What Does A Killer Internet Business Plan Even Look Like?

If you have little or no experience of internet marketing, crafting an internet business plan is nigh on impossible.  Just building a website is not enough – a ‘build it and they will come’ attitude will yield disappointing results.

I have been studying internet marketing for around a year, almost full time.  I find it fascinating and addictive.  My blog is a measure of how far I have travelled in a short space of time.

Even though I now have a pretty good idea of ‘what to do’ the main problem is focusing enough to do it!  The internet can be very distracting.  That’s why having a business plan is important so that you can rapidly traverse the seeming mountain that there is to climb.

The other distraction is that there is a constant flow of new tools and techniques being invented that are driving forward innovation on the internet – it is a constant learning process.

(I read somewhere that the world’s knowledge base is now doubling every 4 years.  That is due in no small part to the creativity that has been unleashed by the internet and is an astounding fact when you reflect that it has taken several thousand years to develop our knowledge base to it’s current position.)

So you need to get used to the fact that in internet marketing, you will be constantly learning and tweaking to improve your results – just like a traditional business.

So here are a few critical steps that should be included in an internet business plan:

• The first step is to choose your preferred market and then identify a niche within the market.  If you are going to develop a business for the long-term, it’s important to select a market or niche that aligns with your passions and interests, otherwise, if you are only ‘doing it for the money’ it will be a case of ‘blood, sweat and tears’ to achieve success.  It’s much easier to do something you love – creating valuable content will then be easy.
• Next you need to carry out some market research.  Primary research will involve researching the keywords you will try to compete for and then trying to weigh up your competition and how you can achieve a competitive advantage.  Input your chosen keywords into a search engine such as Google, and your competition will be instantly revealed.  There are tools such as Market Samurai that can do a lot of the hard donkey work for you in carrying out this research.  It’s boring and tedious work but you need to stick at it because ‘failing to plan is planning to fail!’
• Once you have identified a promising niche with some competitive keywords, it will greatly improve your search engine rankings if you can purchase a Domain Name that includes your keywords.
• The next step is to choose a platform for your central website.  There are many platforms and formats but bear in mind that Google seems to favour blogs because these facilitate constant, fresh content.  My website has been created using WordPress which is a very popular and totally free, although it takes some skill in the initial set up.  Site Build It is another great website building application.
• In every case, make sure that you set up ‘Analytics’ so that you can monitor what is happening on your web pages – no point in making improvements to your web pages if you don’t know if these are yielding better results.
• You then need to generate traffic to your website – no traffic, no business.  There are a large number of ways to achieve this, including:
  • Search Engine Optimisation, briefly:
    • keyword research and search term selection
    • put the keywords in the right places
    • build links into the page
  • Create a valuable ‘web of content’ that drives traffic into your website using:
    • blog posts and web pages
    • video marketing
    • article marketing
    • social networking
    • bookmarking
    • micro-sites or content sharing sites such as Hub Pages and Squidoo.
  • Paid for advertising, such as pay-per-click e.g. Google Adwords
• Once you have traffic coming to your web pages, you need to use direct response techniques to start driving them into your marketing funnel.  A ‘Marketing Funnel’ is where you collect leads, develop a relationship and convert to sales.  Create a marketing funnel for each product or sale but any marketing funnel should also have a back-end sales process where buyers are invited to buy additional products and services at the point of sale and afterwards.  Copywriting skills are required to maximise this process.

A key strategy is to combine your marketing funnels with self-branding.  By creating a list of prospects and buyers, the money is in creating relationships and constantly delivering value so that you can keep selling more and more products and services that resolve your buyers problems.  This requires that you always act with integrity and in the best interest of your customers.

Of course, in developing your business plan it helps if you set some targets and allocate resources to your plan.

Whilst I have really only given you an outline of a killer internet business plan, nevertheless, you now have the essential framework to deliver success.  If you would like help to prepare your internet business plan then contact me or input your email address in the sidebar at the top of this page and I will send you details of my limited membership private coaching club when a vacancy arises.

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