The first 'P' in Profit was to make a plan. And you will remember that I likened it to a builders blueprint. Though I'm not talking about a formal business plan with spreadsheets and financial calculations you have to take along to the bank if you need funding.
No, just a common sense approach so that you have a good idea of what you are going to do, how you are going to do and the timescale you are working to.
If you have a plan then this enables you to have a good stab at measuring how much progress you are achieving.
However, I also likened business to a battlefield and
referred to the necessity to keep an eye on what is going on at all times.
Military men refer to; 'the fog of war' and it is well known that whatever plan is in place at the beginning is so much waste paper usually within 5 minutes of launch. It is the same with business at every level.
As Barry Gibbons wrote in 'If You Want To Really Make God Laugh, Show Him Your Business Plan", the best place for your business plan after you've got your funding is in a forgotten drawer somewhere because the one certainty you have is that it's not going to happen like that.
This is why 'Prioritise' is the second 'P' in Profit.
At it's most mundane prioritising can be reduced to a daily 'To-Do' list. We all have them, most of us ignore them the minute they are written yet the minutes we spend producing them are probably the most important few minutes of the day.
This is when you refresh your memory of the plan and compare where you are to where you should be. You make adjustments to the order and priority of your work and you determine what you are going to achieve today.
And that's the important part. Far better to identify a small number of things that you are determined to complete today than just keep regurgitating an ever increasing list of things to do that does nothing more than demoralise you.
When you write your to-do list, whatever form it might take, try to identify achievable objectives both in time and difficulty so that you end the day being able to strike out those things you have completed and achieve a sense of satisfaction and progress.
As I write this it is 10:00pm and this is the last thing I am going to do today. But it was on my list this morning and is a priority item so it is going to get done. Then I can sleep easy without having to worry about when I can catch up with an incompleted task.
The fact is that today has gone badly wrong and I've been making adjustments all day to changing circumstances. And that's a bad thing to be doing because it puts me here at 10 o'clock at night still working. You know the feeling -and this is exactly what you (and I!) should be working to avoid.
Those few minutes in the morning should allow you to survey the battelfield, see what changes have taken place, adjust your response and basically create a short term plan for the day. It's simply the difference between strategy and tactics. Strategy is you long term effort and direction and tactics are short term, short range activities. In this case, deciding on your priorities for the day.
Regular assessment on a daily basis of how you are progressing against your plan is an essential activity. Prioritising work for the day and making changes to your plan is to work 'on' your business. If you find yourself endlessly grinding through routine work with no time to actually achieve anything is when you are working 'in' your business.
You're not a business owner when that happens. You are simply a worker in a business that you happen to own.
So 'Prioritise. is the second 'P' in profit. Any guesses on the third?
You might find these other articles about business planning and priorities useful:
- Time Management Guide (actionbites.blogspot.com)
- Business Planning That Makes Sense For You (inc.com)
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There are those who advocate doing something, anything, to get started online. There is some merit in this argument if it motivates you by delivering a great result, especially sales, very quickly. Though my only concern is that it can be equally demotivating if urgent activity results in no sales.
I have become a great enthusiast of the 95% rule as advocated by your average painter and decorator. '95% of achieving a good result is in the preparation' And that means planning what you intend to do.
Planning your Business
What is your objective? Are you aiming to make money, or maybe change your lifestyle, get more satisfaction out of your work, or maybe something else?
You need to research your business idea. Any market can be likened to a battlefield and you are only going to win your battles and ultimately the war if you understand the lie of the land. The same goes for knowing the strengths and weaknesses of your competitors.
Simply plugging along with great determination doing the same old thing that isn't working in the belief that one day you will make a breakthrough is not going to get you anywhere if you have not lifted your eyes to the horizon to survey the surrounding area and missed the obvious easy route to your destination.
Then you have to ask; do you know how you are going to make money with your business? Are you providing products or services? Will your sales be profitable? How many sales and of which products do you need to achieve your income objectives? Most importantly, how can you maximise your return for any given input, in the vernacular; how do get the most bang for your buck?
Once you have settled on your objective, can you achieve your plan with the resources you have available? Do you have the skills, the tools the time and the money? If you can't do some necessary task yourself can you find other people to do them for you?
All of these are questions that it is best to answer for yourself before you launch your business project. Most people find it most effective to write them down, some don't. Either way, you must address them and have answers to the questions if you are going to reach your destination with the minimum time, money and effort.
Once you have done your planning then it becomes simply a reference document, just like a blueprint for a builder. You continue with the construction of your project brick by brick and check at each stage that your progress is as per the blueprint.
Design your business from the beginning and you will achieve your objectives faster, cheaper and experience less aggravation along the way.
Look out for the next post. What's the next 'P' in Profit?
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- Image by rosweed via Flickr
There's just no telling where or when your various promotional strategies are going to pay off. Internet marketing is a cumulative numbers business and one of the most important things to remember is to be methodical.
So when it comes to blogging the way in which you publish your post can have a long term impact on your success. By that, I mean that just writing a post and hitting the publish button is not going to get you anywhere. You have to make the post easy to find both for human visitors and for the search engines.
So when you've finished your post jst stop to draw breath and remember that you are only half way there.
First off, if you have an autotagging tool then use it. Save your post as a draft and it should search automatically for relevant tags in your content. This gives your brain a chance to cool off before you examine the tags it produces and start deleting the irrelevant rubbish which it will inevitably produce while keeping the relevant tags.
Then start using your brain again to add the tags that it has missed using your common sense. Tags are seriously important because they are the most efficient way for the search engines to search for content.
Next, Categorise your post with relevant categories. Again, with the right tools Categories can be hierarchical and Categories are most useful for human visitors because we think in a structured way.
Research has demonstrated that our brains resort to 'chunking' when overloaded with information. So we can usually handle up to 7 main ideas at one time before our brains start to 'lose it'. This is why we tend to create organisational structure that move from broad subjects down into more detail. So Categories are for humans and the single level of tags is more efficient for the search engines.
What prompted this post? It was an email that I got from another website owner telling me that he has created a nice link to this blog and, as we know, every inbound link is precious. But his site is about iPads – so what's that got to do with this site?
The answer is that I think I have one single post on this site about the iPad and I put it up because it's just funny. What's more it's a YouTube video with no written content. But I tagged it with 'apple' among other things.
And it was the link to the tag page at www.brucebird.com/tag/apple/ that he found when searching on Gigablast.com for sites relevant to his niche of iPad that led him to create a post all about www.brucebird.com that you can see at http://www.appleipadtablets.com/link/brucebird.com
So I got a nice inbound link and as one good turn deserves another I'm giving him one back in this post – which also serves an educational purpose for you, dear reader.
So never rush to print with your posts. Make sure you go through a methodical process of adding categories and tags. They are the hooks you provide to help people to find what you are writing about and you never know what the long term benefits might be.
You might also find these articles on SEO with Wordpress useful:
- WordPress SEO What Makes It So Different? (lanechase.net)
- Learn How WordPress SEO Can Drive the Targeted Visitors You Want To Your Site. (lanechase.net)
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- Image via Wikipedia
A note for all copywriters and those writing for the web. An intriguing article in today's paper about TED.com (stands for Technology, Entertainment and Design) has relevance to anyone attempting to master the art of copywriting or any other form of writing for the web.
Chris Anderson is the owner TED.com and what particularly grabbed my attention was his ruling that speeches at TED conferences cannot exceed 18 minutes. Eighteen minutes, he concluded, is: '..long enough to be serious and short enough to hold people's attention'.
How true that on first exposure to a new speaker or writer the author or speaker needs to grab your attention sufficiently to ensure that you come back for more – while at the same time keeping it short enough to recognise the user's short attention span that characterises the modern world as we surf our way through our lives.
At the same time you need to pack sufficient impact into your message to ensure that the listener recognises that it has value.
Note to self; more time and preparation required for all public pronouncements to ensure maximum impact with minimum words. And if it ain't worth saying then don't bother opening your mouth.
Related articles about TED.com
- How did TED start? (laf.ee)
- When ideas have sex: Matt Ridley on TED.com (ted.com)
- Announcing TED's Global Conversation Project (ted.com)
- Ted – the ultimate forum for blue-sky thinking (guardian.co.uk)
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