Life Plans or Business Plans. Five Ways to Make Sure they Work

Writing Plans Can Be Hazardous to Your Business Online

When writing business plans, or any sort of plans, make sure yours work.

People like me (coaches, advisers and consultants) are always telling people like you (potential and actual e-ntrepreneurs©) to "dream big and set great goals". We are always encouraging you to create a vision of what you want to achieve as a person or in terms of starting your own small business online.

So you do that, then you are surprised and disappointed when things do not turn out just as they were in your vision.

Here are just five reasons why you may be having great difficulty achieving those goals and plans for a small business online.

1. Not your Vision: Your vision was not what you really wanted – you created it to meet the needs of others, not yourself.
2. Your vision was not clear enough. You did not see, hear, feel, taste and smell the reality that would exist when you had achieved your dream.
3. Focussing on the negative. For some reason humans are programmed to focus on negative things. When we are reviewing progress, we notice what has gone wrong, not what has gone right.   This means that people often focus on minor fire-fighting and totally miss the fact that their customers started using their product for something different. Launch the business in the direction you planned, but remember it is your customers that float it – make sure you are not fighting the current they are trying to create.  
4. Fear Factor. It is hard to break out of your comfort zones. Starting a small business online means you are going to have to do things you have never done before. We tend to focus on the fear we feel of doing different things, and ignore the fantastic potential outcomes of taking that action. 
5. Break-Down. Finally and most important of all, I find my friends are good at taking their visions and setting long, medium and short-term goals and action points. What they are not good at is applying their skills to visualising successful outcomes for those mid and short term goals. In other words they do not programme their brains.

Creating a good visualisation of a successful day, programme, plan, project or action can add massively to your success. Professor Richard Wiseman of Hertfordshire University in his book 59 Seconds: Think a little, change a lotadvises exactly that.

Internet Business Set-Up - Progress is Haphazard

Internet Business Set up Can be Haphazard

Follow progress on my internet business which teaches others how to start their small business online.

For those of you who have not visited us before, I am putting together an online business.  The business will teach others to do th sane using ebooks, online courses, video, audio and offline seminars.  Our goals is to help get 1,000 small business up and running in the next five years.

Oh, and to:

• boost my potential pension using e commerce and
• describe my progress and help me get things in order in my own mind.

I was trying to find a word that would describe progress so far and I have to say that haphazard does not go far wrong.  It is not that I haven't been working hard - every hour of the day is spent either thinking about the business or doing something in relation to it.

It is just that there are so many things you have to do when you set up a new online business.  They all seem to need to be done at the same time, and as you do one thing, you are reminded that you should be doing something else.  Also, so much of what you do is related and you need to make the links as you go, or you are likely to forget them.

The good thing about that is much of what you do or write can be used more than once.  A web page can be re-written and circulated as an online or offline article, a blog can become part of your sales materials, a sales page can be updated to be a new web-page.

I though I would run through what I should have done by now, what I have done and work out what needs to be done this week

Know What Your Market Is

So far I have got a very clear idea of what market I want to be in.  This market is made up of people who want to learn to make money online.

Know What Your Niche Is

I also know exactly what my niche is and I have set up all my goals with this in mind.  My niche  is made up of  people who have possibly not thought of starting this kind of business before.

These people may not be natural e-ntrepreneurs perhaps, but they have been pushed into starting an online business by current financial circumstances.

Know What Your Business Model Is

There are as many ways of running a business online as there are offline.  In my free course course I will be describing four business  'models' (apologies for the jargon), and I will be combining three of them in my own new business.    The four models and I will be combining them in my own new business.

 The four models we describe are:

1. Affiliate Business
2. Drop Shipping
3. Start Your Online Business
4. Your Offline Business Online

Start Communicating

It can take a long time to get noticed on the web, so the sooner you start the better.  I have got my web-site up and running and written 12 pages of content.  However, it is best ot wait until you have 30 pages or more before submitting the site to the search engines, so there is a while to go yet.

It is also good to get as many incoming links as possible before submitting to the search engines for the first time.  To try and achieve this, one of the things I am doing is creating useful links from this blog to  various pages on my web site.

I Can See Clearly Now

OK, well that has clarified that what I need to do this week is frantically write pages for our website and compliment them with articles and blog entires that are linked to the website.

If anyone out there has got a good suggestion as to where else I should try and get links from, let me know - I will be very grateful.

Your Internet Business Can Only Succeed If Your Mind is Behind It

Your Online Business Needs Your Brain

 Setting up and running an internet business requires an E-ntrepreneur to do so many different things it is not funny.  In fact it can be terrifying.   It can't be done unless your mind is working for you and not against you.  And that means setting great goals and sticking to them!

Setting great goals is more complicated than just saying "I want to own an online business" or "I want to be a millionaire". Our subconscious brain needs things to be specific. Oh and it needs things to matter as well.

SMART Goals

Lets look at SMART goals briefly first. All goals should be Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant and Time bound. Breaking this down a great goal would be "I want to earn $2,000,000 dollars by 12 Dec 2014 by running a successful business selling nappies online".

It is Specific in that it says exactly what will happen, it is Measurable – a certain amount of money by a certain date. It is Achievable, it is Relevant to me and it is Time bound. (12 December 2014)