Erik’s Blog: Board Shorts and Business Suits

A lot of people, and I’m guilty as well, are jumping into the internet without a business plan in mind. They go in and even though they may claim to be an entrepreneur for sake of building clout with others like them (guilty again) they aren’t really building towards anything. They’re cloaking a hobby with words like entrepreneur, business person, start-up, mogul. Most phizzle off because they don’t have a good outlook for their business.

One of the biggest lessons I’ve learned in trying to become an Entrepreneur is to have an outlook for the business you are trying to create. You may not have a set plan, and for those of you who can’t even plan what’s for dinner the next night those words will be like music to your ears.

But you need to a plan for the next month, 3 months, 6 months, 1 year, and then a long term outlook. Of course these can change as you go along. There’s nothing wrong with having a fluid business outlook. You just need to keep to what you write. You need to stick to your plan as best you can.

As an example I’ll apply it to Blogtown Press:

1 month: Work on On-Site Search Engine Optimization and continue to get as many inbound links from directories as possible. (Or as time will allow). Build the internal workings of each page and have a sound backbone for search engines to find the information they’re looking for.

3 month: Continue to build the archives on all the blogs, and launch several new blogs. Within 3 months I see the Blogtown Press Blog Network consisting of at least 20 blogs. As they grow I will continue to try out new writers and possibly have several more writers working of Blogtown Press.

6 month: Although this depends on Google, work on all the factors that increase PageRank and try to achieve a page rank of 5 on at least 8 blogs. Having Page Rank will allow me to have more authority within the blogging community and especially look better for advertisers and increase my traffic. By slowly establishing Blogtown Press, at 6 months from now, I will become more of an authority on the subjects our blogs focus on.

1 year: Have a network of sites focused on Blogtown Press that brings in $5000 a month earnings. This is a bit lofty but you have to shoot for the stars. I say a network of sites because I am thinking about launching a forum shortly. I see Blogtown Press and it’s partners bringing in several network sponsors where I don’t have to go through intermediaries like Google and TLA (although I still love you guys). I would also like to be providing several writers with full-time gigs making several $100 a month.

From this business outlook I can now list at least 10 things I need to do to get me to each of those milestones.

Now you do a business outlook.