How to Create an Online Business Plan

Any kind of business, whether online or brick and mortar, should have a business plan. It is a blueprint, your source of direction and even inspiration. It encompasses the reason why you are putting up a business in the first place, tells you how to achieve your goals, and determines whether you’re succeeding or not.

A lot of business owners, however, struggle when it comes to creating a business plan. In fact, they are so apprehensive and scared about it, that they just skip it. A business plan, however, does not have to be very complicated and hard to understand and follow.

Here are some of the basic steps:

1. Start with a very simple business plan. Unless you are planning to show it to investors or financial institutions such as banks (they usually require a business plant that follows their desired format), you do not need a very complex or comprehensive business plan. The most important thing is to cover the most essential sections, such as your business concept, USP (unique selling proposition), marketing analysis, financial projections and needs, resources identification, and growth or exit strategies.

2. Make everything doable. Your business plan will remain just that—on paper—if your goals are too hard to achieve, impractical, or illogical. For example, you do not just come up with figures from out of nowhere. You base them on the track record of your competitors or on data extracted from studies such as niche-market trends. You cannot expect to earn $100,000 for the first year if you lack people and capital to expand your online business fast and easy. In fact, it is important that you will be somewhat conservative with your sales assumptions and figures.

3. Include an SEM and SEO plan. Keep in mind that you are not doing just any kind of business. It is based online. Therefore the marketing strategies and methods of analyzing their success are quite different from what you traditionally know. A special part of your business plan may be for SEO and SEM. For instance, how much traffic do you expect for the first three months? What’s the percentage of growth? Most important of all, what’s your preferred conversion rate? That’s how many of your leads are converted into buying customers.

Never forget this too: always re-assess your business plan, at least twice a year. A lot of things can happen. Your goals may change. Your marketing strategies may not work, and or you’re using new ones. The business plan needs to reflect these types of changes, in order for the information to stay practical and feasible.