Hundreds of people start a small business every day with little or no thought as to a formal business plan strategy.  It’s critical to know how your business fits into your industry.  As the owner of your business, you also need to understand well how the decisions you make about how your operations will run will affect the company’s goals and objectives. 

First you should include in your business plan strategy an analysis which details what your company offers to the marketplace.  You need to be able to identify your strengths and clearly define how those strengths give you a competitive edge. 

What products and services do you offer, and what value do they bring to your potential customers?  What advertising methods do your customers respond to best, and what are the best ways to reach out to potential customers? 

Make sure your business plan strategy also includes any weaknesses your company has, and opportunities for improvement.  By facing those areas in your business that can use improvement, you will be able to create solid strategies to tackle them. 

The next area to address in your business plan strategy is your company’s operational approach.  What is the organizational structure, and who is responsible for different areas within the company?  Why does your management team outshine your competition?  Don’t forget to also include an key contractors or outside consultants that are important to your operations. 

Finally, your business plan strategy should identify your operational “Plan B” that you will use if your initial plan doesn’t work out.  What if a key contractor decides not to continue working with you?  What if a storm destroys a large percent of your inventory?  Identify early warning signs to be on the lookout for and have a plan ready for the unexpected.

You don’t need a business plan strategy to operate your business on a day to day basis.  However, taking the time to do so, particularly in the area of business operations which are so often overlooked, will give you a competitive edge when the unexpected happens. 

Be sure to visit SmallBusinessAccountingBackroom.com to get many more resources to help you take your business plan strategy to the next level.

No business plan is complete without a solid business plan strategy in place to make it work.  Similar to gas for your car, a solid strategy gives your business plan the fuel it needs to succeed. 

A successful business plan strategy includes a plan for the following areas of your business: 

Products and Services.  Identify your best performing services and products, then create a business plan strategy geared to increase sales in those profitable markets.  In addition, if you plan on developing any new products of services, include timetables to get them complete and identification of additional resources you might need. 

Marketing.  Your marketing strategy is one of the most important areas to cover in your business plan strategy.  It should include an analysis of what your most profitable sources of marketing are, and how you plan to use advertising and marketing to expand your business in the coming year.  This section should also identify any new branding materials you may need to develop to achieve your business plan strategy in the area of marketing. 

Operational and Employee Development. You must include in your strategy the resources you are going to need to achieve your business plan strategy, which should include the human resources.  If they are integral in achieving the company goals, remember to include any contractors or consultants you work for in this area.. 

Financial.  Include your financial plan for achieving your business plan strategy.  Many believe wrongly that if you aren’t going to use your business plan to obtain outside financing from an angel investor or bank, that the financial portion is not necessary.  This is not the case, however.  If you plan to finance your business plan strategy through business growth, it is even more critical to carefully analyze your cash flow projections to ensure they are accurate and support your business plans. 

Finally, your business plan strategy should address where you are today with respect to the above areas, as well as your alternate plans in the event circumstances change from those expected. 

Be sure to visit SmallBusinessAccountingBackroom.com to get many more resources to help you take your business plan strategy to the next level.

Outsourcing has become increasingly popular both for those buying outsourced labor and those providing the services.  It is an ideal use of a speaker’s or author’s resources to take advantage of outsourced help while promoting their speaking services or book.  And, due to recent economic conditions, small to midsized companies are having to lay people off or delay hiring full time staff.  The result is more talented workers looking for work.  The solution in many cases is to outsource. 

The advantages for the small business, speaker, author or other entrepreneur purchasing the outsourced services include:

1.    No Permanent Commitment is Required.  It is easy to end a working relationship with an outsourced service provider and find someone else if a situation turns out to be a bad fit. 

2.    Less Employment Overhead.  When you are making money and need help, you can get it.  When times are slower, there are generally few if any expenses involved. 

3.    Can Outsource a Wide Array of Critical Tasks.  Whether it is an unexpected legal situation or minor office duties, you can find an outsourced service provider to meet your needs.  Some of the more popular tasks that small business owners outsource are “virtual assistant” duties, website and Internet marketing tasks, and even bookkeeping and accounting. 

Outsourced service providers benefit from the relationship as well:

1.    You Choose Who You Work With.  Since you are responsible for choosing who you work with, if a working relationship doesn’t work you can move on to a better fit. 

2.      Easy Scheduling.   As a contract worker, you can work on your own terms and time frame, and are often able to complete the work from home. 

3.    Any Economy.  The ability to earn on an outsource basis is not reliant on your ability to obtain traditional work that may not be available in your field. 

Outsourcing benefits both the entrepreneur, author, speaker or small business owner purchasing the service and the outsource service provider, which is why this type of service is here to stay. 

For many more resources and ideas for promoting your book effectively online, visit PromoteYourBookCoach.com.

You wake up in the middle of the night with a million dollar idea.  You can’t get it out of your mind as you shower and get ready for the day.  But, the idea soon fades as you perform your day to day tasks, and when you finally have time to spend on it, you can’t remember why it was such a great idea.  Sound familiar?

You can solve that problem by making use of a good business plan strategy.  While a business plan strategy has many uses, one of the best is to get a million dollar idea down on paper before it vanishes. 

The first step in creating your million dollar idea business plan strategy is to jot down the general idea that popped into your head in the first place.  You don’t need to find a specific notebook or sign onto your computer.  Grab whatever paper is handy and get the general idea down fast.  Do this step right away, the rest of your business plan strategy depends on it! 

Now you can go about the rest of your day safe in the knowledge that your idea can’t be lost.  It is critical to write it down, because that action is telling your subconscious mind to figure out how to make your million dollar idea happen. 

Over the course of the next few days or weeks, confirm the following and commit them to paper about your million dollar idea:

1.  What type of market is t here for your million dollar idea, and is there little enough competition that you will be able to compete?  It’s not necessary to be the only one who had the idea or offers it in the marketplace.  You just need to be a big enough fish in the pond to be able to compete. 

2.  Can your million dollar idea meet the needs of that market on an ongoing basis? 

3.  How will you deliver the million dollar idea to the market?  Said another way, what type of skills, team, and other resources are required to make it work? 

That’s it.  By answering those three simple questions, you have taken your vague, undefined million dollar idea and created the base of a business plan strategy that will make it work
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If this exercise has left you even more excited over your million dollar idea, your next step is to expand your base into a more robust business plan strategy. 

Answering a few simple questions to create a basic business plan strategy is all it takes to turn your million dollar idea into more than a dream.  From there, you make your dream turn into a reality before you know it. 

Be sure to visit SmallBusinessAccountingBackroom.com to get many more resources to help your million dollar idea become a reality, including samples of business plan strategies to take it to the next level.

Probably the most critical part of Internet marketing for your business is organizing your website so it will achieve your overall goals.  Yet, most people completely bypass this important step or, worse, just turn the whole project over to a website designer to handle. 

When you take the time to strategically plan the outline of your new website or an upgrade of your current one, not only will you achieve a website that will show off your business in the best way, but one you will be able to add and edit content easily, and probably most important will help to achieve your overall business goals.  Below are a number of steps to follow while planning your new website:

1.  Write down on a piece of paper everything you think the visitors to your web site might want to know about your product or service.  If you are planning a website for a school, for example, the visitors would be interested in how man students attend, classroom sizes, staff information and sports offered.  Take the time to brainstorm as many areas related to your product, service or industry that someone might be interested in when visiting the website.

2.  Take on the role of your website visitor.  Surf the Internet and visit various sites offering similar services, then review them as a potential customer would.  As a visitor, what do you like and dislike about each site?  Are you inspired to take action from the website?  Can you find what you are looking for fast? Are there a lot of pages to navigate through to get to what you are looking for?  With the goal of making your website as easy for potential customers to use as possible, note all of this information down for future use.

3.  Investigate to find out the keywords your visitors will most likely search for to find your website. Google has a free keyword research tool that will work fine for this purpose.  By typing in a general phrase such as “exercise video”, other keywords will come up that are related.  These are the things your visitors already have questions about.  By arming yourself with this information, you will be able to plan your website to answer their questions right away. 

4.  Plan your new website so that it can expand.  Avoid websites that can’t be easily expanded to add more pages or products.  A good website is a constant work in process. 

5.  Plan a website that you can control, rather than be at the mercy of a web designer to make even small changes to your website.   Successful Internet marketing today relies on a dynamic website with fresh content added often, and having an antiquated website that only your designer can change will just not work anymore.  You need a website platform that will allow you to add website content fast and simply.

Your website is most often one of the biggest marketing expenses your business will encounter.  Make the most of your investment with a new website that supports the goals you have set for your business. 

Marty Dickinson is the founder of HereNextYear, Inc., a full service Internet marketing company in business for over 10 years. His specialty is Internet marketing solutions for the small business owner, speakers and authors. Visit to see what HereNextYear has to offer and to learn more about their innovative new website packages fully integrated for ease with social networking and other Internet marketing strategies.

Thinking up great benefit statements has always been the most challenging part of copywriting for the web. And benefit statements are critical to selling your readers to try your products, services, and ideas, second only to the headline.

All of the other parts of copywriting such as good headlines, price offers and stories were much easier for me than finding good benefit statements. But creating a benefits list drove me crazy; that is until I learned how to come up with one or more benefits every minute.

You might remember from any basic sales course that people do not care about features nearly as much as they want to know the benefits. Knowing that, I started to try to get to the bottom of what benefits actually are. They’re action items, right? As an example, you “build” muscles or “create” more time. If that is true, how bout starting each benefit statement with an action verb? Here’s the process:

1.  Find a long list of action verbs and alphabetize them.

2.  Display the alphabetized list of action verbs on your desk or, even better, view them on your computer screen so that you can see the list in its entirety
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3.  Make up a sentence describing your product or service using each verb on the list.

”Accelerate” is the first word on my list of verbs, for example.

So, I might say to myself that my product helps people to “Accelerate your learning speed by     getting true hands-on training with every command”.

4.  Write benefits until you can’t think of any more, and don’t think of quitting early! You can cut out those that don’t have as much impact later. You don’t need to stop to think if you are writing duplicate phrases down either, now is not the time. Just open your mind to think about your product or service and brainstorm benefit ideas as they come.

5.  Prioritize your list with the most important benefit statements first and the least important last.

This process has worked for me not only to create great benefits lists, but also for writing articles for my website like “35 Reasons Why a Blog is Better than a Traditional Web Site for Your Business,” or “50 Ways to Kill a Perfectly Good Seminar”.

Use my list of verbs or create your own and start creating your killer benefit statements in just 20 minutes. In most cases, a good list of 20 benefits is all you will need for your sales page.

Marty Dickinson is an entrepreneur and the founder of HereNextYear, Inc., a full service Internet marketing company in business for 15 years.  He specializes in Internet marketing solutions for the small business owner, speakers and authors.  Visit to see what HereNextYear has to offer and to learn more about their innovative new website packages fully integrated for ease with social networking and other Internet marketing strategies.

Most sales training books and courses spend a lot of time on closing the sale, but very little time is spent on discussing the leads that, well, lead to those sales.  The sales process begins with generating leads, so it is important to understand as much as you can about them in order for your business to be as profitable as possible. 

Can you count the number of leads you received over the past 30 days? Most mentally review and can name a handful of quality leads they talked to, but a good amount of potential leads are lost every month. 

What’s the big deal?  A huge amount of a company’s resources (both time and money) are spent generating leads that will hopefully result in sales, and the better you understand where and how you get those leads, the better off your business will be.  And, if you can use your newly found information to either reduce the cost of your marketing or the time that you spend, wouldn’t that be worth it? 

First, you need to be able to track specific information about how you get leads.  Below are some questions to ask to get started: 

1. What is the main venue through which you get your leads? A “pre-lead” is really just a prospect, for example a website visitor or someone you shake hands with at a meet-up group.  Your job is to identify those venues you use to collect your prospects, such as trade shows, meet-up groups, advertising, or your website.

2. Then, answer the question, what specific sources do you get your actual leads from? For example, specific sources could be a particular trade show, an online blog a direct advertising campaign, an existing client referral or a pay per click advertising campaign.

3. Finally, what is the quality value for each of the leads you receive from those general sources and specific sources?  I have found that this is easiest to derive by assigning a percentage value to every lead received from a source.  So a lead that is just kicking the tires gets a lower percentage value assignment than one that you send a proposal to or even ultimately sell.

Understanding where you are getting your leads and the quality of those leads will help you to spend your marketing time and money in the right places to increase your profits. 

Get more small business success strategies and claim your free white paper: “7 Ways Your Stone-Age Accounting System is Stealing Money From You Every Day … And, How to Get it Back This Year”  to learn about an online accounting program that makes it simple to track your leads and conversion rates.

Most sales training books and courses spend a lot of time on closing the sale, but very little time is spent on discussing the leads that, well, lead to those sales.  Generating the leads is the first part of any sales process, and the more time you spend understanding this important step, the more efficient your business will become.

How many leads did you get last month? Most mentally review and can name a handful of quality leads they talked to, but a good amount of potential leads are lost every month.

Why does it matter?  The more you know about your leads the more successful your business will be, because generating leads is the first step to making sales.  Would you find it worth it to learn something more about your leads if you were able to cut the time you spend getting leads, or even better marketing costs?

Your first action plan is to create a way to track key information about the ways that you generate your leads.  Below are some questions to ask to get started:

1. What main sources did your leads come from? Before a lead becomes a lead, they are only prospects – someone who visits your website or that you meet at a networking group.  Identify your main sources for gathering prospects, such as the Internet, trade shows, networking events, or direct advertising.

2. Next, what are the more particular sources your leads come from? Organic search, PPC, a specific networking event, another website, response to a blog post on someone else’s blog, or a specific advertising campaign are all examples of specific lead sources.

3. Last, what quality would you rank the leads you get from the sources you defined in the earlier steps?  An effective way to come up with this is to assign a percent value to every lead a source provides.  So, if a lead actually results in a sale, it receives a higher percentage value than one that expressed interest but didn’t get past the proposal stage.

You will be able to spend your marketing budget and your time much more efficiently once you understand where you leads come from and the quality of those leads.

Get more small business success strategies and claim your free white paper: “7 Ways Your Stone-Age Accounting System is Stealing Money From You Every Day … And, How to Get it Back This Year”  to learn about an online accounting program that makes it simple to track your leads and conversion rates.

Even the most passionate business owners shy away at the thought of making cold calls.  But cold calling can be very useful to your business success even if you don’t use it for direct sales.  Here are a few ways you can use cold calling to your advantage:

Market Research 

Cold calling has a negative reputation from those pesky telemarketers that call right at dinner time, but the truth is that you can use cold calling to get the questions you need to successfully grow your business answered. 

You can get the answer to any number of questions that might come up simply by calling local businesses that would know the answer.  True, these people are busy and you don’t always get a positive response, but you will be surprised at how often you do.  And by making more calls or independent research based on those answers, you can fill in the blanks and learn more than you can imagine. 

Strategic Alliances

Now more than ever a successful business person will focus on strategic partnerships to grow their business.  Traditionally, business people have relied on networking functions such as meet-up groups to form such alliances.  

Often you have a specific business or person in mind that you’d really like to meet, but so far have not had the opportunity.  While stalking them out is an option, a more direct approach may be to give them a call on the phone.  The phone is a very non-intrusive way to feel them out through general market research questions, and if the connection is there suggest further meetings to talk over possible strategic partnership options. 

Those business people willing to try new techniques for forming strategic alliances and learning as much as possible about their industry will thrive, even in today’s economy.  Cold calling can be an effective strategy to achieving these goals.  

Get more small business success strategies and claim your free white paper: “7 Ways Your Stone-Age Accounting System is Stealing Money From You Every Day … And, How to Get it Back This Year”  to learn about an online accounting program that makes it easy to track the effectiveness of your marketing campaigns.

First sales are always more difficult than repeat sales.  So, small business owners are always looking to build a loyal customer base.  Regardless of what you sell, there are a lot of ways you can maintain a loyal customer base.  Here are some tips:

Maintain Expertise in Your Field 

Continuously strive to stay up to date in your field.  It is important to always be perceived as the expert in your field.  With easy accessibility to information on the Internet, customers do their research and are more informed than ever.  You don’t want a situation where your customer knows more than you, the perceived expert.  So read the updates and take the courses you need to always be up to date on what’s going on in your industry.  Customers will stay loyal if you stay committed to lifelong learning. 

Make It A Priority To Resolve Customer Issues 

It is rare that you will hear about a customer problem up front, so you need to use your intuition in many cases.  You might want to take your customer’s pulse periodically by reaching out and asking if everything is going well, or if there are areas that need improvement in your working relationship. 

The most important advice is to never point blame when you hear of a problem and use the SODDI defense (some other dude did it).  It’s your business, so everything that goes wrong is your fault – take the blame with grace.  Then, take action to fix it fast.  Customers are more used to excuses than fast action so your commitment will be noticed.  Instead of the error being foremost in their minds, the amiable resolution will keep them returning as repeat customers.  In fact, it is often that case that those “problem” customers often end up referring new business your way because of their satisfaction with your service. 

Help Your Customer Recall the Reasons They Picked You 

This is no time to be humble; continually point out your advantages over your competitors, and praise your customer for being so perceptive and astute to choose you.  Everyone deserves a little praise, so why not also take the opportunity to remind your customer of your competitive advantages while praising them for making a good choice in you. 

Creating loyal customers is no more than treating them so well that no one else could compare.  Give them such great service automatically, and they will demand the same for years to come.  That’s customer loyalty. 

Get more small business success strategies and claim your free white paper: “7 Ways Your Stone-Age Accounting System is Stealing Money From You Every Day … And, How to Get it Back This Year”  to learn about an online accounting program that makes it easy to track repeat customer profitability.