Business Plan Outline - The 5 W's

Business plan outlines are all unique. The one common thread is that all business plan outlines help the business owner answer the five W questions: who, what, when, where and why.


If any of you ever worked in journalism or as reporters, then you know that what you want to do when you investigate anything is answer the 5 W's. A business plan outline is a concrete method for investigating a business idea, so answering the 5 W's just makes sense.

Business Plan Outline of the 5 W's

Who are you?
Your business plan outline should detail your certifications, industry experience, and credentials. List the business credential that you've already received or those that you're planning on getting in the early stages. This part of the business plan outline also lists the staff you project needing and what their qualifications will be.

What do you plan to sell?
In your business plan outline you need to include a discussion of what it is you are selling. Are you selling products, services or both? Once you know what you are selling you then need to discuss the revenue and profit associated with your products and/or services.

This part of the business plan outline also includes your preliminary sales and marketing plan. What will you be doing to gain your clients and how much time and money will you spend doing so?

When did you launch or when do you plan on launching?
 This information is critical to outside investors and it will also help to keep you on track.

Where are you located?
Here you will indicate the types of facilities needed to run your business. Will you work out of your home or rent office space?

Why is your approach unique?
This is a critical question that your business plan outline must address. You need to explain your number one differentiator. Somewhere in your business plan outline you must make space for detailing the proposition that sets you apart from everyone else in the market.


Business plan outlines help you structure your answers to the most important business planning questions. These questions can are summarized as the 5 W's. By answering these questions, your business plan outline will lead you to discover and detail the exact "how" of your overall business operations.


How To Write A Business Plan… Made Easy
The Help You Need With Writing Your Business Plan that is broken down so that anyone can do it. Find Out More...

Four Steps to More Blog Traffic and Increased Sales

If you own an online store you  probably already know that a blog is a very important source to promote your product or service. They are easy to install, administer and update, plus, search engines love them. Really though, what  good is a blog without traffic? It doesn't matter how amazing your blog is if no one is reading it. Here are five quick ways to boost traffic to your blog and hopefully start seeing those big sales for your business.


1.Build a list of blog services to ping every time you post new content.

There are a lot of different services and sites that you can use to ping your blog. If you didn't know, pinging means that you notify the service that you've updated your blog with new content. These services then list your new posts and you get the traffic from them. The more services that you use the better chance you will have of receiving the traffic that you are looking for. I've made a list of blog pinging services you can copy by clicking the link. That should be enough to give a nice boost to your traffic if you keep your site updated frequently.

2.Update your content regulary!

Both search engines and blog  ping services love, love, love regular updates! It's very likely that you will get targeted traffic from search engines if you update your blog regularly. You should try to make a new post to your blog at least once per day if possible. Be careful though because too many updates per day, say eight or more, can harm your search engine position and hits from traffic.

3.Post in forums

Post in forums, but do not spam them! Post something useful and interesting with a link to your blog in your signature. Don't just post  your messages in any forum, if you're selling cds, post in forums that are about music. Don't post in pet forums if you're selling beauty products. That will definetely get you tagged as a spammer and you don't want that. By posting your messages with a link in your signature in forums you will get one-way links back to your site. These are good for search engine position on sites like google, msn and yahoo.

4.Submit to blog search engines

There are tons of search engines available that list only blogs. Just google search  "blog search engines“ and you will find a nice lengthy list of them. These blog search engines will help you to receive targeted traffic. Be sure to write a  very good title and description for your blog when you submit your information to the site so that people will easily find it and want to click on your link.

Follow these four simple steps and you will begin to see an increase in traffic to your blog. Soon those long awaited sales will start coming in and adding up. Don't forget to update your blog with fresh, unused content that you write yourself everyday to acheive the best results.

How to Add Your Signature to Your Post in Blogger

I almost always forget to add my signature to the ends of my post. I have a signature and I think it is a very nice signature but it always slips my mind when I finish writing a post. I knew that there was a way to have your signature automatically load after each post but I just kept forgetting. So, anyway, here's a little guide on making a signature for your blog and where to put it so that it always shows up on each of your post.

First of all, you need a signature. The easiest thing to do is to go to Live Signature. You can design your signature from their selection of fonts, slants and colors. Make the signature that you want and then save it to your photobucket accout. If you have a different image that you would like to use for your signature you can save that to your photobucket account too.
You need the html code for the image that you will be using. You can copy the html for your live signature after you create it if you do not have a photobucket account. I recommend saving the file to your own account so that you will not have to worry about anything.
Back to the image, if it's in photo bucket you just need to copy the html code. Now you need to go to your blogger dashboard and click on settings, then formating. Scroll down to the end where it says, "Post Template." This is where you need to paste the html code that you copied. Now save it and that's it. Now every time you go to post your signature will already be loaded in the window where you type.

How to Make a Custom Cursor for Your Blog

A custom cursor is a nice little added touch to your website. You can use a flower, cat, hippo, letter - whatever matches your site. If you don't want to go quiet so custom as to turn your cursor into an animal or a car you can always just change the color or the size of the arrow that people will use when visiting your site. This is another easy little html change to personalize and customize your blog so you can stand out among others. Below you will find the style sheet that you need to change your cursor.



-->

You will need to add this style sheet to the head section near the top of your html file for your blog.

See where it says "my cursor.cur" that is where you will need to put the url of your new cursor. A cursor needs to be saved as a .cur or .ani file so you will need to save it online somewhere. Again, I used Bravehost.com just like I did when I saved my favicon. If you did not read, "How to make a favicon," Click it now and read how to set up an account so that you can save your new cursor image.

You can download a free icon maker from CNET.com or Just look in the Windows->Cursor directory using File Explorer on your computer for a collection of premade cursors. The easiest thing to do is go to http://www.totallyfreecursors.com/ and download a cursor or you can always do a google search and find tons of them.

Once you have your cursor picked out and saved online you will need to right click and "copy shortcut" when you put your cursor over the file for the new cursor because you can't open it since it's a cursor file.

I think that makes since. Feel free to email me if you have any questions.

How to Make a Favicon for Your Blogger Blog

I decided to add a cute little favicon to my web page. As with the other HTML aspects I have added to my page it took more than a few tries to get it right. I decided it was time to write another HTML lesson to help you guys out if you've been wanting to add a favicon but didn't know how to. Having a favicon for your blog isn't just cute. It will definetly make your blog stand out among others. A lot of people don't have them and don't know how to put one on their page. This is good for us because our sites will stand out in a list of bookmarked sites. It will also help to keep 404 errors out of your log because the favicon can't be found.

I've found that there is a problem if you are using Blogger though. There is no way to upload files and images in Blogger. To solve this problem you will need to make a free webpage in order to have somewhere to upload your files to. I like to use Bravenet web hosting. I just set up my free website with the same name as my blog. This is very useful because now you can make additional pages to link to from your blog if you ever need them and you can upload images and files that you need but are unable to upload to Bogger. Once you register your new site you do not have to actually set up the webpage since you are only using this new site for storage.

In order to make your favicon the first thing you need to do is get yoursef an image. There are a few different ways to do this. A favicon is a 16x16 image. You can crop a tiny piece of an image using Photobucket or Flickr or you can go to, http://www.favicon.co.uk/gallery.php and save one of the favicons featured on the site. You can also use an image no larger than 150px or a small icon. Another option is to download a free icon maker program from cnet.com. Once you have your image go to http://tools.dynamicdrive.com/favicon/ and upload whatever image you want to use as your favicon. Once you click on "create" you will need to download your image to your computer. It will be saved as a .ico file.

Now you will need to use your new free webpage that you set up. Log into bravehost.com and click on the name of your website located under "free website" in the "Web Hosting Section." Next you will click on, "File Manager." Click on, "Upload File" and find the favicon image that you saved to your computer as a .ico type file. Once the file is uploaded simply copy the url where it is located by right clicking the file name and saving the shortcut.

Here is the HTML code for your favicon: 

<link href='icon file url ' rel='shortcut icon' type='image/vnd.microsoft.icon'/>

You will need to insert the URL to your favicon that you just copied into the code above between the two ' ' where it says 'icon file url'

Next you need to put the code into the html of your blog. You need to look around the top of the code in the head section and find where your title is located. It will look something like this: <title><data:blog.pagetitle/></title>

Insert your favicon code after the </title> code.

After you save your file it may take a few minutes for the favicon code to take effect. That's it - now you have your very own cute, custom little favicon for your blog.

display HTML code in a scrollable box

I've been trying for a few days to get one of those little scroll boxes with the HTML code for my button up on the site. I know that I am not the first one to have a hard time figuring this out because I found a lot of different sites that claimed to explain it. I've been trying for three days to do this so obviously all of these sites do not make it clear. I decided that I would do a quick write up of exactly what I did to get the little scrollable box to finally appear on my site. First of all you need to copy the script for the scrollable box and place it into a HTML widget box. (I'm using blogger) Here is the script that you need for the box:

<div style="width:200px;height:100px;overflow:auto;
border-width:2px;border-color:000000;border-style:solid;">
Your content goes right here.</div>

The above code will display like this:

Your content goes right here.

Now, see where is says:
="width:200px;height:100px;
You can change these numbers to whatever size you need to fit in your side bar or content area.

200px by 100px is a normal single side bar size
125px by 100px is the size of a normal button
426px by 100px is the normal size of the main content area of a blog

Once you have determined the size of your box it is time to insert the HTML code that you want to display. See where it says, "Your content goes right here." You guessed it, that is where you will put the code that you want to display.

Delete "Your content goes here", and put a couple of spaces between the last > on the left and the first < on the right. I find it easier if you put the extra spaces so that you don't change the wrong part of the code. Now, paste your HTML code with the spaces seperating it from the code for the scroll box. In order for your HTML code to be displayed properly you will have to change each of the < and >. You are only going to change the < and > that are part of the HTML code that you want to display inside the box. The < and > that are in the code for the actual scroll box will need to stay as they are.

Okay, so all the < in the code you want to display need to be changed to & l t ; (do not include the spaces) and then change all the >'s to & g t ;(do not include the spaces). This way the code will be displayed the proper way without being changed to what the code instructs the computer to do. So, what that means is:
change < to & l t ; (do not include the spaces) change > to & g t ; (do not include the spaces)
You are only going to change the < and > in the code that you are trying to display inside the box, NOT THE < AND > IN THE CODE FOR THE ACTUAL SCROLLABLE BOX.

You should now see the scrollable box on your site with the HTML code that you inserted inside of it.

I hope that this makes things easier for some of you because I had such a hard time figuring out how to do this. Hopefully I explained it for you guys.

How to Give a Reflexology Massage to Hands

A reflexology massage can be very relaxing. Although the massage involves rubbing only your hands it will actually bring comfort and relief to other parts of the hands. Click Here

How to make a Magnetic Dry Erase Cabinet Door Message Board

A message board is an easy and convenient way to keep up with things going on in your house. This board is built onto an existing cabinet door and features a place to write messages and a magnetic surface for leaving notes, receipts or anything else you might need to remember.  Finish Reading Here