Newbies, you should do a business plan before starting online

With all the possible ways to make money online, it is easy to go from one method to another. If you want to be successful online, you need to view it as a business. What do people do before opening an offline business? They make a business plan of course, and it shouldn't be any different because your online. So here is an example of a quick business plan I could do before trying to set up an online business.

First, you should think about your skills, and also what you like. Let's say writing is something you like and can do, you then decide to make a ghostwriting business. So now you need to make a little plan with objectives for the first week, then the second and after that.

So let's say you give yourself 2 weeks to start getting some customers and some feedback. You would join all the sites such as Elance and bid on projects. Get as many as possible, start to bid lower to get more customers and feedback.

Once that is done, for week 3 you could give yourself the goal of creating a small 1 page site where you give your details and put the feedback on it.

Now that your starting to have a reputation, you can start to scale it up, maybe make a WSO to get more clients, start charging more per articles, make some promotion to your site via articles, this is where you need to know exactly how you will scale it up, you need to have a system for scaling it up to make it work well.

So this is a small plan for the first month, but you should go beyond that, because well, you will just scale it up without having a smart system set in place. You need to think long term for your business, so you could decide that once you start having enough clients, then you can start to find your own team to outsource. If you charge 10$ per article and find a team that can do it for 4$, you get 6$ of profit per article. Once you have the right team, then you won't need to do much work anymore, if you know they make quality articles for you, you don't need to spend that much time to make sure the articles are good.

Once that is set, you just have to scale it up as much as you want, you can start incorporating other services later, and giving that work for your team, but it should all be planned.

Of course what I just gave you doesn't go that much in details, that would be for you to fill, but I just did that in 15 min, if you take an hour or two, you can set up a much more detailed plan.

Also this is a suggestion, but ghostwriting is a very good business model when you first want to work online. You learn a lot of things, how to promote a service, how to make a small webpage, how to manage a team, how to make some WSO. If you get to the point that you outsource pretty much everything from your clients, then you can easily take that money for other projects, while making some good money at the same time.

You can start to build a list, create some ebooks, it's up to you, but again, you should make a business plan. I seriously believe that the business plan is the most important thing to succeed online or offline, as with taking action.

So I hope you will learn some valuable stuff from this post, and if your not sure what kind of business to start out with, well why not give ghostwriting a shot, I already laid out a plan for you