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Many small business owners have a vision for their company’s future, but fail to properly plan for that goal.  An important part of any business should be making business plans, which can be used for many different purposes.  Most people think of business plans as being used only to obtain financing from banks or angel investors.  While business plans are definitely critical to obtain financing, that is not the only role they play for the small business owner. 

Quite a few business owners have really good ideas, but have difficulty seeing those dreams through to completion.  In short, that is the role of a business plan.  When you take time to go through the step by step process of creating a business plan, you know you have addressed all of the areas you need to achieve the outcome you desire.

Keep in mind that good business planning does not involve coming up with a good logo, website, social networking strategy or any other tool that you will use later to implement your business plan.  The first steps before all that is to answer the foundational questions about your business that you need to create a strong plan. 

For example, when creating the marketing portion of your business plan, you should not at the onset plan what advertising venues you will use or the look of your ad.  Your first goal is to discover the core root of your marketing goals.  Ask yourself fundamental questions about your customers: what customers do you want to attract?  Where have you found them in the past?  How can you reach them?  What are their likes and dislikes? What specific products or services will you offer to them? 

Until the core questions have been answered, in essence the “what” questions, it doesn’t make any sense to think about or implement any of the “how” answers.  But once that base is clarified, it becomes much easier to build on the “what” with the right tools to achieve your plan.  

Think about building a pyramid when you set out to build your business.  Spend more time on the base, or core questions to build a strong foundation.  A good business plan is the base that you need to achieve your business success. 

Be sure to visit SmallBusinessAccountingBackroom.com to get many more resources to help your small business succeed, including information and resources on business planning, financing, sales and marketing.

Video is by far the most likely killer app for the online marketer. Leaving aside the huge potential for your video to go viral, there are other extremely good reasons why video trumps all other forms for squeezing leads. Engage your prospects with video for total domination of their perceptual sense: audio, vision and empathy. Eliminate distractions and engage your viewers attention with video. With appropriate use of arrows and simple layout a video squeeze page focuses eye direction. All said and done the conversion rates from video squeeze pages are staggering. Try video squeeze page and test your conversion rate, I think you will be pleasantly surprised.

Unlike static pages, when a video stops playing there are even more opportunities to direct the viewer to take action by having the last slide in your presentation use animated arrows and other cool effects that explicitly point the viewer’s attention to the squeeze box. Even in some instances you can redirect the whole video squeeze page to a sales page or a traditional static squeeze page.

Another way to drive a stampede of hot leads to your optin list is to post the entire video squeeze page (video and optin squeeze box) as post on your blog and then submit the blog post to the social bookmarking sites. Your squeeze page will get bookmarked by all social bookmarking site.The resulting backlinks does wonders for your squeeze page. Should you run an Adwords PPC campaign you can expect to pay much much less for your cost per click.

Paid subscribers of our site (Video Info Marketing) get a step-by-step guide on how to setup a video squeeze page. Don’t worry if you don’t have the time or cannot handle any techie stuff we can set it up for you for nominal charge. You can also have your webmaster watch the entire clip and install it for you.