Regardless of how much money you make, you should live within a budget. The key to wealth is not how much you make, but how much you KEEP! Setting a budget for your life, your business, your entertainment just makes sense. As a 30+ year entrepreneur, I realize the importance of setting a budget within my business. I do this annually and budget for marketing, payroll, equipment purchase or maintenance, supplies, office rent, advertising cost, etc.
The biggest mistakes people that new entrepreneurs make is either not having a budget or spending money in all the wrong places.
Marketing Is Where It’s At
The single most important element of your business plan has to be MARKETING. You can have the greatest website, blog, capture page, content, and videos. If you don’t get traffic to your site, you’re OUT OF BUSINESS.
We all come into business with different cash positions. Some are cash flush with great incomes either from their jobs or other business endeavors. Some are just squeaking by. Regardless of your circumstances, there is a marketing plan to fit your budget.
Either You At Work Or Your Money At Work
There’s only two ways to work, make money, or to get things done — Man at Work! or Money at Work! There’s just no way around it. If you view that from the entrepreneurial perspective, there’s only two ways to market, add friends in Facebook, bring traffic to your website, write articles, build a blog, etc. Either you do it or you pay someone to do it for you. Paying for it can include simply hiring someone to do the work for you such as building a website or even adding friends to Facebook. Or it could mean paying for some kind of online system or computer program to do some or all of the work for you. While there’s lots of free tools and strategies out there, you still have to do some work to set it up (or, once again, pay someone to do that for you) Enough said there…
It’s important to budget both your time and your money. I find that people usually have more of one than the other. In my case, money isn’t as critical of a consideration as is my time. I really have to work at getting the time to do the things I want to do and therefore, I need to be careful to spend my time ONLY on the things that move my business forward. If you have more time than money, then you need to have laser-sharp focus on your spending.
To financially budget your business you simply need to decide how much money you can afford to get things going and how much can you afford monthly to maintain your overhead. Start up costs and ongoing overhead need to be considered. Your monthly overhead will include (depending on your budget), your business overhead, your capture page system, your blog, your email auto-responder, phone expenses, advertising (such as PayPerClick, banner ads, classifieds, etc), and web hosting.
Especially when you are starting out, you should spend 90% of your time and money on marketing. Get to a point where you have more leads than you can handle, then make some adjustments.
So here’s a list of marketing possibilities grouped into two categories: Free and Paid
FREE
- Social Marketing
- · Facebook
- · Twitter
- · YouTube
- · BetterNetworker
- · Blog
- · UStream
- Content Marketing
- · Video Marketing
- · Article Marketing
- · Press Releases
- · Squidoo / Hubpages etc
PAID
- · Pay Per Click (Google, Yahoo, MSN others)
- · Ezines / Solo Ads
- · Banner Advertising
- · Facebook Social Ads
Most of the FREE options have some tools you can purchase to help you automate some of the tasks. For instance, there’s article submission software that can automatically submit your articles to hundreds of Article Directories for you. There are similar programs for videos to distribute them all over the internet.
Simply decide if you want to put you to work or your money to work or both! There’s so much you can do for free but you can accelerate your growth if you decide on some paid strategies as well.
;)
;)
Yes, a common mistake is to work at making MONEY vs making a PROFIT.