Once you've completed your first business plan, you may think you've created everything you need to get rolling. Think again! If you require more than a basic plan for a single mini-page with an eBook and some AdSense blocks, you'll need to create some other plans that are faster changing and job specific. Fortunately, they'll be shorter and cover just one topic.



Your action plan is the set of steps you need to get each phase of your product or service to the customer - from driving traffic to your offer to follow up after the sale. Think of all the steps that you need to sell an eBook:

- Product creation

- Hosting

- Downloading and protection of your download links

- Making a sales page, including capturing customer information, One Time Offers (OTO's), etc.

- Writing sales copy or outsourcing it.

- Graphics, including eBook covers, Web page illustrations and photos, "creative" for affiliate sellers, etc.

- Integrating a payment processor with your sales page

- All the other piddling steps I didn't include here...

You'll save yourself time and energy if you write out, in painful detail, each and every step you need to take. If you forget one, imagine the time, effort, and embarrassment and lost credibility you'll suffer if you do! If you have an effective checklist of steps, you can begin to consider outsourcing more and more of your chores to other people, freeing up your time to devote to planning your next strategy.

If you have more than a few articles on an article directory to hawk your wares, you could benefit from having an advertising plan, complete with a budget. If you do any offline advertising, an advertising plan is a must! Ad spending is one of the most expensive parts of doing business. The tighter the controls on your costs, the more money you put in your pocket.

Your marketing plan will include your Joint Ventures, affiliate programs, a reference to your advertising campaigns, article marketing program, SEO efforts, viral messages, social networking - in short, anything and everything you do to get the message out that you are in business to make a profit!

Then there's the plan for your ultimate leverage - networking with your peers. Never leave this to chance. If your contact list for other marketers is mixed in with the rest of your email addresses in your address book, you need to get serious about defining and detailing all you know about your fellow Internet Marketers.

Take the trouble to note important dates in their lives - birthdays, anniversaries, landmark dates in their business careers, etc. Internet Marketing can be lonely and lead to social isolation. If you stand out as a person who makes a real connection with such a person, even if you never meet face to face, you'll create a bond that goes beyond a greedy need for a JV deal. You'll make a friend for life.

As you can see, the need for each of these plans depends entirely on how complex and far-ranging your business is now, and will become in the future. The more carefully defined your chores and duties are, the simpler it will be to pass along this work to an employee, Virtual Assistant or partner.

Even if you have no dreams of establishing an empire of Virtual Real Estate, you'll still need to plan out and describe every step you take online - even if it's only to explain to your mother-in-law why you're not just a do-nothing who sits in front of a computer all day!