Back in January, we helped you create an advertising strategy for 2009. Now comes the MOMENT OF TRUTH, when we look at how each effort affected your business this year. Follow this three-step strategy to find out how you did:

Step 1. Add up the costs.

For each of your advertising efforts this year, make a list of "hard" costs – the fees you paid for Pay-Per-Click advertising as well as the cost of time you spent, say, passing out business cards at networking events.

Step 2. Calculate the benefits.

If you used Web-based solutions (promotional emails, banner ads, etc) and tied each effort to a marketing source code, it should be easy to come up with a total dollar figure for each effort. But that's not the only benefit to consider – don't forget the branding, goodwill and name recognition that comes from many advertising efforts. How many business cards did you pass out? And what about your email list – did you add legitimate opt-in addresses this year? Those are worth their weight in gold.

Step 3. Compare the benefits to costs..

When dollars and cents are involved, you can do a direct analysis by dividing benefit by cost. And if you can determine an hourly cost for your time, you can extend that model to include the hours spent writing and refining Pay-Per-Click ads, building a custom storefront, editing and mailing an email newsletter and other similar activities.

Calculations get trickier when you try to measure intangibles like brand awareness or goodwill. If you kept close track of everyone you swapped business cards with, and can match the networking events you attended to specific customer accounts, you can calculate the Acquisition Cost for each customer. Now you have an idea of whether your efforts made your business money. But wait — don't forget that that relationship got you a referral for three more customers. . .

Start planning for the next year.

Once you've analyzed each of your advertising methods, you'll have a pretty good idea of what's working and what's not. Decide if the unsuccessful efforts are failing outright, or if they might pay off with more time or with better measurement.

Expand whatever's working, discontinue what's not. Need new ideas? Refer back to Exercise 1 and pick another option or two to try in the new year. By this time next year, you'll have this down to a science.