Planning your affiliate marketing business

[its_me_shaners]

Hey Ros !!
I was hoping you might be able to shed a little light on a topic im curious about, that I have never seen discussed.
Its business planning. Im sure some will find this a completely dry concept and wont do it. To their detriment I'm afraid. Im a part owner in a family business. Monthly we sit and discuss business planning, the marketing plan and the ad budget amongst other business type or related concerns. Maybe i'm a geek but I do like these things, maybe its because we do it at a restaurant and dad floats the bill for my beer and chicken wings. Hahahaha ok seriously though. This is an integral part of our success with our business having a plan and goals and targets to meet each month, actually weekly. You know income, sales, billable hours , non billable hours, expenses.... etc etc etc.
You're a successful marketer and i'm sure you have a plan, (its a 100 billion$ market). Do you have a business plan, marketing plan, ad budget. Goals etc etc.
How much time do you spend with planning, research. How do you do it?Would you recommend this to other would be marketers out there.
How much importance do you place on goals and target attainment. Im pretty sure you're not a "lazy marketer".
Thanks in advance
shane!!

[boysbach]

Hi Shane we run a offline and online business and we have run an offline business since 1986 and we always have business meetings to talk about where the business is going and everything else. As an accountant I always see it important to do budgets etc and the great thing is having the business meetings in a nice expensive restaurant because in the UK the bill is totally tax deductible.

[richerbrat]

Shane - Business Plan Pro is the most popular business planning software. But - filling it out takes longer than writing a book, so unless you want to borrow money from the bank - do your planning in a way that suits you.

I work backwards. For example - I start with a goal I want to achieve over the next year - say it is $100,000 dollars turnover. Next work out how you are going to achieve that goal - who is your target market etc - costs of achieving each sale and profits per sale.

Once you have done all this, you can move onto your marketing plan. Basically - the simpler you keep it the better. If your average sale is $50, and you want to achieve sales of $50,000 - you need a thousand sales. Break that down into smaller amounts of time of months or weeks and you know what you need to do to achieve your target.

Next, suppose you have ten proven ways of marketing your business - you need to start studying your results from those to see how much business you get from each - eg. if you are aiming to get 10% of your sales from mailing out postcards and 150 postcards brings you one sale - you will need to mail out 15000 postcards per year.

I hope this is clear. It is a bit complicated at first - especially if you haven't been monitoring the results of your marketing but it will get easier.