If you are serious about the success of your online business then you need to find ways to give yourself every advantage you can over your competition. Writing a business plan for your company can be a crucial step in getting your profits to where you want them to be.

I. It is one of the best ways to motivate yourself and plan how to drive your business to the next level.
2. In case your business is just an idea in your head for a long time, writing a plan will materialize it.

A business plan can serve a couple of main purpose

In terms of revenues if you have to reach to a bank for the money, the plans that has already sorted out the investment you will need? And what is your contribution to it? Can be figured a head of time.

Briefly you need to know the following:

1. Your entire business plan
2. Description of your business
3. Your Markets Strategies
4. Competitive analysis of your market
5. Development of your plan
6. Managing your business
7. Finances of your business

Your entire business plan:

Your entire business plan should include the key points of the product and its benefits to your market and you. How much you think is the start up cost and how much profits your are expecting. A brief description of financial aspect. How do you see your company will operate as a result of working with this plan, in other wards the progress and achievements that you will see in your business. What have you done to start your business so far.

Description of Your business

This will include details about your product and your market. A plan of operation day to day activities to run the business. How will you manage all aspects of business doing it by yourself? Or you are expecting some help. How do you feel about your product.

Your marketing strategies

This part of your business plan includes your thoughts about marketing your product. Your target audience how will you market them. How will you introduce your product to them and when. What economical methods you are going to use for this on line plan.

Competitive Analysis of Your Market:

Here you will write about your competitors that your product will compete with. What are their strengths and weaknesses. An honest analysis is very important, so you may not see a set back in your business once launched. Alexa is a great place to look for that. This website will tell you about the amount of traffic your competitors are getting.

Developmental plan or Operational strategy:

Depending on the rest of the business plan in this section you figure out how to profit with your business from the very first day. How much sale your planning and advertising can grab depending how deliberately you planned your launch and how will your market react to your plans. This can also include making your operational schedule, planning your advertising before your product comes in the market and your product awareness.

Managing your business

This is the plan that is important for two reasons. In case you need more people to manage your business, this is where you introduce the team and their special contribution to your business. In case you have a lawyer or a consultants mention them here.

Finances of your business:

This is a very important part of your business plan. As after all a business is all about making money with it. The more profits you make the better it is. Now since you are only writing a business plan, you have to be very realistic and figure out your expenses before starting. Create statement forms and balance sheets for the capital investors. In case you do not need this only monthly income and monthly expense sheet is enough for you to figure out all the details of the business.

Once you have written your business plan you will be amazed you will be able to refer to it whenever you felt too involved in one aspect of the business or when you felt lost where to go from here. Writing a business plan can be a great way to see things in action. A business plan brings you closer to reality.
Makes you feel your goal is a reality to be working with your business soon.

So you have found that the Internet is a vast resource of templates for various business forms, including business plan templates. If you think you can use some of them and you are looking at downloading, take extra caution. You need to be sure that they will serve your particular purpose, especially if you are eying to use a business plan template. Not all businesses are the same, so you need to make sure that while you use the template, you should also customize templates enough so that they speak on your behalf, and communicates your identity and value proposition accurately.

To help you work on a business plan, it pays to know the major parts that business plans typically contain. A business plan is touted as the most crucial document that a business owner or entrepreneur will ever develop before he launches his business. The business plan sets the direction of the company, especially during its start-up years. It is also the document that investors look at when they are deciding whether or not to put their money in the business venture. As such, business plan templates should contain the structure of the company, its revenue and growth goals, as well as its future plans.

So what are the parts of an effective business plan?

The first section should contain the executive summary. Here, you sum up the important points of the entire business plan in such a way that it piques the interest of investors who don’t have the luxury of time to read through the entire document. The gist of the business plan should be laid out in a three- to five-minute read, underscoring the key issues and should not be more three pages. While it is presented first, the executive summary is prepared last, when the rest of the plan has been drafted.

The next section is a description of the business. The purpose of this section is to provide detailed information about the company, as well as the products or services that it plans to offer. This is also the place for putting your company’s mission statement and milestones.

The third section contains the market analysis, which aims to present the company or business venture in the light of the market situation. Here, you talk about how you position your company in the market landscape so that your readers will have a better understanding of the prospects of your business. Make sure to include a discussion of your industry, your target markets and your competition.

Next, your readers, especially the investors, need to know that the people who will lead the company can be trusted with their money. As such, the business plan has to have a section on the management team. In addition, investors also need to have an understanding of the process of your business. As such, your plan has to have a section on your operations, including your go-to-market strategies.

Investors also have to apprised of the risks that they will be taking if they do decide to put their money on your business venture. As such, have sections on critical risks and financial projections, where you describe in detail the risks that are avoidable and expected, as well as how these risks relate to your ROI projections.

Finally, the best business templates are those that have room for appendices. These appendices provide supporting documents to the claims that you made in the entire business plan. They come in handy once the investors have initially decided favorably, and would like to scrutinize the plan better before they sign on the dotted line.

A business plan is an indispensable tool for an entrepreneur and not only because of its importance to the fundraising process, but because of how it helps businesspeople crystallize their strategy and evaluate their process. These are the three major reasons to create a business plan if you are a hopeful entrepreneur.

Fundraising

Most literature on business planning focuses on the need for a plan to encourage external investment into the company, whether it is through loans or equity investment. Most funders will not consider putting money into a company without seeing a well-written, convincing business plan. An entrepreneur must make sure the plan speaks in terms the funders will understand, and meets their requirements for the qualifications of the management team, funding requested, and financial return.

Strengthening Strategy

When strategy is an amorphous concept, existing in the minds of the various company founders, it is loose and perhaps even contradictory. It also does not necessarily make use of the best research on the market, customers, and competitors. The process of creating a business plan requires the entrepreneurial team to go through this research and analysis systematically, creating a better foundation for strategy. Having to write down the strategy also creates an opportunity to make sure all of the founders are literally on the same page about what they intend to do. If they are not, fruitful discussions can be started which are better to get out of the way at this early stage while plans are still much more flexible.

Evaluating Progress

Finally, while the action plan outlined in the business plan is being implemented over the first months and years of operation, the business plan is both a guide and a means to see how well the results of the business stack up to the projections made early on. The pro forma financial statements can make this type of evaluation very easy. Make sure that the original pro formas are kept in spreadsheet format so that actual financials can be laid out alongside them. If your budgeted targets are saved in your accounting software, such as Quickbooks, this kind of comparison can be even easier and variances can be measured automatically.