Hi, welcome back. Remember, this is an on-going series of posts, a guide for anyone wanting to set up their own internet home based business, so if you don’t want to lose the flow I recommend that you subscribe to the RSS feed. Each part of the series is numbered so if you have come in late and missed the earlier issues, you can pick the sequence up from the archives.

How to Set Up a Business Plan for an Internet Home Based Business

By setting up a business plan, you are road mapping your way to success. It will help you to develop your business goals and strategies, as well as providing you with a better understanding of the marketplace. It will also highlight any business strengths or weaknesses that you may have, as well as providing you with an opportunity to take a close look at your competitors. If you want, you can also include financial projections, historical data and growth expectations into your business plan.

With any good business plan, it should show who the target audience is, and just how the product or service that is being provided will meet or exceed their needs and expectations.

When organizing a business plan it is best if you break it down into sections such as:-

1.Business summary – The product or service you want to provide.

2.Market analysis – Research on the product or service and how the competitors are doing.

3.Product positioning – How to make it more prominent compared to your competitors.

4.Market strategy – How are you actually going to market it?

5.Customer analysis – Look at what the customer wants or needs.

6.Financial analysis – What you need to invest in order to set up the business and to keep it going while it is just getting started.

7.Overall business goals – What you hope to achieve in, say, a year’s time.

But what is more important is that once a business plan has been developed, it should not lay in the back of a drawer somewhere. It should be a working plan that you can refer to when you need to.

The best way to make a business plan is to keep it simple (one or two pages should be all you need).

Certainly one of the best things you can do when starting an internet home based business, in fact if you really want your business to succeed it is mandatory that you create a plan then stick with it.

Tomorrow in Part 6 we’ll look at what types of businesses would make a good internet home based business.