My Business Blog | Paul Palmer

Starting a small business means you should have a clearly etched out business plan. Planning ahead means there are more chances of achieving success. It ensures the growth and survival of any business. Whether a corporate house or a small business being run by an individual, a group or even a family, a business plan is the backbone of starting a small business. Various dimensions are included in a business plan. This article discusses some of these.

You must first understand the basic objective of your business. Your objective needs to be realistic, unambiguous and simple.

The next step for development of your business plan would be to describe your services or product. You must give the full details of each of these services or products that are being offered by you. These salient features should include taxes, pricing, shipping, time involved and delivery charges.

Next in line comes the setting up of a financial goal. However, there is a word of caution here. You should never set up unrealistic goals. Set up only achievable goals. If you really do not have any idea about how much your business can yield then you must run the business at break even points within four to six months of start up.

Your plan should have a clear list of available resources. These should include raw material, manpower, machinery, finished product, and your knowledge and domain expertise. Each of these available resources should be used in the most effective way. This way the business overheads will be reduced.

A major part of your business plan should be identifying the market. You should know where and how big your targeted market is. This is extremely essential because you will be getting all your revenues from here. In fact you will able to produce better services and products if you know your market well and have spent a considerable amount of time researching it.

Once the market has been identified, you need to work on the marketing plan. Your services and products can be promoted in various ways. However in order to do so you have to shell out some money. Try out the most cost effective campaign by making maximum use of posters, leaflets and banners. Classified advertisements in newspapers also work. One thing that you must not forget is that word of mouth is also a good way to get your business promoted.

A good financial plan is an important aspect of every business plan. Any business needs a certain amount of investment in the form of running or fixed capital. Therefore you need to calculate your capital requirements after you complete all your other plans. A financial reserve should be kept at least for the first six months of starting a business and only then should you think of starting on the next leg of the business.

Starting a small business means that your implementation of the plan should be extremely strategic. It should involve properly working on a daily work schedule, management responsibilities, promotional and marketing schedules, carefully monitoring the progress and reviewing the schedule.

Steve A
http://www.articlesbase.com/ecommerce-articles/creating-the-right-plans-for-starting-a-small-business-132472.html

When you want to promote your business on line why blog? Of course it is not an essential part of a commercial web site but there are many functions in a blog that can bring traffic to your site.

Looking at the platform itself first a blog is designed to link to other sites easily and to make it easy to maintain. There are of course many choices to make; wordpress or blog spot, hosted or generic, template design, domain registration and of course target audience.

Any business starting out online should have a blog and post to it regularly. By regulary I mean every couple of days and at least three times a week. This can be a little daunting at first, many people ask me; why blog at all?

It’s simple really, all the search engines like web sites which are contributing. A static site may hit top rankings at first, but it won’t last if the competion are offering new unique content.

It doesn’t have to be something amazing, just something about you and your business. Many people treat their blogs simply as a record of what they have been doing.

Then as well as the blog they have additional sales pages as well as advertisements on their blog so that visitors will still see what is on offer. Keeping your site fresh, new and regularly updated with new information will improve your chances of bringing more people to your site.

Paul Palmer

So why blog to keep the search engines interested so they send people to your site.

Is it really that easy to start making money on line? Surely there must be more to it than that, well of course there is. The key point I was making yesterday was that if you know what you want and where you are going then do it.

Many business owners spend 6 months or maybe even a year planning their business on line before they even consider a domain name. As for keywords, what’s that they’ll ask and spend another 6 months working them out as well to fit their business.

When you are new to making money on line it’s more important to get on line and start learning than it is to have a perfect web site the looks amazing. Imagine setting up a fantastic new shop in a new shopping arcade that no one has heard of. Are you going to make your fortune immediately? Without any passing trade or existing customers?

No of course not and it’s the same on line, but a bit harder in some ways. using the same analogy you could pay someone £2000 or even more for a fantastic flash front page and matching pages inside all about your business. However no one will come because they don’t know how to find you. Just because you are online doesn’t mean search engines like google will find you at all nor will they start sending you customers.

Now I have started here with some of the pitfalls, having said yesterday that you have to start. What then should you do to get started? I recommend starting by building your own trustworthy reputation. Surf a few forums, be helpful where you can and ask questions when you feel it is relevant. Set up a blog and start posting about 300 words a day, about you. Never start with a hard sell. get yourself a few social networking profiles set up like Twitter and Facebook and use them.

One thing though as you get started you must always remember to be positive. Nothing will kill your reputation faster than complaining all the time and being negative. That’s enough for today do you know what to do to start making money on line now?

Paul Palmer

I hope you remembered, you have to start as soon as you can whether it’s today this minute or this evening you must start.

A journey of 1000 miles starts with a single step.

Have you thought about what success on line would mean for you. For many moving their business on line seems the only way forward, but extremely daunting. whenasked they say, “yes we know it’s the trend these days”, or “we are just waiting for ..”, or “it’s something we have on the to do list.”

Sound familiar, many successful business people are procrastinating when it comes to establishing an on line presence. It is not an issue that they don’t want to. The plans are often there, even the designs, images and logos too. What thenyou might ask is stopping many successful people making the same success on line? It’s simple really, the trouble is the Internet is so far out of their comfort zone that they procrastinate.

The one thing which prevents many people taking their business on line is not anything to do with ability. Nothing to do with time or even money. It’s quite simple the most important thing you need to do to achieve success on line is start.

It really is that simple, it doesn’t matter if your first site is perfect. Domain age is very important,, just as changing and improving your site will help too. Now what are you waiting for? Is everything sat is a drawer waiting for … who knows what?

Paul Palmer

Go ahead punk make your day, start today.

Being the Best In Every Area
What is character? Your character is the degree to which you live your life consistent with high, life-enhancing values. A person who lacks character is one who compromises on higher order values in favor of lower order expedience, or who has no values at all. Your adherence to what you believe to be right and true is the real measure of the person you have become to this moment.

Define What “Excellence” Means to You
Let us say that one of your values is “excellence.” Your definition of excellence could be, “Excellence means that I set the highest standards for myself in everything I do. I do my very best in every situation and under all circumstances. I constantly strive to be better in my work, and as a person in my relationships. I recognize that excellence is a life-long journey and I work every day to become better and better in everything I do.”

Organize Your Actions
With a definition like this, you have a clear organizing principle for your actions. You have set a standard by which you can evaluate your behavior. You have created a framework within which you can make decisions. You have a measuring rod against which you can compare yourself in everything you do. You can continually grade your activities in terms of “more” or “less.” You have a clear target to aim at and organize your work around.

Decide What You Want for Your Family
It’s the same with each of your other values. If your value is your family, you could define this as, “The needs of my family take precedence over all other concerns. Whenever I have to choose between the happiness, health and well being of a member of my family, and any other interest, my family will always come first.”

Keep Focused
From that moment onward, it becomes easier for you to choose. Your family comes first. Until you have fully satisfied the needs of your family, no other time requirement will side track you into a lower value activity.

Shape Your Own Character
The wonderful thing about values clarification is that it enables you to take charge of developing and shaping your own character. When your values and goals, your inner life and your outer life, are in complete alignment, you feel terrific about yourself. You enjoy high self-esteem. Your self-confidence soars.

When you achieve complete congruence between your values and your goals, like a hand in a glove, you feel strong, happy, healthy and fully integrated as a person. You develop a kind of courage that makes you completely unafraid to make decisions and take action. Your whole life improves when you begin living your life by the values that you most admire.

Action Exercises
Here are two things you can do to put this ideas into action immediately.

First, create a clear, written description of your values and what they mean to you. From that point on, resolve to live consistent with your own definition.

Second, discipline yourself to live in complete alignment with the values, virtues and qualities that are most important to you. This is the key to character.

Paul Palmer

Many consider business on line but so often they find it hard to move forward becasue it isn’t really clear how you should start unless you are already on line youself or working with someone who is online. This can be a real show stopper for many people when they really do have the potential to make it big in their own niche business opportunity.

I was out last night at a business party in Copenhagen, Denmark, it was quite hard for me to network and I didn’t really have anythign in mind when I arrived. I am a qualified person and Quality Assurance Manager for a pharmaceutical company, but I also have a residual income from my on line businesses. The party was with the Pharmaceutical company so I was just there looking to have fun.

At the end of the night though feeling tired and ready to go to sleep, because I thought I should, so I could make my flight at 9 am the next day I got talking to one of my team from the event. He is working in a manual job after a period of being out of work. I didn’t really think much about his role at first, he’s young, then again most people seem young to me these days, so I thought he was just starting out. I spoke to him for about an hour about hsi background and of course business.

It turned out he has 2 degrees, his first in business and his second as an Architect. Now to me that is someone going places who with the right impetus can make it big. Why I thought as I sat there are you doing a minimum wage manual job in my company then on a temporary contract basis. Me being me I was interested in his story so I asked a series of open questions. By the way I’m a trained auditor so questioning techniques are something I really do know a lot about.

I found out he and his best friend had made some money already while in college simply travelling to Germany buying soda at 50 to 66% off (his words) and selling them to his “friends” back in university. Now here’s an entrapreneur I thought so why isn’t he making money on line. As I dug deeper I began to realise he simply didn’t know how. I found out he had taken the job because he had been out of work for 8 months so had taken on a couple of contract jobs in a row to get some money coming in rather than none, one of them was even designing a web site for a sole trader like me. All along the way throughout the discussion I was still thinking this guy could be going somewhere, should I offer to help him in business on line.

When he told me he was just doing the job for 7 months and waiting to see how it goes alarm bells started to ring for me. I asked him several different ways about his plans for his future and I could see he just didn’t have any, not a single goal to his name. It struck me then that he was a well qualified graduate going nowhere in a dead end labouring job. It’s a shame because he could have so much more.

I have decided this morning as I prepare to fly back to the UK, I’ve been awake since 4:30 am how rediculous, that its time I dedicated my business blog to helping people to lear how to do business on line. The opportunities are there, the guy I was talking to last night had some excellent ideas and even others to work with and make them happen. What he was missing was a leader, a mentor who can help him overcome his lack of motivation by showing him how easily he could start testing his ideas on line.

Paul Palmer

Business on line, starts just like every opportunity we take, with the first step.

What do you want from your life?

Everybody wants something even if its just to get to know you. Many people will take time others will want money. Sometimes the people who say they don’t want anything are the ones who try to take the most without you even realising. Unfortunately with network marketing or MLM or whatever name they give it the end often seems to be the same you end up paying.

There is a system we use for root casue analysis but it also works when you are not sure whether you should be doing something or not. All you have to do is ask yourself why.

Seems easy but try it on something. For example why am I here? To do my job. Why am I doing this job? to get money? Why do I want the money? To spend?

Why spend money? to live.

Sometimes though you get to a point when you realise the reason you are doing what you are doing is something you can no longer do becasue you don’t have the time.

Heres an example from my life I actually did do this one and changed what I was doing as a result.

I was spending all my spare time on line learning and promoting web sites, as a result I was neglecting my family, my 3 sons.

I was on a training session when they said to ask yourself why 5 times and you will get to the answer. Now 5 is just an arbritrary number and depends really on how detailed you are before you move on.

So I asked myself why am I doing this? To make money to support my children

Why am I doing it this way? Because I can

In asking myself the why questions why online marketing

why this product?

and so on I came to realise that by working hard on line to give myself more time at home with my family that I was actually achieveing the opposite of what I was attempting to achieve.

I wasn’t spending any time at all with my children, every waking moment I was obsessed with social networking and posting to my blog and the result was; nothing, not a penny and all the time I had lost would never come back it was just wasted.

I know how to make money on line but not through network marketing, nor MLM, I don’t like the idea of convincing people to do what I’m doing just so that I can make a commission on what they pay

Instead I have decided to focus on sales, I know it doesn’t suit many people or rather the thought of it doesn’t.  We are all selling the only difference is what we choose to sell.

If you are intereted in how I make money in the UK let me know maybe you can too.

Paul Palmer

I have made my choice to spend less time making money on line. Not that I’m reducing my income I’m just not doing the tings that don’t make money any more unless I really want to.