July 20, 2002
Table of Contents
Welcome
Quote of the Week
Administration
Featured Resource - ELANCE
Staff Article -
WRITING AN EFFECTIVE BUSINESS PLAN - PART 3
Marketing Tip of the Week
Guest Article -
UNDERSTANDING THE FLOW OF INTERNET TRAFFIC, TO ATTAIN WEBSITE TRAFFIC - PART
2
Parting Comments
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Quote of the Week
How old would you be if
you didn't know how old you were?
- Satchel Paige
Administration
WE STILL NEED YOUR FEEDBACK!
We're going to keep the following addresses here for awhile for those of you
who have home businesses and might be interested in receiving a "home
business" version of our newsletter. Please let us know. Many of you have
responded, but we know there are more of you out there who operate home
businesses and would find more relevant information in our home business
newsletter than in this one. A simple blank email will do, as follows:
mailto:s2home@peakconsultinginc.com - to switch to a home business
version and unsubscribe from the small business version.
mailto:both@peakconsultinginc.com - to receive both versions of the
newsletter.
We anticipate the first mailing of the home business newsletter will go out
next week!
Featured
Resource
Elance
Need some work done and need it done as inexpensively as possible? Write up
the project and let professionals fight over it, bidding the cost down as
they do! Whether you need a business plan, marketing plan, an advertising
campaign, a new website, a logo, or just about any other business service,
Elance provides a terrific resource for getting things done inexpensively.
http://www.elance.com/rfp?rid=B1ZL
Staff Article
WRITING AN EFFECTIVE BUSINESS PLAN
- PART 3
by:
Cary Christian
Last week we discussed the
all-important Executive Summary. This week we'll continue on with the meat
of the business plan.
DESCRIBE YOUR BUSINESS
You described your business briefly in the Executive Summary, now you are
going to describe it in detail. Describe how your business is organized,
where your offices are located, how you operate day-to-day, the products you
sell, and so forth. This section should be relatively easy for you to
complete.
INDUSTRY ANALYSIS
Some readers of your business plan will not be very familiar with the
particulars of your industry. You will need to educate them.
Other readers, such as a venture capital specialist in your industry, may be
nothing short of an expert in your industry. You will need to prove to this
person that YOU know your industry.
If you can write this section and gear it toward your reader's level of
knowledge, all the better. If you don't know your reader's level of
knowledge of your industry, you must write it as if you are educating
someone totally unfamiliar with the industry in which you do business.
Every industry has its own unique characteristics that differentiate it from
others. You need to display a thorough understanding of these
characteristics and how they affect your ability to operate profitably.
Point out factors that create risk and explain your strategy for minimizing
these risks. Point out factors that create opportunities and explain how
your strategies will exploit those opportunities.
You'll need to do plenty of research to properly prepare this section. You
should know and present representative gross profit and net profit margins
earned by companies in the industry. Explain how the distribution channel
works. Include charts that show the size of the different competitors in the
industry and other information that helps define your competition.
How do advances in technology affect market penetration in your business? Is
there a chance to dominate a segment of the industry by pioneering
technological advances like American Airlines did with the Sabre reservation
system? If so, are you and your competitors all working on such
technologies?
A lot of people think the industry analysis section is just fluff. It's not.
You can gain a lot of credibility with your readers in this section if you
exhibit a thorough understanding of your industry.
MARKET ANALYSIS
At first glance, one might think the industry analysis described above is
the same thing as market analysis. They are strongly related, but not quite
the same.
In your market analysis you are going to build on your industry analysis and
take it a step further. You're going to discuss the positioning of your
products in the market, pricing strategies, and how your products compare to
your competition's products. You're also going to give demographic data that
has an impact on your product sales.
For example, let's assume you are selling to small businesses and your
target market comprises five major metropolitan areas within one state. You
should provide data on the number of small businesses within those target
markets and data regarding their normal usage of products like yours. In
other words, you are attempting to quantify the size of your market in terms
of potential customers and potential sales including repeat sales.
This type of research is very difficult to do properly. But doing it will
teach you many things. You'll learn much about the market that you never
realized, hopefully giving you more ideas on how to penetrate the market and
where your emphasis should be placed. You may even find you should abandon a
specific territory based on your research.
In defining your markets in this manner, you don't want to just borrow some
verbiage from a chamber of commerce type site and throw it into your plan.
Get the raw data, preferably from several different sources, analyze it, and
draw your own conclusions based on the data. A lot of your competitors for
funding won't be so thorough and this will give you an edge.
If you can afford to purchase this data from a market research firm, that's
great! It will make your life easier. If that proves to be too expensive,
you'll have to do the research on your own.
You can start with census data. There's a lot of good, detailed information
available. Most metropolitan areas or counties will also have websites where
information on the number of businesses, business types, and business size
can be gathered. Check out regional magazine websites that focus on the
business and economy in your target markets. They often provide this type of
information at least annually. Trade publications offer you your best shot
at getting an estimate of the market size for your products in dollar
figures. From these sites alone you should be able to gather enough
information to create a professional representation of your market.
A CAVEAT
If you are using your business plan to raise equity funding and there is
fierce competition for funding in your industry, you may need to seriously
consider obtaining your industry and market data from a market research
firm. If your competition is using professional market research data, you do
not want to be outclassed. But I suggest you also do your own research as
well. Analyze it in light of the data provided by the market research firm
and try to find ways to use it to make the data even more specific to your
business. Find every angle you can to gain an advantage.
Copyright (c) 2002
Marketing
Tip of the Week
If you're looking for a new product to
sell online, whether it's your first product or just something to complement
your existing product line, don't think in terms of the product! Instead,
find a MARKET that's not being served or one that has a "hole" in it (a
niche you can fill). Do a little research and find out what people are
buying a lot of and find a way to create a better product or one that
provides benefits not easily found in the market. Look at ads in magazines,
top download sites, top ranked websites, and use some of the free keyword
analysis tools we've told you about in previous issues to find out what
people are most interested in. It can take a great deal of money and lots of
time to develop a market. It's much simpler and vastly more profitable to
find the market first, then develop your product.
Guest
Article
UNDERSTANDING THE FLOW OF INTERNET TRAFFIC, TO ATTAIN WEBSITE TRAFFIC - PART
2
So how do you get more than
the 3 hits a day that the average website gets on the internet? You must
understand links and their importance to traffic. Traffic is what feeds
e-commerce, business-to-business or any Internet website for that matter and
links are our signs and roadways, for visitors and robots alike, to find our
sites and easily visit them. Without links, pointing to you and away from
you, you are nothing.
The world is not flat, like some visionaries of old screamed. It's
round, as modern day thinkers found. In the case of the internet it's
multi-dimensional. Each point in space, like a planet floating in space, is
virtually the same distance from each other where time and space doesn't
matter, when traveling from one-to-another.
That sounds like a futuristic story in another space-time continuum. Perhaps
we need to use cyber-space as an explanation and use reality, as an analogy,
while explaining how traffic flows through the Internet.
Each website could be like a planet, a point of space in this cyber-space,
not limited by time and distance. A click from one, instantly whisks you to
another, similar to possible conveyances of the future, causing traffic to
flow from one-to-another.
The traffic from point-to-point or planet-to-planet happens along
established link paths, with the larger websites, having more links pointing
to them and away from them to other websites. The largest ones, like massive
terminals, routing the travelers to the knowledge they seek. These websites
link to others of like kind. Where Themes match and knowledge is similar to
what the quester of knowledge is looking for. This is natural, where 'like'
links to 'like'. To build traffic to our sites, we must began to build these
terminals. These Link Way stations need to be link pages of nicely organized
information.
When I am surfing the net, I save the kinds of websites containing content
and links that I am looking for, into my Favorites folders, thus creating my
own personal Link Directory. When I use my favorites, I am using the linking
nature of the web to find new websites that I am looking for. My
favorites, over time, become a personal Link Directory,
organizing websites, many that have link directories of the knowledge I
want.
Once I have enough of these favorites, I stop going to the search engines
for knowledge on these subjects because the knowledge I now have is
specifically tailored for my needs. I'll only go back to the search engines
when I'm researching a different Theme and start the process of collecting
my Favorite links, but only if I can't find what I'm looking for, through
links stored in my Favorites.
I think most of us use the Internet in this fashion, don't you? Don't
just rely on a listing in the phone book to send you business. Having lots
of signs pointing to your website and a clear easy path to it, will insure
the thousands of new visitors will finally arrive.
-----------------------
Content has been reprinted with permission of the author. First appeared in
http://www.cyber-robotics.com, © 1999-2000 David Notestine, all rights
remain with author.
Check out David's terrific product, Zeus, and get your link strategy into
high gear and your traffic numbers soaring!
http://www.peakconsultinginc.com/zeus.htm
Parting
Comments
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