business–especially if they’re realistic and well planned from the start–is always immensely satisfying.

Featured Portfolio Project: Restaurant MEAL. Restaurants and other local store fronts always have great opportunities for social network conversion and analytics as well, especially through visually focused networks like Facebook and Pinterest.

To start, the bottom line that businesses should be constantly checking is: what is my return on investment for this piece of digital marketing? Although “ROI” can be difficult to determine with social networks, we’ve found that simple numeric goals and tracking do an excellent job in getting started. Take the process here one step further by gathering data from potential clients from the start through better conversion tracking, and clearer analysis of this type of data so that you can turn “window shoppers” into buyers and “lurkers” into long time readers. Let us know at anytime if you’d like to take these ideas a step further by receiving a risk-free proposal.

• Facebook: Take a look at your rate of new “likes” for your Facebook page for the last 30 day period. What was the rate of growth for this period compared to the previous one? What do you think you did to help achieve that kind of growth? What can you do to increase that rate just a bit for the next 30 day period? Use your page insights to nail down these numbers, and set your goals. Consider investing a monetary budget into Facebook advertising, or just a bit more well-planned time into community building (which we’ve found often yields better results over paid!) To reinforce your efforts, check to see which of your Facebook posts were most popular and had the highest engagement rates. Why do you think that happened? How can you produce more posts of that type? Worried about the effects that EdgeRank has had on your reach counts? We’ve found that these updates have actually helped our clients, not hurt them: read more about that here.
• Twitter: Just like Facebook, do your best to figure out how many new followers you received in the last 30 day period (tsee our note on 3rd party trackers below), and work on increasing that rate either through strategically set budgets for time spent on community building on Twitter or paid Twitter Advertising. Check on which of your Tweets were retweeted or replied to most often, and why that might be. Are you reaching out and taking advantage of the link building benefits of Twitter? Since Twitter hasn’t yet provided great analytics tools for their business users, we love using TopsyPro to gather exciting insights and metrics into our clients’ Twitter data. Topsy lets us not only track other accounts, mentions, and retweets, but general phrases, hashtags, and other trends to see where and how discussions are heading on Twitter and how our Twitter marketing efforts are shaping up.
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  Click to check out our most recent small business tips for Pinterest.

  Pinterest: The metrics that count with this visual social network are repins and board followers. While Pinterest is certainly working in the right direction towards better “in house” insights for businesses starting with verified accounts linked to domains, take the time to do an estimation of your repins and new board followers in the latest 30 day period and work to beat those growth rates in the next 30 day period. What kinds of pins were really popular? How can you produce more of their type? We also have our eye on Curalate: a marketing tool suite for the visual web–especially Pinterest. Their portfolio of clients boast companies like Campbells, Gap, Michael Kors, and much more, even for small business! Take a look at the exciting ways in which their technology works in their welcome video here, and we’ll report back once we’ve enjoyed a complete campaign tracking Pinterest analytics with this service.

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