With the New Year around the corner, like always, it is time to renew your spirit and start pondering about resolutions again. Resolutions are not just limited to personal, you can set some goals that help you and your business grow for another year.

Have you list out your resolutions yet? It is always nice to reflect over your businesses or what you have been doing for the past year to get started.

Here are some suggestions for increasing your business for 2008 or if you are planning to start one.

1. Start eBay As A Part-Time Money Maker
A part-time eBay business can be very profitable. You choose to spend as little or as much time as you want at eBay – few hours a week to a full-time job. You may also want to consider how much time it takes to shop for your merchandise. You may have to travel to dealers, go to trade shows, or spend time surfing online to find your auction merchandise.

Dedicate a full day each week for this process. Your merchandise is what makes you money, so it’s not a good idea to skimp on the time you spend identifying products.

2. Making eBay A Full-Time Job
The tasks required for your eBay business can be time consuming, but careful planning and scheduling can turn your small business into an online empire. The best way to go full time at eBay is to first run your business part time for a while.

Running a full-time business at eBay is the perfect option for working mom who prefers staying at home with her children, a retiree looking for something to do, or someone who’d rather do something than work for his boss (majority?).

3. Be More Diligent With Record Keeping
I learnt that, one of the major reason why businesses don’t earn as much as they could is due to poor record keeping. The smaller the business, the more true this is. This New Year’s Eve, why not try committing yourself to a better record keeping program?

Decide to one day of the week to go through your receipts, sales and business purchases, and ensure they are all recorded and filed. Filings and records also makes it easier when you declare your taxes.

4. Seek Out More Efficient Marketing Opportunities
You want to make sure that your products is reaching as many potential buyers as possible and you want to make sure you are getting as many traffics as you can. Consider going beyond eBay to market your products, try setting up an e-commerce store, Yahoo! store or blogging to bring some buzz to your products.

If you don’t have a website, get one. If you already have a website, learn how to increase the number of visitors to your site through search engine marketing/advertising or search engine optimization (SEO).

5. Know Your Top 10 Customers
Is there more that you can you do for them? Where can you find more just like them – List your top ten customers by sales volume. Are they in a particular geographic region, of a particular age group – what is similar about them? Do everything you can to build on those relationships. Know what they like, ask them how you can improve your business, ask what bugs them and make it easy to do business with you.

6. Delegate Effectively
We all want to work less and earn more, don’t we? Here’s one of the greatest secrets of time management from the guru – successful delegation. Get those low-payoff activities either delegated or dumped. If you’re solo, perhaps consider outsourcing these tasks to somebody for an hourly rate.

7. Learn Something New
Learning something new that will add to your skills and add a new dimension of interest to your life. Increase your knowledge, read books, newspapers, magazines, talk to other business people for sparking new ideas, refining old ones, and making contacts. Online and offline, make the effort to be a part of a group, whether it’s a group specifically designed for networking or an organization dedicated to a particular type of business. This is definitely going to refresh you and your business.

8. Take Time For Yourself And Have Fun
When you are running a business, it can seem like you have to be there all the time or things might go wrong – and this is even more obvious if you are the a one-man-show. You may find yourself working more than 20 hours a day. There is never an hour where you can sit still. But, we all need a break.

Have you become used to working long hours, when in actual fact, you can be smarter about how you spend time working? Take a walk with your family, go camping, enroll for dancing class and turn off your phone.

9. Believe In Yourself and Be Persistent
So many disappointments and failures in life starts from our inability to believe in ourselves. So give yourself a gift – self confidence. And don’t give up! The one sure way to fail at a new business is to never start one. You will definitely encounter setbacks or few naysayers along the way. So what?

10. Write Down Your Resolutions Now
Don’t just read the above list and start making excuses, thinking how nice it would be to have the time to do this. You could boost your business just by at least working on a couple of the above points over the coming months.

I only made 4 work from home New Year resolutions for 2008:
1. More time for myself and family (limit my work from home activities).
2. Delegate some jobs to other people (hire a maid or something?).
3. Stop blogging after midnight.
4. Read up about Forex, attend a course and learn more about it.

Click on the image above to see a New Year greeting card from me for you!

I wish you a happy and safe holiday season and a fantastic New Year. What are your resolutions for 2008?