Information and Knowledge

Every business needs a Business Plan in my eyes. I feel that if you fail to plan you plan to fail. However, many people don’t know how to write a business plan. Business plans are somewhat simple to make it just depends on the purpose of your business plan.

Is your business plan an internal document or is it going to be used to get investors? If it’s an internal document the structure doesn’t matter. The main thing is that you can easily update it and do so frequently. You see, I believe a business plan should be a liquid document. What I mean is, the document is and should be always changing.

An interesting conversation was going on on Seesmic.com a week or so ago. A person posed the question: “Are Business Plans still necessary?”

I thought it was quite an interesting conversation, especially since this guy actually used to teach, at the University level, how to write a business plan to undergraduates and graduates.
Here is his video post: (click the Seesmic logo)

I would have shown you my video response but for some reason it is not working. The only one in the conversation that doesn’t work is mine, the one I want to show you! lol Basically I said the same thing as I did above. I think they are still needed but not in the traditional sense, unless you’re going for investors or loans. As an internal document, they can be whichever format you want.Here are some business plan resources for you:

• Believe it or not, the SBA has a lot of great information on business in general. I’d suggest checking it out. This link takes you directly to their how to write a business plan section: How to write a business plan

• This is a series of pre-written business plans from proven businesses. It’s less than ten bucks so might be worth checking out: pre-written business planspre-written business plans

• This book is written by a guy with a CPA and a Masters in Business. The book looks good and he seems to know his stuff. This guy would definitely know the inside secret to business plan writing. Click on the image to check it out:

• This book is written by two very well qualified individuals who have written many books about business, investing, planning, and more. Brian Hill and Dee Powers both have MBA’s and know what’s going on with Angel Investors and Venture Capitalists. The table of contents is impressive. I think I might have to get this one myself! Business Plan Basics

• This place is cool, they have A LOT of resources an sample business plans too! They’re in the UK but business is business no matter where it is. I urge you to check out this place: Sample Business Plans

If you need help or just want someone to check over your plan, please let me know. I’ve reviewed many business plans and may be able to give you some good constructive feedback.

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Whoever said MySpace was dead is DEAD WRONG!

What a bold big headline for a blog post! Especially from me, right? Well, that’s how strongly I feel about it. Normally when people say something is dead, they have something to either resurrect it or has something other than the dead thing. Most of the time it will cost you money.

Yes, it’s true. Normally someone says “This is dead. But if you buy this, I’ll show you how to make it better.” OR they say something like: “This is Dead! THAT is better and buy this so I can show you how to use THAT.”

I’ve heard the moaning and groaning about MySpace results on the marketing front, etc. Did you ever think you may be doing something wrong?

YESTERDAY, a report came out from HitWise. It said that MySpace.com received 72.73 percent of the market share of U.S. visits in May 2008 among a custom category of 58 of the leading social networking websites. Here are their research results:

What does that mean to you? Well it means there’s a heck of a lot of people STILL on MySpace and using it. The average time people spend on MySpace is almost 30 minutes! Do you understand the magnitude of possibilities this brings?

No matter what your targeted market is, MySpace has the users there. If you’re not using MySpace in your marketing efforts, you’re crazy.

HitWise reports that the average time spent among all social networking websites was 27 minutes and 21 minutes, representing an increase of 71 percent compared to May 2007. Among the top five most visited websites, MyYearbook led with users spending an average of 30 minutes and 51 seconds on the website. Facebook experienced the largest growth in average time spent, increasing 56 percent in May 2008 to 20 minutes and 21 seconds from 13 and 01 seconds in May 2007.

Do you see what I’m getting at here? Yes, there are many other social sites. I don’t discount any of them at all. Some may be more valuable to your targeted market than others. What I’m saying is, do not discount MySpace from what you hear from others. If someone’s complaining about their results they need to change things up a bit. Hell, do you see door to door encyclopedia salesmen any more? No, they changed with the times!

One of the most interesting things out of this report from HitWise is the New and Returning section. This is the reason why MySpace is big. They received 95% of their visits from returning visitors. This means only 5% of the visits were new users. This could be looked at that they are not getting too many new people to the site. Well, with the amount of people already on MySpace, there’s no many who would be new. LOL!

If you are new to marketing on MySpace or need some help, I’d suggest you get the MySpace Cash Machine report. I have attached it to this blog post for you to download for free. Yes, I said it’s for free.

Click the link to download: MySpace Cash Machine