By the end of the month, 90 percent of New Year’s resolutions will be broken. According to the US Department of Labor, the top three reasons that stops adults from keeping their new year’s resolutions are:

1. Procrastination
2. Lack of discipline
3. No game plan

Whether you break your resolutions every year or resolve to create none in the first place, you still have a whole year to look back on and learn from.

Four Marketing Lessons I Learned in 2009

Like many people, 2009 will probably always remain in my mind as the year of the recession. As my clients scaled back their freelance budgets or closed their doors completely, I was forced to stop taking business for granted and start thinking about what success really meant to me.

I also learned a ton of lessons about marketing that I didn’t read in any book or blog. They were things I had to figure out along the way, and I’d like to share them with you.

1. Honesty is the best policy, even if it means being negative or controversial.  Being younger than almost all of my clients, I spent much of 2009 trying to craft a successful image, only to find that it made me blend in to the background. But when I dropped the role of the expert, and started admitting my own struggles, the response was overwhelmingly positive.

Even now, I find that posts about my own marketing experiences generate more responses and more traffic than those that just provide generic advice.

2. Perfection can be a real time waster. I used to obsess over every little detail, thinking a typo here or a mistake there would ruin people’s impressions of me. Then I started noticing the number of successful marketers who didn’t do things perfectly — and they were getting more accomplished because of it!

I’m still working on letting go of my need to be perfect, but I’ve already freed up a lot of time that used to be wasted on my quest for perfection.

3. Analytics don’t matter if you don’t learn from them. I have a love/hate relationship with Google Analytics. If my numbers are up, I love checking my stats. If they’re down, those stats become a total mood-killer.

Unfortunately, my mood is about the only thing those analytics affected in 2009, because I didn’t track the numbers over time. I’ll be explaining my new tracking methods in a future post, but for now, check out Beth Kanter’s 7 Tips For Measuring Your Blog’s Success.

4. Keywords matter, but you gotta get ’em right. When I first started optimizing my site for search engines, I used key phrases like “women in business” and “business owners.” Now I know better. Instead of using generic key phrases with a ton of competition, I’ve learned to focus my effort on longer, more specific phrases with less traffic. (Google Analytics tells me that “hiring a marketing consultant” and “social media marketing ROI” have both been effective.)

I’ve also learned to think like my readers when selecting keywords. Most of my readers wouldn’t search for “women in business,” but they would search for “create a marketing plan.”

What Was YOUR Biggest Lesson in 2009?

I posed this question to the readers of my e-newsletter last month, and they responded with some great food for thought. I’ll post some of their answers tomorrow, but I also want to hear from you: what was your biggest business takeaway in 2009? Share your answer in the comments section below.