3 Foundations To An Online Business Plan

An online business plan, as we have already reviewed in the last article has three basic parts. Along with those, you also need to have a foundation. Remember in Do You Really Need An Online Business Plan? the point about “You’ll also want to create a plan to plan your business.”? Well, this foundation is just that.

In the last article – Basics Of An Online Business Plan – you had a little homework, so you could start preparing to write your formal plan. Now let us go over the three basic foundations to your plan:

Your Goals for a Website
Your Budget
Your Time

Your Goals for A Website

Here start thinking about the advertising you are currently doing for your “offline” business. What do you want your website to accomplish?

Do you want it to augment your current advertising?
Do you want it to be your primary advertising?
Do you want it to showcase your portfolio?
Do you want it to provide information to sell your product or service?
Do you want to create eBooks and guides around your service to sell?

Your website could also accomplish multiple goals. You don’t need to have this all locked down in your mind, just start thinking of your main goal right now and as you move along you can tweak and add new goals.

Your Budget

When thinking about a budget, you probably want to start with just the basics, you can always grow and add as you learn more.

You could technically go ‘free-tools’ all the way, however this is not really the best strategy. Why, you ask? Because you are then at the mercy of whoever owns that media. So, let say you built your blog on one of the free platforms – great you say, no out-of-pocket. Now let’s say for what ever reason that platform took down your website. No more blog and you have to start from scratch. Huge ARGH!

Another consideration in using a free source is your site’s name (URL). Let’s use the the example of building a blog on the free Worpress.com platform. (Which is a great platform and we will speak more of it later.) Instead of having a nice, clean URL like “http://www.example.com” which is easy for your customers to remember. Your URL would be “http://yoursitename.wordpress.com”. The longer and more complicated your website’s name is to remember, the less likely your customers will remember.

OK, so back to budget, there are three basics for having a piece of online real estate.

Website Name – your ‘domain name’ (www.example.com)
Website Hosting – the service that provides you the ability to show your website on the internet
An e-Mailing Service – autoresponder service (the service which keeps all your leads and sends them messages that you create

A domain name is about $15.00USD per year; hosting is about $10.00USD per month; and an e-mailing service is about $19.00USD per month. So, about $363.00USD per year or about $30 per month.

And remember in the Basics Of An Online Business Plan (Point#2) we discussed hiring a consultant could cost $1,000-2,000 per month. Albeit, it will take some time and patience on your part, but this is some serious savings.

Your Time

This one is very straightforward, how much time are you willing to spend/can you spend to this project. As with any new project, you will have to devote more time in the beginning, learning the process. What you need to think about is how much time a day can you work into your already busy schedule.

If you could block off 30 minutes a day and maybe 1 hour on the weekends it would be great. If this amount of time shocks you, don’t worry. This project is part (or all) of your advertising and needs to part of that time block.

What Next?

So, now we have reviewed three more factors you should consider in thinking about your online business plan.

Your Goals for a Website
Your Budget
Your Time

Get out that pad and your favorite pen/pencil an start making some notes. Again, these are ‘free-thinking’ notes, don’t worry about having to commit to anything just yet.

As before, if you have any comments, questions, or good-natured tidbits, share them below.

Next time, we are going to go over one more part to an online business plan, then you will start putting the whole thing together.