Know Your Business Or Know You Will Fail

Too many times business owners get so wrapped up in their business that they forget about running it and end up failing miserably. They may be the best at what they do but if they lose track of any aspect of their business they can wind up playing catch-up or eventually simply giving up. The majority of new business owners get off to a good start based on a viable business plan, but once in the heat of the battle forget about the plan and learn the hard way that winging it is not going to make it work.

It is one thing for the plan to call to make a set dollar amount of sales every month, but if it does not specify how it will make that goal, the plan will fail. There is an old business saying that states failing to plan is planning to fail and in any business this is true. However, if the business owner cannot say on a daily basis where they are at in meeting that goal, they will not reach it.

For example, if the plan calls for $10,000 a month in sales and on the 15th of the month sales are only at $3,000 chances are they will miss their goal by $4,000 for the month. On the 15th it is too late to make up the other $4,000 for the month. Tracking the progress on a daily basis will make it easier to hit the numbers over the 30-day period. Knowing they have to do $340 in sales every day to hit the $10,000 mark if at the end of day one they are at $300, they have to take steps to add another $40 to the next day's business.

If sales exceed their expectation they cannot slack off and allow the extra on day one to cover any potential short fall on day two or three. They must still aim at the daily goal in order to insure they meet their planned monthly numbers. If they happen to go over the monthly goal for sales, they just need to remember that profit is not a dirty word.

On the flip side, while projecting daily sales they also must project daily expenses. For instance if they plan on expenses to be 30 percent of sales and sales meet the $340 per day, they can spend $102 on expenses. If sales for the day only hit $200, they are going to have to trim expenses to $60 in order to hit their planned profit numbers. In some businesses, expenses may have to be tracked by the hour to meet the goal for the day as waiting until the end of the day to find out the expenses exceeded the goal, meaning expenses from the next day will have to be cut.

With any new business, it may be difficult to forecast income and expenses on a daily basis, especially when the environment such as bad weather or supplier issues can influence the daily business. However, by staying on top of the business the owner can maintain better control over the profit potential.


Keith Walden is has worked in the home business industry for over 10 years. Visit his website, www.unlimited-profits.biz for the latest home business opportunities and resources.

Internet Marketing At Its Best

With the continued growth of the computer age, there is a whole new way of marketing a business. Especially for businesses who perform most of their transactions online. When reaching for online customers, internet marketing becomes the main target for your marketing efforts as it will attract the customers in your demographic – online users.

There are two distinct styles for online marketing, one is business marketing, the other is website marketing. With web site marketing the goal is to have people searching for particular services or products find your web site while conducting an online search through the major search engines. There are many facets involved in web site marketing and once a business is able to get them all clicking together, there is a good chance they will experience a major influx of new visitors to their web site.

One the other side are businesses that heavily promote their availability aimed at the internet users more so than the search engines. Buying internet advertisements, sending out emails and other promotional marketing materials that are designed to bring visitors to their online web sites, are just a few of the online marketing strategies being used today.

One of the things to remember with online marketing is to consider your home page as a billboard along the side of the road. If there is little traffic along the road, there will be few people who will see your billboard so your efforts should be focused on getting people on the right road. Looking at it from another perspective, there may be over a thousand people selling a certain brand of personal care items and they all have a web site, many provided free when they signed up and they all look alike and have the same enhancements.

If a person searches for the brand by name, there is no telling whose web site is going to pop up in the search results. If you own one of these thousands of sites, specific marketing will need to be done to guide that potential traffic to the site you own. To do this you can use pay-per-click advertising that you pay for based on the number of visitors who click through to your site.

Affiliate marketing is also a popular method of bringing visitors to your site. As a business, you agree to pay a certain percentage or dollar amount of a sale to another site, an affiliate, who drives the traffic to you. Essentially, you are gaining free advertising and only pay for it if your site makes a sale. While some link exchange programs have been successful in the past, having thousands of unrelated links to your site may turn search engines against you and lose your information from their engines and as a result from their results pages.


Keith Walden is a home based entrepreneur - visit his website, www.Unlimted-Profits.biz for the latest articles and resources on internet marketing strategies and affiliate marketing programs.