A New Year is approaching and a new decade too. We have another chance to make “New Year’s resolutions” and perhaps make a difference this year to our online business that we’ve been meaning to for some time.
The time is now!
I’m sure most of us should be making bold promises and resolutions about our weight and or diet but here at Expertlistbuilding our job is to help people build a real online business and we leave other aspects of life to other experts!
Failing to Plan
It seems obvious that “failing to plan is planning to fail”. but this does not help us plan! We know we should plan but we still wonder if we can just get by without a proper plan
Success is not an accident, it is the result of years of effort usually and sustained effort too. We all get lots of emails telling us about a short cut to success or an underground secret now revealed because a “newbie” has stumbled upon… yada yada ..
…this is all amusing stuff and perhaps the result of a little too much alcohol!!
Truth is that getting a business going is about providing a service or product that people want. That is it – the rest is about details. What service or product is best we’ll cover in forthcoming posts – right now I want to encourage you to plan.
How to Plan
The main thing is not to get bothered about being totally accurate. Nobody in the real world expects you to be able to decide or know months in advance what stage your business will be in and what you will need to do and how much you will earn.
But you need to chalk it out roughly. And you need to put dates on it – without dates you have a goal and with dates you have a plan.
Let’s give an example. Suppose you want to start an Internet Business. You don’t know much about anything except laptops, you love to read all about them and talk endlessly about the technical details, features and operations of your favourite brands.
So your choice is clear – your niche is laptops, let’s see how we plan that.
Start by making a list of tasks you have to complete – it does not have to be in the order you do them in – any order will do.
What decides success or failure is your Marketing – not your skill or lack of it at designing websites or producing cool graphics – so we’ll start there.
1. Marketing means finding out what people want – so we start then with research to find out what online shoppers want when they look for laptops. Marketing also means finding out how much competition there is from other websites -because you have to get your website on the first page of Google. Task number 1 is market research
2. Then you need to produce a list of keywords that shoppers are likely to use – keyword research
3. Next is website building or blog installation
4. After your site is constructed it has to have articles, posts – content in short
5. And then you switch into promotion. You have to build links to your site.
The exact list does not matter – your next job is to pop some time limits on each task. How long each one takes depends on how familiar you are with the task. Your market research could take a month or a week or an hour – there is no correct answer. There is only the decision you make – so make it. If you are stuck with any of this just get help – don’t throw in the towel.
Suppose you give yourself a week to do your market research and a week for each of the other main tasks. That would get you something like this
Week 1 market research including affiliate programs or adsense
Week 2 keyword research for your domain name and each post or page
Week 3 Website – choose domain name and install blog, choose theme, plugins
Week 4 content – write or find and edit articles based around your keywords
Week 5 Build links to your new blog with article marketing
Week 6 Build links by forum comments
Week 7 if your site is taking off you may decide to build a list
Week 8 write lots of emails to load into your autoresponder.
After that you could simply add more content to your blog and continue to build links. Every couple of weeks check traffic numbers of new visitors and clicks on your affiliate links and adsense advertisements.
At the 3 month mark decide whether to start another site and cycle through your routine again to build another site or to spend more time building the site further.
This is a very simple approach but it is real and doable and an example to help you plan and get into action and into earning an income from your online business.
A last point to help my fellow “recovering perfectionists” – a second best or even 3rd best article or post you actually publish is better than the perfect one you need to give that extra time to before you get round to…
The time is now!
Resources
Intentions Planning @ Kathy Baker’s blog: Your Success Mastery Now
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Filed under planning by on Dec 29th, 2009. Comment. 
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