Writing a Business Plan – A Necessity for Success!
Why do you need to write a Business Plan for an online business? Honestly, any business requires a business plan the online business one is just simple and probably so much shorter than an actual brick and mortar one!
For any business to achieve the success you want you are going to need to have a plan of attack to accomplish what you are setting out to do otherwise it is like the blind leading the blind and feeling your way through the darkness.
I would appreciate you reading this complete article and you will find a link to my Training for an Online Business link attached below, my suggestion is head over there next to find even more information about starting your own online business 🙂
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What is a Business Plan
By definition, a business plan is a written description of your business’s future, a document that tells what you plan to do and how you plan to do it.
If you jot down a paragraph on the back of an envelope describing your business strategy, you’ve written a plan or at least the starting idea of a plan.
With this business plan for starting an online business good news is we are not going to be researching how much things will be costing for buildings, materials, employees, insurance, etc.
This business plan is going to revolve around you and your schedule along with your business idea and the goals you have in mind of what you are going to accomplish and in what amount of time you want to complete each phase.
Knowing what a business plan is let us take a look at what you need to include with writing up the business plan.
What’s Included in a Business Plan
- Executive Summary – this includes an overview of your business including plans and goals
- Opportunity – What are you actually selling and how are you solving a problem (or “need”) for your market? Who are your target market and competition?
- Execution – Cover your marketing and sales plan, operations, and how you’re going to measure success.
- Financial Plan – Knowing how much you want to invest in running your business can keep your budget inline until you are making a profit from your online business.
Online Businesses address a problem summarize in one or two sentences the problem you are solving. Every business is solving a problem for its customers and filling a need.
Listing out your solution to the problem your product or service. How are you solving the problem you have identified in the world with your niche?
List your target market who is your ideal audience? How many of them are there? It’s important here to be specific.
Some of these might be very difficult to include in your business plan at this time because you have no training to find the information or research the information you need to know.
Training is necessary for any job or business you are interested in applying for or opening whether it be a brick and mortar business or an online business without experience or proper training you are setting yourself up for failure.
My Business Plan Includes
Keeping it short. Business plans do not need to be complex but should be short and concise.
Knowing your audience. Write your plan using language that you will understand and can provide clear details about.
How are you going to solve a need within your company this is basically what you want here.
Setting your goals. This is the most important part of my business plan, without having goals being in business for yourself can be easy to blow off work if you do not feel like it.
Researching my topics. To deliver to my audience the best and most useful information keeping it in line with the help that I am here to offer the solution to their problems as one might say. Being honest and trustworthy!
Keeping a schedule. Being your own boss can sometimes lead you to feel that taking a day off is no big deal right? Sorry, but even being the boss has its downfalls you are the only employee, as well, no work getting done if you are not doing it and this will put you behind on making your goals.
Training is Important
In this website I am giving you a super head start to all the training that I have taken so far within the platform I belong to and yes I do pay for my membership.
These tips are things that I am learning not from the actual lessons but alongside the lessons which I was not aware of prior to becoming a member of the platform.
The training I have already done can answer all the questions above that you are going to have to find a way to answer for example your target market might be in shoes, how many people search for shoes? 811429 per month is the answer!
Take any word or phrase that you might think would be a good business model online and you are able to find out if it is worth the time for you to start an online business within this niche.
What is a niche? This is all covered in the training, but a niche is what you have found a solution for that people are looking for answers about, such as shoes but narrow it down some like dress shoes.
Can you find this information online by searching in Google, Bing, or Yahoo sure you can but in about umpteen thousand websites scattered everywhere.
What kind of time can evolve with finding them all or be saved by coming to one convenient location? For years I have wanted to get involved in affiliate marketing tried many different programs paid into the thousands of dollars trying to find the right one.
Of course, you are welcome to do the same thing no problem there. But for me to provide you with a FREE place to start out online and keeping all the information to being successful in one place which do you prefer?
In Closing
Alright, today I have provided you with another step in the puzzle to start an online business and the FREE seven days of training is still available to you when you are ready to sign up.
I am still available to be your one on one coach during this time and help you whenever you have questions or get stuck and need assistance.
If you have already decided what your online business is going to be can you let me know if you have written your business plan yet?
Now that you know you need one and have a skeleton to follow how long before you can write one up?
Please leave any questions, comments, or suggestions in the space provided below I do respond to them promise 🙂
Thank you for taking the time to read the complete article, what is holding you back from getting all the training required to start your own online business today?
Best wishes,
Susan
I used to teach a small business planning class to students at a community college. I like your simple business plan that you presented here:
1. Executive Summary –
2. Opportunity
3. Execution
4. Financial Plan
On one hand, when people are learning affiliate marketing, it is important to not get so hung up on the planning that they never get around to learning how affiliate marketing works and to writing content.
That said, at some point, it become very important for people to spend some time every day researching their niche. This can be done online easily.
Reading magazines and going to successful people’s websites help also. The more you learn about your niche, the easier it is to avoid wasting time on things some big company is already doing an amazing job of. If you focus on what problems the customer needs help with, you can achieve greater success even faster.
I hope your post makes people realize that it is very easy to prepare a simple business plan for an online affiliate marketing business.
Sondra,
Thank you for this excellent response to this article here – at times I do get carried away
with how things need to be accomplished with building any business.
Affiliate Marketing is not one that has to be this drawn out but to become successful you will
always require planning. The business plan is essential for any business to succeed and touching
on all the points will enable those who come here to understand the importance of this step.
Thank you so much for stopping by,
Susan
Hi Susan,
Thanks so much for this article on writing a business plan. I really enjoyed reading it and learned a lot. I completely have to agree with you about the importance of creating a business plan. Actually, I’d say planning is important for almost any bigger projects.
I really liked the step by step instructions of this post.
Keep up the great work!
Louis,
Thank you for the response to writing a business plan for anything that is of importance. Without proper planning, one must realize they are setting themselves up for failure in what they are looking to accomplish. Online business is no different than building a brick and mortar business just the initial investment is not going to be as costly. You are looking at mostly your investment of time and dedication to creating the content for the website and patience waiting for the website to mature with the search engines.
Thanks and come again anytime,
Susan
Thank you Susan for this wonderful post. I appreciate your detailed analysis of planning. This is a vital aspect of business ethics that most people overlook.Working without planning is planning to fail. The basic fundamental principle of any business is planning. This should come first before any other step.And success in any business requires proper planning.
To survive in online business for instance you must institute an action plan and write down your plan in phases. This could be short term plan and long term plan, then map out the proper strategy to accomplish the plans. Most people jump into affiliate marketing without due process, no proper research, no plan, no training, no strategy, and in time they get burn out. Learning a business and getting trained for the business is part of a proper planning towards building a strong foundation for such business.
Thank you for such wonderful words of approval of not only the proper way but the necessity for writing a business plan for either online or offline businesses. What most people do not realize is building a business online takes time and commitment just like a brick and mortar business. Without knowing what and how to do things you are going to spend many years trying to figure out what to do but worse yet how to do it.
This is what my whole website is for to help those who do not realize the training is available at such an affordable cost to them all they need to do is sign up and find out if it is right for them.
Thanks again,
Susan
For a sole trader or other small business, I consider a business plan should include the following sections as a minimum:
1. Executive Summary
2. Market Analysis
3. Products and Services
4. Marketing and Sales Plan
5. Financial Plan and Projections
6. Appendices
Each of these sections might usefully consider the following:
The executive summary, in less than one page, should clearly summarise sections 2 – 6 above with a recommendation (presumably a ‘green light’ that the business plan is worth proceeding after reasoned dispassionate analysis). This should include your USPs (Unique Selling Points) that make your plan stand out and different from the competition.
The market analysis should analyse the market(s) in which the business proposes to compete, who the principal competitors are and, through a SWOT (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, Threats) analysis, identify dangers and how they will be met.
Describe your services/products in the light of the market analysis and identify USPs. Why will customers come to you, buy your offering and keep coming back?
The marketing and sales plan should include from the marketing side, you should address the 4 ‘Rs”:
– Recognition: The product/service should be easily recognisable relative to the competition Potential customers should recognise your product and be aware of its benefits.
– Relevance: Potential customers should be able to relate your product/service in the context of their daily lives.
– Reward: There should be some kind of reward for the customer in purchasing your product. This can be physical or psychological. Customers attracts where they perceive maximum benefit. If there are similar products, then it must provide something extra – its Unique Selling Point(s).
– Relationship: How a customer relates to the product/service is vital to its long-term survival. This assists repeat purchasing. Remember it’s much easier and cheaper to sell to existing customers than find new ones.
Financial projections should be for at least three years and avoid the temptation to overestimate income and understate expenses. Also, scenario analysis is useful to consider the effect changes in assumptions affect the financial requirements of your business (eg changes in competitors’ attitudes, new entrants into the market, changes in technology etc).
Additional or supplementary information should be put in appendices. You might include your resumé and more in-depth information brought out in the main body of the plan.
Mark,
Thank you for this wonderful outline that you use, with affiliate marketing online and the training that Wealthy Affiliate offers they have simplified it for the regular person to work with. Quite simple really – chose a niche – make sure to set your short term goals and long term goals (preferably not in dollars but what you can control – such as time, amount of content you produce, hours dedicated to working, researching, etc), build your website, keep up with training, and make sure to follow Kyle and Carson always. Jay with his Live Events will keep you up to date with changes and much more.
Therefore, with the training at Wealthy Affiliate, you will be able to build a business as long as you can follow implement step by step directions with video to follow along.
Thank you again and please come back anytime,
Susan