The Importance of Planning Your Online Business

When it comes to planning your online business, or even any form of activity, if we want something, the best way to go about it is by planning how you are going to achieve your goals! Even the process of setting goals in the first place is a step in the right direction.

Now, for making money online your goals, are of course, geared towards earning an income through the internet. That’s a given, but the message here is what goals or targets do you need to set for yourself in order to make that income. You can’t just say, “right my goal is to make money online“, that isn’t a plan, it’s a dream! A more educated approach would be, “I want to make money online through email marketing“. Do you see how you now have a more clear direction to go in?

Case Study: Planning Your Online Business

Let’s take an example, and make it into a case study. So, someone wants to learn about email marketing, so that they can make a living online. Great! But where do they go from here?

Of course, they need to learn about email marketing and the ins and outs of doing it, so that they can perform email marketing effectively. This is another trap a lot of newbies fall into, they rush into learning these skills, without planning how they are going to do so. There is a lot of contradiction online when researching how to acquire a new skill, so things can become confusing. Ever heard the phrase, “learn one method and stick to it?” This is very true here, BUT, you want to learn from someone who has proven success with email marketing, or whatever process/service that you wish to learn.

So, in this example we have a plan to learn about email marketing to help us make money online, and an additional goal to find a program/course that is going to help us learn the skills that we need. Now, this plan can go two ways; either you will fall flat on your face and FAIL, or you will SUCCEED!

The route to FAILURE is often caused by information overload. It may be an old internet marketing cliché, but it’s still relevant and is very real. Someone may find a course that claims to teach them everything that they need to succeed and rush into everything, without a clear plan of action. They will learn the whole course (or so they think) in an evening, and then try to implement everything overnight. Well, we all know things don’t just happen overnight, especially when starting out online!

To be SUCCESSFUL you need to plan out what you are going to do, and if you have done that already, then well done to you! Planning has many benefits, let’s take a look at just a few;

• Clear direction – When you have a plan, you know what you’re going to be doing today, tomorrow, next week, next month and in some cases next year!  This helps you to know in what direction you are taking your business.
• Implementation – Planning forces you to take action! Yes, another cliché, but yet again it’s still very true. Although you would take action on the route to failure in some cases, the action you’d be taking is totally different, as it’s blind action as you don’t know where you’re going.
• Stepping Stones to Success – When you make targets in your plan, you are creating stepping stones to success. Each step takes you a little closer to your dream and helps to break up your overall plan into smaller goals.

OK, these are just a few benefits of planning out your activities. It is crucial for you to make these plans, otherwise you are going nowhere, as you yourself don’t even know where you want to end up.

I want to take a closer look at the first bullet point for a moment, Clear Direction. This is an essential point, if not the most important of all. The best way to go about putting clear direction into place is by doing the following:

1. Grab a pen and paper
2. Ask yourself – Where you are at this moment in time? What is your current situation with your online business? (write your answers down!)
3. Ask yourself where you want to be overall with your business?
4. What are you going to start with? What tools do you need? (i.e. website, courses, mentors, eBook’s, etc.)

Now you are beginning to make a clearer path for yourself, as you know where you wish to take your current situation, and how you are going to get there. Write out your personal goals, your business goals, your entrepreneurial goals, etc. This will help motivate you, so always have these visible when working to remind yourself why you’re doing this.

Conclusion

You can now make daily plans on how you’re going to achieve your goals and targets. Plan tomorrow today, and the coming weeks, and months. It may sound hard to plan ahead months in advance, but you don’t have to be too specific. Just state some overall goals, for example, ‘I want to grow an email list of over 1000 subscribers’. This could be a goal for you.

Do you see how powerful this stuff is! Without a plan you’re heading where you’ve planned subliminally to go, which is nowhere. With a plan, you are planning to get to where you want to be.

But what do you think?  Do you have your own plan that you are using to become successful?  Do you think a plan is necessary?  Let us know below in the comment section.