Your Business Plan

You can start your online writing business without bank loans but you still need a business plan. Even if your bank’s loan department does not need to see your plan, the success of your business depends on making it.

You need to have a vision of where you want your business to be at various points in the future. Once you have these goals you can measure your success by how close to them you are.

Forget airy-fairy cash flow forecasts. To be realistic you have no idea of how much your business is going to bring in. On the other hand you have only very limited costs, disregarding your time, so your financial risk is extremely low.

Your only outlay is for a domain name and hosting for that domain, $85 a year or less.

Do not, under any circumstances, sign up to any paid program at this early stage of your business. They just suck money out of your bank that you do not have. There will come a time after the first six months when you might profit from one or two of these, but in the initial six months just concentrate on building your website up, making contacts and learning.

Start thinking in terms of short, medium and long-term income streams.

Writing for upfront payment is short-term income. It is essential at times, but be wary about devoting all of your writing time to it.

Writing for InfoBarrel and similar article directories gives you recurring income from each article. Your own websites are another form of recurring medium-term income.

Your long-term income comes from building up your website visitor numbers to such a level that someone will offer to buy it from you. Think of each website you grow from scratch as an investment for the future.

Your targets for the first year will be more concrete than for two years and longer, but it is useful to have longer-term targets written down even if you modify them later.