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Starting a Small Business Online - Planning

Planning your small business startup online without a lot of hassle

Once you decide to start a business, the natural inclination is to want to jump right in. You want to see that business up and running and want nothing to do with anything that might slow you down.

That's why when most people starting a business online hear about the importance of writing a business plan, our minds gloss over. We want to get going, not spend a lot of time learning how to write a formal business plan that, in most cases, has is geared more for someone starting bigger business - complete with multiple employees - than we aspire to at the point.

Now relax. I'm not going to lecture you on the benefits of writing a formal business plan. You don't need the kind of business plan you would take to a bank or a venture capital firm to back up your request for startup money.

But you need something to make sure you stay focused on reaching your goals instead of drifting off into inconsequentials that hurt your business more than they help it.

So do something informal to keep you on track.

Do a simple plan.

There are basically three things you need to know when you start a business.

• Your target audience and their needs
• Your product
• How you plan to put them together

Your target audience and their needs

Think small and think realistically when you plan your business. Even if you think you have a business idea that will appeal to everyone, narrow your focus down to the target audience that you have the best insight into.

It's a lot easier to sell to the types of people whose needs you are deeply familiar with than to sell to a vague, generic mass. Trust me, trying to play the numbers game and appeal to a generic mass of people when you're first starting out is almost guaranteed to be a business-killing mistake.

"But what about all the potential sales I'm missing by targetting a narrow audience?" you ask. You can always expand your audience later - after you've gained experience and momentum.

First go for the low-hanging fruit, the easier sales where you're on familiar ground. Frankly, you're not any more likely to open your business and make an immediate jump from nothing to full-time income than you are to walk through the doors of a New York train station and immediately find yourself in Los Angeles.

It takes time and effort to travel from where you are to where you want to be.

So, instead of trying to go big and generic in the hopes of attracting everyone, plan for slow, but steady, growth by first focusing on your most likely sales. Then you can gradually expand your target as your business builds.

Your product

Make sure your product fills a need that you can easily identify. Too many people get things backwards, picking a product and then counting on customers to buy it just because it's there.

Think of your product not as a physical item, but as a solution. Focus your business on showing how your product solves your target audience's problem rather than on simply setting it blankly in cyberspace.

Even if you dress it up with plenty of "wonderfuls" and "amazings," it won't sell until people see a solution in it.

Solutions sell.

How you plan to put them together

Here's another reason to start with a target audience instead of going broad: the better you know your target audience, the better you know how to find them.

You want to put your solution smack dab in the path of your target audience. Are they likely to search for a solution in a search engine? Put yourself front and center in it with the keywords they are most likely to use.

Are they more likely to not know of your solution and thus not be searching with keywords related to your product? Then know where you can find these people who have the problem you solve, and make sure they find you right where they are.

Setting your goals

As I said before, you won't start your business online and immediately pull in $500 a day. You can get there eventually, but only by steady, long-term growth.

So set specific growth goals for your business. And set them low. You won't average $100 a day in your first month. For most people, working part-time and putting little to no money into pay-per-click advertising for instant traffic, even $5 a day is unrealistic.

But set specific dollar milestones for yourself and look realistically at those milestones. Ask yourself, "What do I have to do right now to reach that next milestone?"

And then do it.

Faithfully.

Persistently.

Fearlessly.

You may feel like the tortoise, plodding along when you'd like to zip along like a rabbit. But then again, I don't have to remind you who won that race, do I?

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