If you want to get a small business loan at some point for your Internet business, you may be asked for a business plan. Regardless of  how big or small your domain name, website development, or other online business  is and even if you have no ambition of turning your hobby into a business or are loaded enough you’ll never have to worry about loans, you still need an Internet business plan. When I speak of having an Internet business plan, I’m referring to a plan of action which you will outline and undertake so that you’ll be able to achieve the goals you’ve set for your Internet business. If you haven’t set any goals for your Internet business, you best get started on that now. How will you go about achieving your business goals if you don’t even know what they are? Set short term goals and make a list of long term business goals for your Internet business . If you’ve never written a business plan before, you’re probably wondering how to set and achieve your goals. We’ll get back to talking about writing a business plan for your Internet business a little later in this article — let’s look at some tips on what needs to be done before writing a business plan.

Tips on Setting Goals

When writing a business plan for your Internet business, choose SMART goals — goals that are specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, and time-bound. Let’s first go over these goal attributes. A specific goal should descriptively outline the goal and how to achieve your set goal. If we take my goal of making this blog a PR5, I could for example say that I will make a serious effort to increase the number of posts per month. Stop right there — do you see what’s wrong with setting that goal? It’s not specific. Saying you’ll increase the number of posts per month doesn’t tell me whether you’ll be increasing the number by 1 or 100. A specific goal would be to say you will put out 1 post per day or 30 posts per month — that’s measurable, it’s attainable, it’s certainly a realistic goal which could be achieved, and we’ve included a time element (posts per day or posts per month). What sense would it make to choose a goal irrelevant to the success or improvement of your Internet business? Let’s discuss different types of goals which may be relevant to our business.. One might be to increase customer satisfaction or to increase the number of repeat buyers by 10% over the next 6 months – both of these goals are fairly easy to make measurable by asking customers if they’re satisfied with the service they received both now and 6 months from now and by tracking the number of customers who made purchases on multiple occasions. Goals on the web development front may include reducing your website’s bounce rate (the number of people only visiting one page on your website before leaving), to increase the number of page views from your average visitor (eg. making visitors more interested in your website), or to increase site traffic and revenue (by perhaps focusing on making more revenue per visitor). We can add in specific and measurable elements to these goals, as the above examples have done to make them good goals to set. The goal of a business plan isn’t to set goals that are easy just so we can achieve them and pat each other on the back — we can set hard time-bound goals, however they should be possible to achieve with the knowledge, skills, and resources you have available at your disposal.

I talked about time-bound goals a bit at the beginning of this post when talking about having short term goals and long term goals — a business does need to have both to ensure they’re going in the right direction. With Internet businesses, short term goals are much more important than long term goals — the Internet continues to rapidly evolve and businesses who rely on it need to evolve with it. Try to set long term goals that are adaptable. Long term goals lacking adaptability are destined to fail. Thinking too far ahead of yourself leads people to do silly things, as we saw during the Dotcom Bust — it’s unrealistic to assume traffic, revenue, etc will continue to grow at a certain rate indefinitely because they’re growing at that rate now and setting long term goals with such an assumption made is setting yourself up for failure. When you set a goal, think of all the ways you could go about achieving that goal. If I take my goal of getting to PR5 as an example, I could say that I’ll focus on continuing to write good content, link building, optimizing my internal link structure, and networking — I’ve left myself a few different options here which allows me to adapt to any unforeseen circumstances which may arise. Make goals positive — it’s much more effective to put a positive spin on any goal than a negative one and if you have more than one goal, prioritize them. Be sure to write your goals so that you’re personally accountable for failure. Why not take that a step further and tell all your friends and website’s visitors what your goals are — won’t that make you feel stupid if you’re unable to live up to the expectations you created? But at the same time, could anything possibly be a better driving force to stay on task and accomplish your goals?

Steps to Prioritize Tasks

The Pareto Principle applies to business plans as well — Can you get 80% as good of results or 80% of your tasks done using just 20% the time? Time management is an extremely important part of goal setting. If you have only a limited amount of time to achieve your goals, then every second you can save is another second you can use towards achieving your goals. Remember to never forget about opportunity costs — if you have 2 goals of equal importance and one will take twice as long to accomplish as the other, it only makes sense to start with the easier goal. Just remember here that we’re choosing the easier goal because we assumed both goals were of equal importance — if the harder goal was of greater importance, taking the easy way out may not be the right choice to make. Prioritizing goals is simple — determine which goals are urgent, followed by which goals are important and so on until you arrive at goals you’d like to accomplish time permitting. This need not solely be applied to business plans nor should it — prioritizing job tasks is an important task for any manager and any worker who can’t grasp the concept of prioritizing job tasks probably isn’t going to last very long. You did it when you had a real world job — bring those prioritization strategies to your Internet business, your Internet business plan, and more importantly, both your online and offline lives. I have several articles about time management on this blog and I intend on adding more in the future because of how important to success it is. If you can learn better time management skills, you’re halfway to success already. Want to learn where you’re wasting time? Write down everything you do during the day and do that for a few days. Then, analyze your list and look for areas where you could improve efficiency. You can apply this idea to business, weight management (eg. Weight Watchers), or good budgeting. When prioritizing tasks, write them down with the same level of detail as when you first identified goals in your business plan.

Writing Action Plans

Now that we’ve written down or goals, elaborated on them, prioritized them, and thought up possible ways we could go about achieving our goals, it’s time to put it all together. Organize all your ideas for how you’re going to go about achieving your goals and then turn them into actions — the whole who, what, when, where, and why. What will be your operating expenses? How are you going to turn a profit? What are you going to do about advertising and otherwise marketing your business? If there are more than just you involved in your Internet business, write down the tasks everyone will have and who will be responsible for achieving which goals.

Website Business Plan

If you were a bank manager, would you lend someone money who had come in presenting your business plan? If not, your business plan isn’t good enough. The fact that your business is an internet business means it’s going to be even harder to secure a small business loan (and this economy isn’t helping either) – especially if your business plan isn’t up to snuff. If you’re targeting outside investors, be sure they’re aware of the financial and legal liabilities associated with your business. Non-disclosure or non-compete agreements may sound like a good idea, however do keep in mind that by doing so you’re telling the person you’re asking for money that you don’t trust them. You’d probably be better off leaving out any information you don’t want others to know rather than make them sign such a legal agreement. A few more things you should cover in your business plan include:

Background information — This is more for anyone reading your business plan rather than for yourself. If you aren’t seeking any form of financing and merely want a clear strategy to follow, you can leave this part out. The same can be said about having an executive summary — you can summarize some of the key problems and challenges your business is facing, it’s current financial situation, and a strategic framework that identifies opportunities for your Internet business. You’ll want to have a vision statement outlining the direction your business will be taking and it’s primary objectives, along with a mission statement explaining the reason for your company’s existence, your projected profitability, estimates of growth, and your target market. You’ll need to assess the risks, competition, and barriers to entry you face as best possible. Do you have a contingency plan or method to limit financial liabilities in the event things don’t proceed as planned?

There are many business plan support services available in most countries — a google search should identify government agencies providing small business services in your area.  There are plenty of Internet business plan templates available online as well. It may seem like a daunting task, however writing a business plan for your Internet business is something well worth undertaking. They say you should dress not for the job you have but for the job you want — does your Internet business not deserve to be treated seriously today?

Related posts:

1. Domain Names and Time Management II
2. Domain Names and Time Management
3. Domain Names and Time Management III