Since July of 2007, I've made over $15,000 online. My primary source of income is a telecommuting job that requires little away-from-computer involvement, but hey - it's still online income. Over the last few months, I've come to a revelation about e-commerce. It's my version of the so-called "divine truth to business," so to speak. I want to hear others' opinions on it. Business has to make sense. What I mean by that is, your business plan has to have no guess work. Either you have a project that works, or you don't. In short, what that stands for is, a plan like "If A happens, then you better hope that B and C bring X amount of dollars, THEN your endeavor will be a success" is a fail. Your business plan, or your sales pitch, or your advertising, HAS to work on paper in order to succeed in life. Your plan has to make sense. Its guesswork has to be eliminated. Either it makes sense, or it doesn't. If you rely on too many "maybes" and "if/then"s, in that case you have very little chance of success. What do you think?
That's an excellent post! writing down your goals and ideas ON PAPER will also help you achieve them- and stop wasting time getting sidetracked....
My take on it was this: you can't HOPE that something good will come to you if you do nothing to get there. You can't register a nice domain and expect it to automatically rank high in Google; you have to work hard on SEO to get to that success. Or a blog - no matter how great your writing style is and how interesting your posts are, you'll get nowhere without promoting it. So, business has to make sense. Like in accounting, it has to be in balance: this work here equals this result there. For example, if you spam and get your site banned - that's what you earned. If you honestly work hard at making the domain visible not only to Google or Yahoo, then that'll come to you, also. And this accounting equation always has to be in balance.
Partially agree with that; I guess for most people common sense works. However, a lot of big and small businesses are opened without common sense. And succeed. And depends what succeeding is. A few 1000/month or a few 100.000 a month. The latter probably won't look in this forum but are instead working.
So many people i know start businesses / ventures without a written plan of how to deal with scenarios, or even a written plan of how the business will operate. Your right - this is a crucial area. I don't start any venture or business without a plan for where its going - its a system that has brought success Failing to plan is planning to fail!