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How do you write a business plan for your affiliate marketing business? Perhaps you can share with me a sample of an affiliate marketing business plan?
Thanks
mission statement: what products will you sell. You can add new products to your statement.
marketing plan: buy ads, contact with affiliat managers...
revenue goals: just for fun or $100/day or $1000 per day...
But for affiliate marketing plans, think hard about who are your real 'customers'. Here's a suggestion: the people surfing your sites are not your customers -- the companies who pay you are your real customers.
Seriously, though, I think very few affiliate marketers see a need to write a business plan. Most of us are amateurs when it comes to business, are totally self-funded, and don't have much of a plan.
Even though we are usually self funded, if nothing else a business plan helps us to set goals. I find that when I set goals for my business (average $5/day from site widgets.com) that no matter how arbitrary my goal may be, I usually end up reaching it. And nothing has helped me more to focus on setting goals than writing a business plan.
I fail to see what's the point of creating a "Business Plan" per se, although setting goals like "$300/day in 3 months" and then setting a specific action steps to _try_ and accomplish that seems more actionable and much more practical to us.
IMHO.
hire somebody to write it for you.
Yea... if you're writing a business plan to submit to a bank or some other source of funding, then professional help is good.
But if you're doing it for yourself.. then write it yourself too.
AG
2. Setup webpage method
- Using static page or CMS such as Mambo
3. Find contents to insert to webpage
- Search related keywords
- Place keywords to Meta Tag Area, Contents, image ALT.etc.
4. Promotion Method
- Pay per click
- Search Engine Submission
- Linking Request
- Buy Banner Position
- Target Email
- Post articles to Forum or Guestbook
5. Value Added in Content
- Set a forum
- Provide Free Download(Tell Your Friend Features)
- Provide Free Course or tips(Tell Your Friend Features)
Finally I think that product is very important. So I need spend a lot of time to choose products.
Maybe I have some wrong. Please give me comments.
Kitty
It doesn't matter what you are doing.
Maybe it is not a plan
How can I plan?
Failing to plan is planning to fail.
True, True.
I like not having a plan.
For Anything, Ever
Ska
Why don't you like to plan?
Need we write a business plan for our affiliate website?
Thanks
Kitty
If you want it go to go as well as possible I would write up a plan.
Remember that business plans are never set in stone. You will need to make changes throughout the life of your site.
Good luck with your site :)
1) Think of a general market or idea that interests me
2) Resolve to make a plan by which I make loads of cash
3) Procrastinate until I get a new idea
voila
Anybody else have about 10 half-built sites sitting around making absolutely nothing?
Strange how the ideas seem so awesome at conception, but then fall from favor and eventually sound lousy within a month or two.
however, i've also seen arguments for quality content and originality drawing repeat visitors.
so now i've designed the site, my plan is:
1. write 20 original articles within the next month.
2. now that i have some content, start trying to exchange links with the big authority sites on that content and submit to the pickier directories.
3. keep writing articles.
4. after decent traffic shows up, apply to some programs and start placing cpl ads.
5. keep writing articles.
6. reassess seo.
7. aim to have 300 original articles within a year.
doable?
maybe.
if i don't aim high, then i certainly won't get there, but i'm hoping for a site that will keep people interested, and that they'll remember as an authority site when they want that sort of information.
tallis
Hi Ska,
Why don't you like to plan?
It's not that I don't like to plan, its just a case of things change so rapidly I don't see the point in planning. Sure, I have a rough idea of what I want to achieve but thats in my head. Sites and missions veer off in all direction from step one so I think it is better to go with the flow and adapt to situations as they arise rather than disappointing yourself when your hard thought out plan crashes even before you have bought your domain.
Maybe I am just lazy ;oP
I don't rely on income from my sites yet so if things go wrong i just move on.
Ska
... but how about financial planning? You can create the best sites in the world, but your biz will fail quickly if you don't watch the money flow.
As they say: "Follow the money"
On the other hand, we need consider timing problem.
In fact, many affiliate marketer can create their website.
We spend a lot of time to finding product, web design, marketing and testing,etc.
Maybe we need consider " Timing Planning" too.
Kitty
If you have a good idea, that's a start.
If you do something with that good idea (i.e. build a site), that's better.
If you make more money on traffic than you spend getting it to your site, then you've won.
Web hosting is a few bucks; ROI is easily calculated with the minor fixed costs. The only unknowns are the opportunity cost of your time (or not?) and the 64 million dollar question: will the site work?
And at the end of the day, all the planning in the world doesn't mean a thing unless you've actually done. It seems rather futile to try to determine what the SERPs are going to do. And it's likewise (in my experience) almost impossible to gauge with any kind of accuracy how expensive PPC is going to be or what your CTR/conversions are going to be like, until you've actually got the site running.
I'm afraid I'm guilty of spending too much time analyzing and calculating numbers which at the end of the day mean little or nothing due to the ridiculous number of unknowns in the equation.
Statistically, how many hundreds or thousands of dollars does it make sense to burn on PPC before you accept that your site simply isn't going to work in its current state?
Coming from both sides of the business (I'm a certified geek with a business, marketing and product evangelism background, founded a dozen real businesses, sold 6, put one in bankruptcy, etc..), I've played both sides of this. Here's some quick bullets:
1) The folks who mentioned building a business plan specifically for raising capital from VC/Angel/Friends and Family/banks, etc...: that's a specific type of business plan. Important in many ways, and Essential/necessary if you go get "real" money.
2) A subset of that would be an Executive Summary, where you take the essentials of the plan, boil them down to 3-5 pages (we actually have a one-page version we used to raise $2.3 million). This is really a sweet version to work with, because ANYONE can read the thing in 5-10 minutes, and it covers the exciting stuff, the size of the market, the opportunity, the technology, the players, the near-term possibilities, and the exitpath.
And Affiliate marketing plan could be built from a templete like this and have a lot of the 30,000 foot perspective and yet enough meat to make it look and feel like a "real" business. And sometimes, especially when you're growing this thing and it's still not making much money, having a tangible, credible plan, even if it's 3 pages, can make a big credibility difference to your father-in-law... and your spouse.
3) An Action Plan, or Tactical plan breaks down the individual items necessary to make this business rock, and gives you a guideline on what to do each day.
This last one is the "formula". This is the insider stuff. And this plan gets refined and turned upside down weekly as you see the business taking shape, and its needs morph on you. But it's critical in my book, to organizing and acting effectively. It's the difference between a 2-5 hour a day commitment, and 10-15 hours a day slaving over a hot keyboard.
So... they're ALL important, but in the case of most of the Affiliate marketers I've spoken with working to build real businesses, the last 2 hold the most intrinsic value ("what's my dream business look like in the real world, and what steps do I take to get there?").
Keep at it! I decided on the last site to become the product supplier and see how that works. So I developed a software for idea generation and sharing those ideas, and am using a number of different "creative" channels to get the message out there. It's at ~$90 a day after 8 weeks, but it's just now getting into the market. We've done everything wrong possible with the site and the user experience, and am thankful that the market is somewhat resiliant.
Keep me posted, and isn't this a phenomenal resource to have (WebmasterWorld?). Imagine life without it...
No, forget I said that...
best,
ME
[edited by: tedster at 7:10 am (utc) on June 28, 2005]
