Web Business Overview – Have a Plan

Monday, November 23, 2009

So you've decided you'd like to go into business on the web, eh? This article will give an overview of options that are available for your web business and will help to give you an idea of what goals should be set for your project.

After deciding to be a web entrepreneur, the next step is to create a business plan. Business plans are as essential to a web entrepreneur as blueprints are to a construction worker. To build a business most efficiently, you must first be an architect and plan how you would like your business to look, what it will do and how your goals will be accomplished.

There are many ways a person can go about making money with the Internet. Options include selling products as a wholesaler or retailer, selling services, promoting products or services as an affiliate partner, selling advertising, selling email or demographic information, selling subscriptions to sites and any number of other ways and combinations of money making ideas.

A good business plan will include details on the service or products you will be offering, growth goals for your new business, projected expenses and losses, employee projections, and any other information you will need to clearly outline your successful business. Though there are many approaches to the actual construction of a business plan, a month by month or quarter by quarter analysis is common.

For example, if your online business will be selling widgets, you may want to go through, month by month and estimate the total number of widgets you will sell, the cost of selling these widgets, expenditures on marketing, hosting and overhead, and any other foreseeable factors you can think of. If within six months you want to begin selling skyhooks as well as widgets, this should also be accounted for in your business plan.

Before moving on to our next topic, it is important to remember that business plans are constantly changing. Some of your projections will be difficult to make accurately, so do the best you can with the information at hand. As more data becomes available through research and experience you will be able to make revisions to your business plan. I am of the belief that it is generally a good idea to make profit projections on the low end to start with. If you believe you can sell between 10 and 100 widgets your first month, it is better to plan to sell only 10, and be pleasantly surprised when you sell 55, rather than to plan for 100 and fall short of goals that have become unrealistic yet necessary for the survival of your business.

After you have a good plan for your business, the next step will be to research your business. But that’s a subject for the next article.