When starting a new business on the internet, you can just jump in feet first, or you can do a bit of preliminary work. That would involve making sure you have everything in place so that your launch will go smoothly. You don’t want to spend days, weeks or even months trying to make your new business work, only to be disappointed.

Where do you start?

You start with a business plan that is designed specifically for your business and your goals. Using someone else’s plan, or one that you built for another of your businesses, could be missing important elements.

When starting a new business, you really do need to begin at the beginning. We’ll assume you’ve already decided on your niche. The next question is, “Is this the best focus or can you dig down and find a more targeted niche?”

The more targeted you make your business, the better are your chances of making sales. Generalization seldom brings huge profits.

If your interest is golfing, you wouldn’t want to target golfing. You’ll want to find a specific area where you can specialize. Perhaps you’re interested in golf destinations. In that case, you might focus your business on the best golf destinations.

If you’re more interested in equipment, then you might prefer to target the best. The same applies to coaching and instruction. If this is your forte, you could break it down even further and coach just newcomers or just experts.

Choosing one closely-targeted niche does not mean it is a good one. So your next question will be, “Can I make money with this niche?” Some niches are only suitable for providing information. People are not looking to spend a lot of money there. They might use your advice to learn more about the topic,how much is yours worth? but when it comes to spending money, they could have other plans for it.

For instance, someone might want to know about the best golfing equipment, but would not necessarily buy it from you. They simply look to you for information. When they have what they need, they could go to a manufacturer’s site, a dealer’s site or an offline store to buy the equipment.

This is where new business owners go wrong. They find what they perceive as a great niche for a variety of reasons. It might have fewer competitors, which could mean it’s just not a profitable niche.

Once you’ve determined your highly target niche, you need to work on your business plan.

Included will be things like who is your target customer, where will you find products to meet the demand, how much profit will you make per sale, and how many would you have to sell to be in profit after costs.

Newcomers often forget to factor in the costs to run their web sites, internet connection and hosting costs, computer wear and tear, and other business costs, along with the hydro required to run everything. And let’s not forget about taxes.

You need to know all of these things when putting together your business plan. Knowing where your customers are and how to reach them is the next step in the process. And finally, you need to design a marketing plan based on what you know about your product and your prospective buyers.