You’ve got the killer idea, you have the marketing sorted and you may even have launched your site, but what do you do now to keep ahead of the competition? Bricks and Mortar businesses utilize a number of cognitive tools, mostly working documents contained in a business plan, to help them asses’ success and plan for the future. In this series of articles I am going to introduce a number of aspects used in e-commerce as well as real world businesses which are shown to improve business effectiveness.

There are many different types of business plan used, from very simple documents to highly complex ones using econometric and accounting data, there is no right way to produce a business plan, but there are many different tips and tools. This series will cover many of the more common tools, and introduce a few proforma spreadsheets which will help with planning the next steps for your business. It will include;

• SWOT Analysis
• Mission Statements, Aims and Goals and Benchmark measures
• The Balanced Scorecard
• Cash flow Analysis
• Key Personnel Models
• Competition Analysis, based on Porters Five Forces.

Whilst none of these aspects deals significantly with SEO or content development (Please see my series of articles on Strategic Content Development) They are all important aspects of business planning, and especially with the level of competition in all niches of the net, it has never been more important for a webmaster to be aware of all of the tools available to help grow a business.

Writing a business plan need not take an enormous amount of time, and they have huge benefits to the webmaster, containing many of the common sense aspect of the business as well as goals and measures of success in one document means that one can easily develop a direction for a business and measure how far the business has come, and how far it still has to go.

The first part of the business plan should be a one page introduction which includes the following information

The Name of the Business

The Niche of the Website and a List of SEO Keywords along with a short estimation of the size of the potential niche

The Names of the Main competition, their page rank and any other pertinent data

This should not be over long and is a single sheet reminder of who what and how you do the things you do.

Related posts

1. Success through Planning – A Guide to Effective Web Business Plans – SWOT Analysis
2. Success through Planning – A Guide to Effective Web Business Plans – Mission Statements, Aims and Goals and Benchmark measures
3. Strategic Content Development an Introduction
4. Building a Pre-Blogging Business Plan
5. Incentives – Pulling in a readership – Introduction