As you already know, running a home based business has its share of requirements and challenges like any other business.Irrespective of the type of industry (travel, wellness, goods distribution…) you have decided to operate in, and whether you are already involved or you are thinking of becoming involved in a home based business, it is essential to know that there are entrepreneurial qualities you need to possess and develop, tools you need to use and master, and skills you need to acquire and strengthen in order to succeed in your home business.Today, we are going to talk about one of the key elements which will help you strengthen your commitment to the success of your home based business: the business plan.Write your business plan.Many people unfortunately fail to realize how having a business plan in a home based business is really important. They obviously fail to seize the real business dimension of the whole adventure of working from home.My purpose here is to remind you this: You are running a business, working from home. That’s why you call it home based business. In order to build a solid home business, you must have a central purpose and a goal. Do not neglect this. Having no direction and doing too many different things might take you in circles without the results you strive to achieve. It is common knowledge that most people who fail in businesses often had no clear objectives or defined purpose to start with.I am a firm believer in the need to have a plan so you know well where you are headed. You need to have a plan to check your efforts against your successes as you move forward in your home business.Remember: a plan doesn’t need to be rigid and can always change. But if you don’t have a clear starting place and a clear final goal, it is pretty hard to stay focused and on track. A business plan doesn’t need to be complicated. In first instance, just ask yourself the simple question “What do I want to achieve from my home based business?” Jot down the various reasons. This will help you to make your plan.In fact, it is good to go through this exercise even if you have been running a home based business for years. Perhaps what you wanted to achieve has changed. Time changes many things and your goals also may change with time. Perhaps when you began doing your home business, you wanted to be home with your children. Now that they are grown, your goals will be switched to something else. You might think about putting less emphasis on the family as before, but focus more on networking in your community and beyond! It is up to you to evaluate how your goals can be changed to fit your place in time.Through other articles, we will have the opportunity to go deeper into the process of designing a comprehensive business plan, but at this initial stage, I want to encourage you at least to write down what we define as our main goals and act on them as our minimum requirementYou might think that writing a business plan is not your thing but at least set a purpose and objective for your home based business and you’ll increase the chances of reaching the success you strive for.

Product creation in Internet marketing is getting stiffer and stiffer nowadays owing to tough competition between Internet-based businesses. Putting up a new product requires plenty of brainpower and finances along with an ability to take risk. With that, even if you have the product well-set already, you have to position it strategically in the Internet landscape for others to notice. You should get the interest of Web users and turn them to actual customers. Aside from the usual physical products, many different products that thrive well on Internet marketing include E-books, membership sites, and video lectures.

The long and difficult process of product creation begins with ideas. They are easy to get – compared to the effort that comes with analyzing the market for that idea. Before the idea turns to a product, businesses often spend money, even amounting to millions of dollars, to ensure the success of the new product that emerges from an idea. Businesses undertake many types of market research and surveys before releasing their products to the public. Now, you may think that because your business is small, you can’t afford research or you don’t have to do research; you can and you should. The Internet allows you to disseminate materials needed for your market study to many people at once without your having to spend a cent.

It is a common maxim in business: Look at your destination first before mapping out your journey. So what are the goals you intend to accomplish with your product creation ventures? The everyday travails of your business may make you forget the end in sight. On the other hand, prepare to entertain new developments that come to your mind in your product creation. Your conception of a product may have started this way, but a few tweaks here and there along with some market research results and it ends up another way. Take it as the result of a creative process, not as a failure to reach your goal. After all, your product creation activities are intertwined with a long-term goal that you should strive to sustain at your utmost: profit generation. So if your less profitable initial idea evolves to a more profitable product, be thankful!

With your product made up already, start doing some aggressive Internet marketing. A product purchase typically comes after more than five times a customer is exposed to an informative call-to-buy message. Thus it is important to get the contact details, like the e-mail address, of potential customers who are on the brink of a sale. Use the results of your market research to determine the demographics to which you should concentrate your marketing efforts.

With consistent product creation, you can make an inventory of your products that you can market in due time. Just keep making products – the moment you succeed in making and marketing a product, customers are surely wanting more from you, so give it to them. Keep them on your side through constant product creation.

One of the keys to succeeding in information product creation is to break the process up into discrete steps. This frequently isn’t an instinctive reaction for the typical information marketer. Especially on the internet where small sized learning products are the norm.

However, it is extremely important to your ultimate success. In fact, I would go so far as to say that if you don’t do this you probably won’t succeed… even when you are starting out let alone as you move forward.

Your product creation system should do this for you if only to help you to understand the overall task.

But why?

In this article, I’m going to ignore chunking and focus on the practical aspects. That’s not to say that chunking isn’t important. It is. It’s important to understanding and to learning the process. But while you can use the same chunks as you move forward, long term your focus needs to be on the operation of the system not the understanding of it. Unless of course you are constantly training new people!

So why is chunking important to long term use of the product creation process? (Yes, I know systems design uses a different term for this process but I’m not teaching you systems design. So I’m going to use the word learning content designers use.)

The first reason that having individual discrete tasks is important is one of schedule estimation. Frequently it is very difficult to estimate how long the total task of creating a product will take. After all, the size and type of the products matters as does the number of products in your product funnel. And those are just the most obvious elements. However, estimating a discrete task is often much easier. The total can then be estimated as the total of the discrete tasks.

Secondly, scheduling a large task can be problematic. However, by segmenting the task into a number of discrete tasks, you gain a much greater flexibility in scheduling. Not only that but as your business begins to add people you are able to schedule multiple people to the product creation.

Finally, segmenting a large task into smaller discrete tasks allows you to have much better control over the product creation. This affects two different areas — status and quality.

By segmenting your process into discrete tasks you are able to schedule and record the progress at much more detailed level. As a result you are more in control of the status of the product creation. You know what everyone is doing. When they should complete it. And how much it should cost. You also know exactly what has been done.

You also improve your overall quality. Instead of waiting until everything is done you can check quality as you go. This allows you to immediate react to low quality products without absorbing their costs. This means that you have less rework and your rework costs less. And if the product is not going to meet its quality requirement you will know about it in time to stop the development, change the requirement or fix the product.