Writing Business Plans: The Basic Guidelines for Business Entrepreneurs

Talk of business planning and you may be surprised that some business entrepreneurs may dismiss the term for a jargon only associated with big successful business enterprises. It is as if modern day business entrepreneurs are still haunted by the ancient dogma which states that ‘the world is changing so fast that my plans are immediately out of date, so there is no point of bothering’. The failure by some small and medium scale enterprises (SMEs) to recognize the significance of business plans have often led to catastrophic results of their business due to lack of objective and structured forecasts for their business activities. While many entrepreneurs will prefer employing the services of business plan experts, an understanding of the process is important for setting benchmarks as to what to expect from the experts.

What is a business plan?

A business plan is essentially an operational forecast that systematically outlines your methods of running specific business activities over specified period. Never associate the necessity of business plans to the size of your business because no business enterprise is ever too small to be subjected to planning. Indeed, business planning remains a core component for running both SMEs and large scale business enterprises. Whether seeking to start a new business, to strengthen a successful business, or trying to save an ailing business enterprise, business plans always come in handy in outlining the viability of your prospects to your customers, business partners, and lending institutions.

The Significance of Business Plans

Business planning is ultimately a worthwhile process that demands for both your discreet approach and concerted efforts. This is because business plans immensely contribute to the measurement of progress or success of all your business activities, whether profit making or non-profit making. In addition to demonstrating the current status of your business enterprise, a business plan also outlines the future agenda of your business by clearly identifying the landmarks and the projected direction of the business. In a nutshell, therefore, can use your business plan to evaluate the progress of your business enterprise, assess the impact of your business decisions, pursue opportunities, and fully utilize available resources.

The Key Steps of Writing Business Plans

A business plan presents the most vivid summary of your business activities. Thus, you must always endeavor to present your plans in the most precise and incisive manner to facilitate easy understanding and interpretation of your operational and financial projections. As such, the transitional aspect of your activities from one step to another is very important, regardless as to whether you are using a software template or not. Therefore, you should always ensure that your business plan follows a systematic structure as demonstrated by the following key steps:

• Always begin your business plan with certain preliminaries considered inevitable such as cover page, list of contents, definitions, and contacts.
• An executive summary highlighting the key objectives of the business plan should follow immediately. Use the executive summary to set the tone by providing vivid descriptions of your business.
• Provide an analysis of your target market, your market positioning and competitive advantage.
• Highlight your mission, vision, and business objectives.
• Provide brief explanation of your business strategies.
• Project your plans for product or service development.
• Spell out your financial estimations.
• Identify the prevalent risks and potential opportunities of your business.
• Provide a clear and straight forward conclusion.

Upon observing the above steps, you may finish up by including an annex summarizing other additional information such as your sales forecasts, capital outlays, employee costs, operating costs, cash flow estimated expenses, balance sheet and profit and loss account. The annex section is particularly important for a running business that has been in existence at least for one year or more.

Tips for Writing Successful Business Plans

While drafting a business plan, always remember that the business plan will stand out as the image of your business organization. Given that you will seek to employ your business plan in direct competition with other business entrepreneurs in the search for financial resources and regulatory approvals, you must make your business plan as appealing as possible. The business plan should clearly demonstrate unique characteristics that make your business standout among competitors. You can achieve this by providing clear definitions of your business activities, objectives, strategies, risks, opportunities, working plans, costs, revenues, and financial summaries.

How to Generate Leads for Multi-Level Marketing

Network marketing is arguably one of the most effective strategies you can employ in your multi-level marketing (MLM) campaigns to access large audiences of prospects for your business. Network marketing has the potential to convert significant portions of your leads and prospects into sales opportunities because of its strategic capacity to reach wide and varying audiences over short periods of time.

However, network marketing is equally characterized by many challenges and obstacles that include the difficulties to generate adequate number of leads, difficulty to convert leads into real business opportunities, and outright rejections from prospects. Moreover, suspicions arising from privacy concerns may discourage many potential prospects from buying or bidding for your products and services, especially in situations that involve filling out of personal details in either physical forms or electronic forms such as landing pages in the internet. This means that you should always design appropriate network marketing strategies to avoid falling victim of the inherent challenges and obstacles.

Generating Online Leads

Generating adequate leads marks the starting point for conquering the hurdles that characterize network marketing. There are several internet resources that you can utilize to generate hundreds of leads and prospects within a day. All you need to do is to be persistent in applying a combination of several tactics to achieve sustained online visibility for your products or services. You must seek blasting strategies for optimizing traffic to your personal website or any other website which hosts your products. This may require considerable commitment of your time and money to generate online leads through paid and free internet resources. Some of the unique online resources that you can use include advertising in ezines, posting blog comments, and creating online podcasts.

Advertising in Paid eZines

Launch an all out MLM campaign by displaying your free and paid solo ads on ezines. Paid ezine advertising is more effective because ezines that provide free advertising spaces are always saturated with too many ads that attract little attention from readers and subscribers. As such, you need to identify decent ezines on which you can display your products advertisements, with the objective of breaking even and finally generate many more leads free of charge.

A single paid ezine ad has the potential of generating hundreds of leads on a single day. However, do not assume that all the leads and prospects that you generate will automatically convert into sales. You must observe patience bearing in mind that the initial blasts that you achieve from the solo ezine ads will only serve as the preamble stage for profit optimization, as long as you follow up and convert your leads into business opportunities.

Some of the high traffic ezines that you can use for paid solo advertisements include:

• Directory of Ezines
• Damn Smart Ads
• Email Promotions
• Ezine Directory
• Ezine Hub

Always exercise diligence and observe patience before purchasing solo ads. The best approach is to begin by ascertaining the relevance, reliability, qualities, and trends of any ezine through initial subscriptions before making advertising commitments. Alternatively, you can post your well written articles to free high traffic ezines such as theEzine Articles
.

Posting Blog Comments

You can generate significant traffic to your website or any other website hosting your products and services by simply posting comments and views on prolific and high traffic blogs. While using this tactic, you must exercise high degree of self-discipline and judgment to ensure that you post relevant comments to relevant blogs without appearing to be spamming or openly attempting to divert web traffic. Many blog owners only approve blog comments which are within the theme and context of their blogs. Some of the high traffic blogs where you can post comments include:

• MLB Blog Expert
• Business Opportunities
• MLM Blog Network
. Multi-Leveler
• Kim Klaver Blogs

Podcast Submissions

Podcast submission simply involves recording audio files and transcriptions such as MP3s and posting them in your website before submitting your web hyperlinks to podcast directories. Podcast submission is a unique yet effective tactic for driving traffic to your website. Free podcasts will provide you with the advantage of feeding your prospects with detailed and valuable information about your products and services. You can also submit your podcasts directly podcast directories such as

• Apple Podcasts
• AOL Podcasting
• Digg Podcasts
• Podcasting News
• Podcast Alley

When recording your podcast, be clear and straight to the point to ensure that you deliver your message to interested listeners within the shortest time possible. If you do not trust your own voice or accent go a step further and hire transcription experts to help you deliver you message with brevity and clarity.

Securing Rental Properties from Stubborn Tenants

As a landlord, one of your prime objectives is to ensure that your tenants submit rent in good time and take good care of your rental properties. However, more often than not, you will find yourself embroiled in prolonged disputes with your tenants due to misuse of your rental housing units. Moreover, you will also encounter tenants who will want to be pursued every month before they submit their monthly rent arrears. Therefore, you stand a better chance to limit or even eliminate such painstaking and time consuming experiences if you adopt preventive measures. One of the most effective ways of avoiding future disputes with your tenants involves thorough screening of prospective tenants. Indeed, thorough screening of prospective tenants is a cautionary action that aims at ensuring that you let out your rental properties only to responsible, honest and trustworthy tenants. Some of the key instruments that you can utilize to screen your prospective tenants includes use of Legal forms such as rental application forms and rental Agreement forms.

Use of rental application forms

Rental application form is a very reliable instrument that you can use to screen your future tenants. Rental application forms represent some sort of interview in which applicants for rental houses reveal detailed information about themselves. You can then use the details provided by the prospective tenants in the Rental application forms to investigate the validity of the information provided. Some of the main details that you may require applicants to reveal in the rental application forms include: marital status, size of the tenant’s family, current and former landlords, current occupation of the tenants, reasons for moving houses, and amount of rent payable to the current landlord. Your rental application forms should also prompt the applicants to provide information about their income and employment status, credit history as well as information about bankruptcies and past evictions. You should also request the applicants to validate their information by appending relevant referees and the contact details of the referees. In fact, you will find credit reports to be very convenient in ascertaining the abilities of your respective tenants to pay rent because they provide candid histories of individual concerning punctuality in paying rent and other bills as well as past bankruptcies and evictions. This approach of digging out current and historical information about applicants will facilitate your desire to house responsible and cooperative tenants.

Signing of rental agreements

Once you approve the rental application request of a future tenant, the next important step that you must undertake is signing of a rental agreement that clearly spells out to the tenant the terms and conditions for renting your property. The Rental Agreement should be signed before the tenant occupies your rental property. Signing of Rental Agreement is a legal way of committing your prospective tenants to comply with your prescribed conditions for renting your property, failure of which they risk legal action being taken against them. Some of the key details that should be contained in a Rental Agreement include:

• Total rent payable per month;
• Security deposit payable before a tenant occupies your house;
• Terms and conditions for refunding security deposit when the tenant vacates the property;
• Clear statement as to who will be responsible for paying different bills such as electricity and water bill;
• Terms and conditions for using additional facilities such as car park
• Visiting hours
• Clear statement as to who will be responsible for different types of repairs and maintenance of the house.

It is always important to remember that all your actions as a landlord are limited within the stipulated state laws of your respective state. You must endeavor to avoid contravening state specific laws due to the fact that different states in the US have different laws that govern landlord-tenant relationships. You can avoid contravening state laws by employing the use of Landlord forms or real estate forms that have been designed by experts. There are some sites which offer Free rental application forms online.

Website Marketing Strategies

Introduction

As a website owner, you must always keep in mind that successful completion of website building usually marks the beginning of the real battle rather than the end. Your website will become relevant only once you make it easily accessible to your target audience as much as possible. Therefore, once you complete designing and building your website, you should initiate appropriate website marketing strategies in order to increase traffic to the website and achieve the objectives for which you created the website. Just like any other marketing activities, website marketing is a procedural initiative that involves a combination of different elements of the marketing strategies. You can achieve effective website marketing through different strategic approaches designed to ensure that your website ranks high among the major internet search engines such as Google, Yahoo, MSN, AOL and Alta Vista.

Fundamentals of Website Marketing

In today’s globalized world, websites represent the most visible face of your organizational or individual initiatives. The question of how you manage the communications and awareness program is therefore a fundamental part of your strategic website marketing task. In deciding how best to achieve this, you need to come to terms with a variety of issues, including the question of how to integrate your communications program with different aspects of routine marketing strategies in order to attain the highest level of synergy. Therefore, as you develop your website marketing strategy, you need to take account of the following key aspects:

• nature of target audience;
• long-term and short term website marketing objectives;
• composition of the message to be relayed;
• communication channels;
• budget priorities;

Nature of Target audience

Determining the target audience of your website marketing plans marks the starting point of communicating your website products and/or services to the right people. You should always avoid haphazard website marketing activities that have not been fine tuned to suit the needs of your particular audience because such initiatives usually achieve very little impact. Therefore, you need to think critically about the ways in which to categorize your target audiences and subsequently, the manner in which you will tailor your message to match the needs of each of your target groups. You may categorize the target audience of your website products or services in different ways that may include: current and potential users of your website; the needs of your target audience; the role of your target audience in the buying process of your services or products; levels of knowledge of your target audience; levels of loyalty among your target audience; and the perceptions of your target audience on the existing websites. It is only against such well informed background that you can make decisions on what to what to say, how to say it, when to say it, when to say it, where to say it and whom to say it in the process of website marketing.

Setting Marketing Objectives

After you identify your target audience, the next step involves setting your communication objectives. Your website marketing objectives may revolve around cognitive, affective or behavioral responses that your campaign is designed to achieve. As a matter of fact, you might be aiming at putting something into minds of your website visitors, change the attitude of your website visitors or encourage your website visitors to behave in a particular way. Basically, you should strive to create a ‘learn-feel-do process’ in which a visitor discovers something in general terms about a website, browses further for a more detailed understanding and finally takes action in the form of trying the products offered by the website and subsequently become a regular user.

Composing the Target Message

After developing a satisfactory understanding of the response that you intend to achieve in your website marketing campaign, you can then begin focusing on the design of your message. The key aspects that you should consider while developing the message for your website marketing include: the content of the message; the structure of the message; the format of the message; and the channels of delivering your message. By so doing, you will simply be deciding upon what to say, how to say it logically, whether to say it symbolically or emotionally and where to say it from. In designing your message, you may choose to use either rational appeal or emotional appeal to convince your target audience to visit your website. In the rational appeal approach, you may state to your target audience that by visiting your website, they will gain distinct and tangible benefits. On the other hand, the emotional appeals approach may take the form of positive emotional appeals or negative emotional appeals. While utilizing a positive emotional appeal, you need to set out a message that associates your website with especially favorable image that emphasizes on issues such as sophistication and uniqueness of the website’s content. For example, if you are marketing a health and wellness website, you need to design a message that highlights to your target audience why they may achieve perfect body health conditions within the shortest time when they visit your website. A negative emotional approach would require that you format messages that may create feelings of guilt, shame or fear, among your target audience. Your message should be structured in such a way that members of your target audience may feel shameful, fearful or guilty if they fail to visit your website. For example, if you are marketing a health and wellness website, you need to design a message that highlights to your target audience why they risk experiencing health complications such as obesity if they fail to visit the website for unique health and wellness tips. However, you must ensure that your message does not sound like a threat if you design your message along the negative emotional appeal approach. Moreover, irrespective of whether the appeal is positive or negative, you must identify a unique website marketing proposition that your campaign is designed to rest upon.

Selecting Communication Channels

For your message to reach your target market, you must select appropriate communication channels that match the content of your website and the target audience. You need to select the channels through which you will achieve contact and communication in the most effective way. Personal influence channels and non-personal influence channels are the two main types of channels that you can use ether interchangeably or as a combination. Personal influence channels further consist of advocate channels, expert channels and social channels. You may choose to utilize the advocate channels in situations where you intend to exploit your own marketing experience as an individual or the sales and marketing force who are employed by your company. Expert channels come in handy in situations where you may prefer to utilize the influence of those people whose views are seen to be independent and respected, as is usually the case with consumer groups and opinion leaders. When such expert channels comment on the value of your website to your target audience, then your website will definitely register overwhelming visits. Social channel is one of the most effective and widely used medium of website marketing. Your website stands a good chance of reaching wide and varying audiences through social networks that usually consist of friends, business associates, neighbors and reference groups. If you decide to use non-personal influence channels, you will have to employ the use mass media such as online eZines, magazines and PR organizations. However, you must always bear in mind that although non-personal influence media have the advantage of reaching large audiences, they lack personal element, with the risk of the message being ignored or misinterpreted by the recipients. It would therefore be worthwhile if you combined both personal influence channels and non-personal influence channels to achieve optimum website marketing results.

Setting Budget Priorities

Like any other form of product or service marketing, website marketing is an activity that involves recurring advertising expenses. It is therefore very important to base your website marketing activities within budgetary limits according to the size of your business or organization. You may choose to set your communications budget through an affordable approach, competitive parity or a percentage of sales technique. The affordable approach allows you to set your website advertising budget on the basis of what you can achieve as an individual or as an organization. The competitive parity technique allows you to set your website marketing budget at a level that matches the advertising outlay of your competitor. You can also base the setting your budget on the forecast percentage of sales or profits to be generated by your website in the period covered by the appropriation.

Conclusion

Website marketing is indeed a full cycle activity that requires carefully crafted procedural approach. Your prospects of achieving success in attracting increased number of visitors to your website will always be determined by your ability to achieve successful combination of the different fundamental aspects of website marketing. You should always endeavor to implement each and every detail of your website marketing plans with appropriate skills and sound commitment. The more you create awareness about your website the more you stand the chances to achieve greater sales conversions for your products or services.

Business Letters: Adopting the Conversational Writing Style

Primary among a letter’s objectives is the immediate need to communicate. This goal is the one that moves us to write the letter in the first place. Perhaps we write a business letter to make certain queries, make debt reminders or merely communicate routine information to our recipients. Because people relate to people, you should make sure your business letters sound human for optimum public relations results such that your words create the effect of a polite conversation. However this does not mean that you should write exactly as you would talk to your audience face to face. Writing demands more correctness of language with the words you use coming from your speaking vocabulary. The tone of your writing should consequently simulate a friendly conversation. Such writing produces warmth that is appealing and motivating to your target audience. Always remember that the language that communicates best is the language that is characterized by familiar words.

One of the most important methods of achieving a conversational tone when writing a business letter is by avoiding being too formal. Writing a conversational business letter is not easy because we tend to stiffen up and sound too formal whenever we write. Instead of being the warm and friendly people we are supposed to be, we end up being cold and stilted. The end result is the creation of an impression of your business organization as a cold and formal institution rather than that of a group of friendly folk doing business.

It is also important to avoid the language of business. Added to our natural difficulty in writing conversationally is an inherited tradition of stiff unnatural writing style that was pioneered by early business writers. They borrowed heavily from legal language of the courts and the flowery expressions of the aristocracy and developed a style of writing that came to be known as the language of business. It was a highly stereotyped, detached manner of communicating that had little of the warmth that is so essential for friendly human communications. Typifying this manner of writing were expressions such as these:
We beg to advice
In compliance with yours date of even date
Yours esteemed favor at hand
Said matter
In due coarse
Deem it advisable
Thanking you in advance

This style of writing business letters reached its peak in the late 1800s and remained very much with us in the early 20th century. In fact, the classic letter writing guide, Pitman’s mercantile Correspondence that was a popular reference during that period, is filled with such expressions. Illustrating this manner of word choice is the following example:

Gentlemen,
We have to thank you for yours of 28th inst…enclosing check for $95.12 in payment of our invoice of 17th inst. Formal receipt enclosed herewith. Trusting we will be favored with your further orders.
We are gentlemen.
Yours faithfully,

Fortunately, the old language of business no longer receives authoritative support. In fact, it has been under relentless attack by writing authorities for the last half century. That these efforts have been effective is unmistakably clear, for rarely do we see letters like Pitman’s example in today’s business. As we would expect however, even half a century of effort is not enough to change business people’s habits. There are many writers today who still end their letters with “Thanking you in advance, I remain…,” “Trusting that you understand my position,” and the like. There are also other outcroppings of bromides like “enclosed please find,” “We wish to thank,” “Permit me to say,” and “take the liberty.”

Conversational style of writing business letters can further be achieved by avoiding the use of rubber stamps. Rubber stamps are expressions that we usually use automatically in certain types of situations. They consist of a blend of carryovers from the language-of-business and the more recent expressions that we use without thought. However, because our filters have received them many times, such words give readers the feeling that they are being given routine treatment. Routine treatment is far less effective than special attention in creating good public relations. Perhaps the most widely used rubber stamp is the “thank you for your letter” variety of opening sentence. Sincere as its intent may be, its overuse tends to place it in the routine category, which is nowhere near the goodwill building effect that would result from words specially selected to fit the given situation. Also in the category is the “If I can be of further assistance, do not hesitate to call me” type of close. Other examples of modern-day rubber stamps are the following:

I am happy to be able to answer your letter
I have received your letter
This will acknowledge receipt of …
According to our records…
This is to inform you…
In accordance with your instructions

To eliminate these timeworn expressions as well as the more modern rubber stamps, you only need to write in the language of good conversation. The worn-out words and expressions are not part of your everyday vocabulary. If you use them at all, then definitely you acquired them from reading other people’s letters and not from your oral communication experience. So if you rely on your conversational vocabulary, you will automatically write in a style that will make a favorable impression on your reader. The differences between stilted and conversational writing styles are perhaps best described with contrasting illustrations.

Dull and Stiff Friendly and Conversational

This is to advise that we deem it a great Yes, you can certainly use the
pleasure to approve subject of your request equipment you asked about in
as per the letter of the 21st inst. your letter of 25th April.

Pursuant to this matter, I wish to state that These contract provisions are quite
the aforementioned provisions are unmistakably clear on this point.
clear.

This will acknowledge receipt of your June 15 Four dozen hunt Slakes should
for 4 dozen Hunt slacks. Please be advised that reach your store by May 30.
they will be shipped in accordance with your As you instructed, they will
Instructions by Green Arrow Motor Freight on shipped by Green Arrow Motor
May 30. Freight.

Thanking you in advance… I sincerely appreciate…

Herewith enclosed please find… Enclosed is…

I deem it advisable… I suggest…

I herewith hand you… Here is…

Kindly advice at an early date… Please let me know soon…

The undersigned wishes to advise I have the contract
that the aforementioned contract is
at hand

I hope this meets with your approval I hope you approve

Submitted herewith is your notification Attached is notification of our
Of our compliance with subject standards compliance with the standards

As you read through the above examples, note their effects as they filter through your mind. Try to visualize the person who wrote each, and record your impressions of the company the writer represents. You should definitely detect marked differences which in turn demonstrate why it so important to avoid such unnecessary rubber stamps in order to achieve effective business communication objectives.