Business Plans & Planning

Even if your business starts out without any real plan you’re going to want to have some sort of direction once you get going. Going full-steam ahead without any business planning isn’t going to get you where you want to be in a year or 3 years. How would you even know WHERE you want your business to be in that time frame if you don’t have a well thought out business plan?

Business planning need not be a formal exercise in frustration. What you will need as a minimum is an outline looking at the major areas of running a business and how you expect to deal with them. How will you handle advertising? That alone can be a 20 page document. It always is for me when I plan out what I’m going to do with my new business.

I use many tools for business plans and planning when I’m starting a business. First I use my favorite mind mapping tool. Here is a small sampling of what I include in my business outline (plan)… I fill in the details under each of these categories:

* Online marketing
* Offline marketing
* Website development
* Lead Generation
* Pay Per Click campaigns
* Search Engine Optimization
* Web 2.0 (Social Media) Marketing
* Pricing
* Formatting of the products

There are a million other things that could go into even an informal business plan and I usually manage to put a few hundred in mine.

Here is our blog category for Business Plans & Planning. This has all the information we’ve blogged about that relates to Business Plans and planning your strategy for your online business:

Inc. Answers Blog / Category / Business Plans and Planning >

Here are the rest of our Business Plans & Planning Resources: