If you are starting a home business, it really helps to have
a concrete plan. In the context of creating a plan, you
will set goals that you plan to achieve at various
junctures. It may seem a simple thing if you only have
goals like ‘to be a millionaire’ or ‘to go to Europe on
vacation’, with the plan being just as general, such as
‘earn money for trip’. These may be good ‘ideas’ and you
may even achieve them both someday, but they are not really
goals or plans in the sense of mapping out what you need to
do to achieve them.

A real plan would list step-by-step what you need to do to
achieve your goals. For example, if the plan is to ‘begin
advertising campaigns’. What form(s) of advertising do you
have in mind? Where will you place your advertisement(s)?
What will you need to do to create your ads? How much does
it cost if you use an advertising service? Where can you see
‘track records’ of the success rate of using these
companies? There may be lots of little side trips here to
get to your target of placing your first ad. So you want to
list them out, and take one thing at a time, take action and
then move to the next step. If you can’t complete a step,
don’t use it as an excuse to wait. Make a note and try to
move to the next step.

One way to do this is ‘backward planning’ which is to put
the end result at the top and then detail all the steps you
will need to take to get there. This can really get
complicated with dependencies – for instance, in order to
get to Point C you have to accomplish Point A and B first.

Example would be Point C is placing an ad with a paid
advertising service, but before you can actually do this,
you must accomplish Point A which is that you have to create
the ad. In order to do this, you may have to do some
research to get ideas about what to say and how best to say
it. So accomplishing Point A may involve doing research
online, reading a book about creative writing, or finding a
list of ‘power words’ and then using them in different
ways until you find the one that really sounds compelling to
you.

You may even take this a step further and do some
‘split-testing’ which would be to create two ads that are
different (for example different title and/or different
text, length etc.), and run them both to see which one
converts best. Then take the best one and submit it to the
paid advertising service. Point A is accomplished as far as
you can take it at this time, because now it is on to Point
B, which is that you have to wait for payday so you have the
money to pay for the ad service. That’s easy, however if
you need to create a budget at this point, you better do it
so you can meet all your obligations as well as afford to
promote your business.

An important thing to remember is to keep your goals
achievable. If you are an unrealistic ‘dreamer’ it is
likely you will not only miss the mark to achieve your
goals, but you will be disappointed and feel like a failure.
For example with the goal of ‘becoming a millionaire’ –
doesn’t it seem more logical to think in terms of earning
$100 or $1000 first? If you can do that, then you can
probably ‘wash, rinse and repeat’ to eventually figure out
how to get $10,000 – then $100,000 and finally,
$100,000,000!