Well this week I've been bombarded by finals at my college so I haven't been able to do as much posting as I would of liked. I'm going to begin to explain the first steps in the financial department of setting up a business plan.

A financial plan consists of many things. In this you're going to want to consider projections for income, expenses, and much more. This is the part where I would advise you to hire a professional accountant or financial analyst. However, if you're wanting to do it on your own here's a few tips.


You're going to need to produce projections for what you think your company can reach. I would advise to use a five-year projection plan but a three-year projection plan would most likely work fine. You need these projections for the income you feel you can have coming in, the expenses going out, and even funding sources that you might have got loans from. Now don't just go pulling some random number out of a hat like you're a magician. This takes research, and research is what you'll have to do. Find out historical and industry trends and follow their sales to try and get your projections.

Keep in mind, a financial plan for a business is almost never matched. It could be better, or it could be worse, depending on how much work and effort you put into the plan and follow accordingly. Once you make a financial plan, you need to do your best to stick to it and the keep the budget from drawing into debt.

I would tell most my readers here to, if anything, just expect the expected. If you want to take it further, expect the worst. This way, if the worst does happen, which we all hope it doesn't, then you were at least expecting it. This does happen, but just because it does doesn't mean you should give up! Reconstruct another one that you feel will work better for you. After all, by the time you find out if your first business plan was a success, you'll have experience to build your next one better either way!

I'm going to post the other part of my financial planning for the business plan tomorrow. It will be focusing more on loans and where new businesses can find loans.

Starting a Business: The Business Plan (Pt.3)

Well, I realized I've been posting quite a bit on how to start businesses, but have neglected some marketing aspects of this blog. So for todays post, we're going to explore on ways to gain traffic to your website.

Most businesses these days have a web page. It's almost an obsolete feature of a business not to have a website these days. The internet allows so many people to view your business and products with ease, comfort, and of course speed. Why not offer this option to your consumers?

The main reason a lot of businesses don't even bother is because they can't seem to make sales. Why could this be? They're driving the wrong people to their websites. So how can you market your website?


Here are some beginning pointers I can give you for promoting a new site.
1. Link Referral - Link referral is a great site that enables people to view your site under the given categories. In order to achieve higher ranks, and overall more traffic from this site, you need to view others, write reviews, and mainly stay active. You can easily start pulling in 30-50 hits a day with this useful web tool and expect them to all be unique visitors.

2. Article Submission - Submitting articles about what your site is offering, service or product, will expose your site to many new audiences. Keep in mind, only good articles work. So take your time writing the articles, because overall, that's how people will view your site as well. Chances are, you wont realize huge traffic changes in the beginning. But if you keep up with the articles and keep publishing new ones with different content, people will catch on, trust me.
Below are some article submission sites that I would advise for a beginning website:
a) Go Articles - A great article submission site that has an easy to use system. Must register to use of course. Also limited HTML tags are permitted in the articles you can submit unless you upgrade your account.
b) Ezine Articles - This is probably the BEST article submission site out there right now. I'd advise getting acquainted with this one before using others.
c) Article Dashboard - Honestly, I've personally never messed around with this submission site yet. However, I do have friends who have used it and I've heard nothing but good things. So you might want to check it out.

3. Adding Your Site To Search Engines - This is probably one of the biggest things you need to do of all. You need to add your website to to search engines such as Google, Yahoo, and MSN.
The links where you can do that are below:
1) Add your URL to Google Search
2) Add your URL to Yahoo Search
3) Add your URL to MSN/Live Search

I hope this will help you with your online experience of getting visitors to your site. Tomorrow I will be posting the 2-post segment part of the business plan in financing. I will also extend on this topic some more tomorrow in a separate post.

Targeting the Right Traffic to Your Site

Not every business that is successful started with a business plan. Does that mean it should be the same for you? The "business plan" in the picture is a good beginning step to creating a true business plan.

Have an idea? Can you exploit that idea and possibly make revenue from it? If not, try to think of another idea that a market is more of need for.

This is a great beginning, but business plans consist of a lot more than just knowing your idea and finding out if it's marketable. So what's a business plan really consist of?

First thing you need to do is find the product/service you think will sell and you will enjoy promoting. The last thing you want to do is start a business of something you hate. You want to make sure that this is something you're genuinely interested in and want to do.

Once you have this part done you can now decide on a name for your product/service. Think of something intelligent, witty, and unique. The name has a lot to do with how people view your business and what they view it for.

Tomorrow I'll post more on this topic. But for all you future small business owners out there reading this, I want to let this saturate in your head before I continue.

Starting a Business: The Business Plan (Pt. 1)

As said before, marketing can be a very daunting task to normal individuals. So how can you get started on the right foot?
Have you ever heard of a niche? A niche in marketing terms means a specialized market. In other words, if you have something you love to do or blog about and your very knowledgeable in the field you're doing so with, then that's a niche. A lot of things come with identifying what your true niche is. The best thing I or any other marketer can tell you to do is stick by it and keep working hard.

Now it is true, some niches don't have an established market at all. This is something you need to be aware about before trying to make money off the niche that you thought was ever so popular. If you feel you can exploit a new market area with what you're offering to the community, then go ahead and give it a shot. Just keep in mind that the newer an idea is to the public, the harder it is to market it. But then again, isn't the statement big risk equals big return or possibly big loss the truth?

Once you think you found what you're niche is, then it's time to study and analyze for who your target audience is. What is a target audience? A target audience is a specified group of people that will generally follow what you have going. You need to look for people that can relate and overall would use your product/website. An example of this would be how the tobacco companies used to make commercials to young adults to hook them to cigarettes. They used "young adults" as their target audience and targeted them by doing research and campaigning.

Finding your target audience is a key credential and essential in becoming a successful marketer in today's cut-throat business. Without having that, how are you going to know who to market to? Marketing to everyone will take way to much time and overall way to much money, which is something not a lot of marketers can risk these days.

First Step: Targeting an Audience

Marketing is an organizational function and a set of processes for creating, communicating, and delivering value to customers and for managing customer relationships in ways that benefit the organization and its stakeholders.

What this means in layman's terms is marketing is a function of businesses that they use to communicate and react to what the consumer(s) want and keeping the relationship with that consumer(s).

Overall marketing is one of the biggest aspects of business all together. If you're thinking about becoming a serious marketer, you'll realize that one of the biggest aspects of marketing is staying in touch with your consumers and keeping them happy.

You might be wondering, "How can it public relations be so closely tied to marketing?" Well, the answer is short and simple. Customers that are happy will more likely return and also spread good word of mouth.

Best Marketing Methods For A New Business

1. Word of Mouth - It's the best and worst marketing method out there. What I mean by this is good word of mouth can go far for your business or marketing campaign while bad word of mouth can make your whole project flounder. Isn't the point of owning your own business is to maximize profits for you and your company though? If you agree with this, then you should be working very hard to please your consumers and the chances of bad word of mouth will be a lot less.

2. Advertising - Advertising is a huge method used today in marketing. With technology continuously booming, it seems like there's always new exploitations that can be used to saturate advertising more. Advertising is done online, on television, infomercials, testimonials, telecommunication, radio, flyer's and much more. With the internet buzz peaking more and more each year, more companies have decided to go with more advertising on the web.

Marketing is and will be used for as long as we live. The more advance and detailed we get with it, the better our results can be. Times are changing fast, and with that, technology is changing fast as well. Jump on the bandwagon and stay updated with the technology at our hands because that can be part of your ticket to becoming a successful marketer.

Marketing in 2008