You’re a blogger, granted, but you’re also, in many ways, an entrepreneur. You are starting with an idea that might one day develop into a business. Without a proper business plan, you lose more opportunities to grow your blog in parallel with your business plan’s objectives. If you’re not thinking on these terms, you will find it doubly hard when it’s time to start monetizing your blog.
A Business Plan Gives You The Right Mindset
Thinking in terms of a business puts you in the right mindset. You will approach uploading content as a means to an end, and not just to make your readers happy. Doing this will help you approach blogging from a business
perspective.
To achieve this mindset, open a notepad, name it Business Plan Draft, and document the following:
- Time invested in researching your target market
- The money which your invested time represents to you (calculate how much you would have earned in a regular job if you put in the same time)
Once you start thinking in terms of your time and efforts as investments, you’ll look for returns. This puts you in the business mindset.
A Business Plan Helps You Set Business Goals
You’ve come this far – you’ve attracted your target audience, you post content regularly and you have an email list. You have some idea of earning money out of your blog. Have you thought about the timeframe within
which you expect to be earning money? This depends on a set of tasks you must complete in order to get to the monetization level. By what timeframe do you expect to finish each task?
In your business plan draft, document the following business requirements:
- The timeframe by which you want your blog to be earning money, say, X number of months.
- The resources you want to make your blog professional – web designers, developers and content writers (if required).
- The time needed to design and code your site
- A professional hosting service for your website (if you’re using a free domain)
- The time needed to set up a merchant account
- Planning your monetization methods – products, services, testing and so on
- The timeframe by which you expect your blog to start making returns
- The time you’ll dedicate towards your blog every day
Don’t factor in the costs at this point. Compute the total time you estimate for all the activities you’ve listed for your site to start making money. The next step is to plan your cash flow.
A Business Plan Helps You Understand Your Cash Flow
With a business plan in place, you’ll have a better idea of your cash flow. You will need to make investments, which mean a loan or venture capital. Then you have to make enough money to justify the interests of your
lenders. Everything changes, including how the money comes in, what you spend it on, how you allocate budget for different headers and set the ROI expectation for each. A business plan also helps you understand how much
money you need to make over a period of time in order to break even and then be profitable. With a proper BP, you will be able to discover the challenges in front of your blog and the business aspects associated with your blog.
Document the following in your business plan draft:
- The total amount you’ll need to satisfy all your business requirements
- The amounts you’ll have to invest into designing, testing, launching and marketing your product.
- The amount you can invest from your resources
- The amount you need to borrow, plus interest on that
- The amount you’ll need to pay off by X amount of time
- The ROI you expect from your various business headers in order to break even
- The amount you’ll be left with for daily operations
A Business Plan Helps You Fine Tune Your Marketing Strategy
Once you have your requirements, goals and plans on paper, you’ll have to fine tune your business model and your marketing strategy to achieve your goals. Document the following:
- Zero investment marketing ideas such as content marketing, social media marketing, word of mouth,
- discussion forums and community.
- SEO techniques to obtain organic traffic
- Optimizing on-site conversion to optimize organic traffic
- Guest posting in exchange for a link to my site
A Business Plan Helps You Understand The Need For A Backup Plan
In the event that your business fails or does not take off, you need to be able to exit without impacting your blog negatively. Plan a proper exit strategy to save the investment you’ve put in. Some exit strategies to ponder are:
- selling your blog
- transitioning into a different monetization method in parallel