What’s The Plan?
Thursday, January 7th, 2010About working online…
- What’s the plan?
- Do you have a plan?
- Do you know what you want to do?
One of the very first things you need to do before you start working online – or start to develop a successful online business is to develop a well thought out plan.
There are literally thousands of different directions you can go online which can and usually does lead to confusion and a bad case of information overload if you haven’t thought things through.
So the first thing we need to develop to make 2010 your best year ever is…
The Plan!!
What can I do to make money online?
- Affiliate Marketing
- eBay
- Services
- Surveys
- Retail Website
That’s just a few of the first ones to come to mind. However there are numerous sub-sections of most of these as well. For example, if you were looking at Affiliate Marketing, you could…
- Setup a Landing Page to promote an affiliate product
- Do you have the necessary skills to do this or will you be outsourcing this task?
- Use PPC (Pay per Click)
- Google Adwords
- Yahoo Search Marketing
- Bing
- Other
- All of the Above
- What are the specialty tools you can use to increase your ROI
- What are the specialty tools you can use to increase your ROI
- Use classified advertising
- Use banner advertising
- Advertise through Social Networks
- Email Marketing
- Do you have a list? (or)
- Will you need to build / buy a list first?
As another example, if you were setting up a retail website to sell retail products online then you would need to consider…
- What type of products you will sell. IE: Electronics, Giftware, Houseware, Pet Supplies, etc.
- Will you use a pre-built storefront or custom build a website
- If custom building, which platform? HTML, PHP, Wordpress, Joomla, Drupal?
- Can you custom build yourself or will you be outsourcing this task?
- How will the products be delivered?
- You will be warehousing products?
- You will use a dropshipper?
- Are there any restrictions as to buyers location in place with the dropshipper?
- How will you calculate costs?
- How will you manage available inventory?
- How are returns handled?
- What is the return policy?
As you can see, having a well thought out plan will save you a lot of frustration, delay and added cost later on. It is best to work as far into the future as you can with whichever scenario fits with your business plan. Thanks to today’s internet this is a lot easier than it was when I started out online. For almost any kind of online business imaginable you will be able to find tons of online business resources to help you figure out in advance exactly what you will need to make it happen. Then you can determine if you have the required skills, assets, etc. or if you will need to bring other people, skills & resources on-board.
In the next entry we will look specifically at one or two of the different types of online businesses and dig a little deeper into ‘The Plan’. If you are considering or in the process of developing a specific online business model and would like to discuss it here, please leave your comments below.
To Your Success,
Joseph Murray
Be sure to check out http://7dollarbooks.com for specific downloadable information on each of the above topics and more.
