When you are thinking about starting up your own online business you will want to have a pre-launch plan in place before jumping in with both feet. Consider it the blue print to creating a successful business.

I cringe at it now, but when I look at my first business plan, it was a disaster, and it wasn’t (in retrospect) that my internet business failed spectacularly. I hadn’t put together a realistic budget, and I’d just assumed that marketing would “happen on its own”. I took out a loan, based on a second mortgage without identifying where the revenue potentials were.

A key aspect to making your internet based business is getting on the web in the first place; you’ll need a web designer for that, or you can learn it on your own. We’re going to be iconoclastic here, and suggest that it’s worth your time to pay someone to do this for you. The primary business case for spending money on outside people is whether or not they can do something you can’t, or whether they can do something you can do - but free your time up to do something else. Even if you’re an HTML and CSS guru, if you’re starting your own business, having someone else do the grunt work of designing the site is worth the time.

About the only thing I did right last time was learn the ins and outs of using Register.com for setting up my domain names. My designer helped me find a hosting provider who could install the software I wanted to make this all work, which helped a lot.

As part and parcel of the domain name parking part of your business plan, you should look into hosting providers. The first rule in hosting is that you get what you pay for. Take it from us - it’s better to deal with a reseller who will answer the phone at 3 AM than it is to have your technical requests routed through Mumbai where an Indian cubical worker reads off of a script. Look into your bandwidth usage, and read the fine print carefully before setting up the contract.

If you want to target everyone from high speed internet to dial up and GPRS modem users then keep it simple and to the point. More is not always better, especially if no one stays around to see it.

So, the next step, after the site is up, is bringing in visitors. This is the marketing part of the business plan, and near the end of the pre flight check list. In most cases, this means getting your shop into the top twenty results for a search engine keyword hit. There are countless articles on how to do this, but the realistic way to do it is Google Ad Words.

Related to Ad Words and related ad proxy systems is getting social networking sites to drive traffic to yours. Focus on getting people who have credibility in their online community referring to your products and web site, and you’ll build a nice stream of ready traffic to your site - and eventually, to your affiliate sales or your products.

Trisha Frauenhofer is an online marketing expert who enjoys sharing her most powerful online secrets including the My Internet Business

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