I know you have something in mind, a great idea, a great business that will give you thousands of dollars a month. The problem starts when you have plenty of ideas – referred to the same project – and you don’t know what you should do first.

Well first of all, it’s fairly obvious that you should plan your project, but sometimes when the ideas are very big, it’s complicated to plan everything before start developing something, don’t you think? That’s why I’m writing this post, because developing a project can be a difficult task when it has many details, for example: an internet business…

The Rhythm of Working

Most of the times, when we think in something big, we look for partners to work with in order to divide the different tasks of the project. That’s a normal thing, many people does it, including entrepreneurs, bloggers and even companies… Working with other people have things that you have to deal with. Every person is different, you and your coworkers can have different rhythms of working and to succeed when you work in team, it’s essential to set a rhythm of working among other things…

I detached this “rhythms” in 5 types:

• 100/0 Rhythm: This is a good rhythm when the project is relative small, something that you can do by yourself. With this rhythm, you start developing the project once you have it 100% planned.
• 80/20 Rhythm: I have worked many times based on this rhythm, and sometimes it’s because I am a person who needs to see the progress of the things to stay motivated. With this rhythm you start developing the project when you have it 80% developed and 20% undeveloped. 80% is quite enough in order to start developing what you are planning, and the other 20% could be something non-relevant, something which your project do not depend of it.
• 50/50 Rhythm: I have also worked under this one . This is a little dangerous because when you don’t have everything planned and defined in a project, no matter how much you have done of it that you can get stuck and probably you could end dropping the idea. This rhythm works with a project 50% developed and other 50% undeveloped, classic of moments when you work under pressure.
• 20/80 Rhythm: You are very impulsive. How can you work with 80% of the project undeveloped? May be you have everything in your head and you don’t want to “waste” time planning and defining everything about your project but dude, I recommend you to take it easy and keep planning before taking actions.
• 0/100 Rhythm: Ok this is impossible, nothing good can emerge here. How can you make a real serious project without planning anything about it? If you really want to make something good, first of all you should thing at least a little about what you want!.

Remember that no matter what you want to develop, if it’s big or small, I highly recommend you to plan everything before getting your hands dirty. It’s good to work with a 80/20 rhythm but it’s even better to work with 100/0. Remember that once you have everything defined with details, anything can’t result wrong.

In order to learn more about project’s planning, I invite you to check my post Do You Plan Your Projects?.

Branding is almost everything when you are running a company. No matter if you promote it offline or online, the important thing is to understand what is your objective as a company, and what should you do once you are established in the market.

But that thing of branding is not just for companies. Who else should be interesting on promoting a brand? Well not to go so far, let’s take as example the Bloggers. When you want to start a blog, you should think about something remarkable that people note and can remember easily. As bloggers, it’s very important to create a sense of loyalty between the readers and us, and that is only possible through a brand.

Also there are many people who can be interested on branding, people like entrepreneurs, web designers or may be book editors need to create a brand in order to have that magic thing capable of moving masses, imposing new behaviors to groups of people.

Once you are established, It’s possible to ruin your brand?

Absolutely yes. In this post I deal with some details that could look insignificant, but they cause great impact on the market, frighten away your followers. Of course, you won’t want to lose them! So the objective of this post is to teach you what NOT to do, in order to let grow and to conserve your brand identity.

1. Break your code of honor: What you do with your brand, is to spread away your philosophy. Because of that philosophy many people follow you, paying attention when you talk or when you launch a new product… That’s how people see those 2 hours-commercials of Apple! What a better way to ruin your Branding that breaking your code of honor? So if you start violating those things that you were promoting and spreading by years, have in mind that you will ruin all that hard work!.
2. Lie: Lying is a typical resource used by marketers in order to catch clients. What they don’t know is that they are losing clients instead catching them. Possibly, they can catch them the first time, but what do you think will happen when they feel scammed? Ohh yeah! They won’t buy anything else from that marketer or company. Instead, if you are sincere with the customers you will create a sense of loyalty, buying the first, second and the next products you launch.
   
3. Badly treat your competitors: Branding is all about market. In addition of you, there will be another people promoting the same stuff that you. Either better or worst, there will be many people offering the same product in different ways trying to catch the most of the people. Competition or potential partners? Think about the possible future partnerships between you and those competitors because sometimes is not a good idea to break relations with them, and even more if you insult them or give them a bad treat.
   
4. Lower the quality of your products/services: Have you thought why people are stuck to you? You can be 100% sure that they are with you because they like what you offer them, because they feel comfortable with it. Either a service, product or just another different stuff, if you start lowering the quality of what you offer, the people will start leaving you and start looking for another companies that offer the same thing. Personally, I think that if you are going to do something bad, it’s better not to do it.
5. Ignore what they want: Times change and people too. Sometimes the people want something because it’s a fashion thing, something like a boom or just because that thing improve their experience as customers. That’s something you need to know, studying the market – how it’s evolving – and learning what the people want. This last thing includes studying your competitors,  they can be offering something better than you to get more customers… So if you know that your clients are demanding something, for your good, you should give it to them.

As you could note, that 5 appointments are pretty important if you want to keep your customers. In this case, by following them, you and your brand will broke forever and ever! Well it’s not so dramatic, you could lower the quality of a service but if you note that and make something to compasate that problem, you will be fine.

I aimed this to companies, or people who sale products or services, but this is perfectly applicable to bloggers. Instead lowering the quality of a service, you could lower the quality of your posts, which will make you lose subscribers!… If you think about all of them, they are perfectly applicable in blogs, websites and even forums…

Conclusion

That 5 tips were good, but you can be sure that they are not the only things you can do to ruin your brand. There should be another tiny things, just be sure to make the right movements by following the philosophy and concepts of your brand. Only them can guarantee the success of your work!

Many times in our life, when we want to make something big, we spend many times planning how everything will work. Either your next vacations or your next business, before carrying it out is recommendable to organize your ideas in order to have everything clear and be ready to work on it.

The planning process is essential if you want to know what to do when things don’t go according to plan.

That’s a great quote that I always remember when I’m planning something. May be it’s obvious, but is good to remember that planning everything before to do something is essential for the thing you want to do. Many people who start making things without goals, end failing and quiting the project because they were not following a path. They never had neither goals to reach nor purposes to keep working, and finally when they get stuck with something, they quit. Ok I have mentioned the word planning many times in this post but what’s the big deal with that? What should you know when you are going to write a business plan?

The Planning Process

In this graph you can see what’s the process of planning suggested by me. First of all, you need to have a vision of the project, defining how everything will operate and how all its elements will be interconnected. So then, defining the mission and goals of your project will help you to keep working the hardest in order to achieve these things. Basically, if you don’t know what do you want to achieve, you will be wasting your time working in something that hasn’t an end…

Study the environment in order to know the market: competitors, consumers… By studying and knowing the competition you will be a step forward of them, so you could develop and offer something better to those people who are using the service or product of your competitors. Once you have analyzed your targeted consumers, determining what they are looking for and what they expect of your service, you will be ready to keep working on your project.

When you want to achieve something, you need to have more than one way to do it. By analyzing and planning different strategies you will have different alternatives in case you fail with one of them. So this could be trial and error, changing of strategy and trying again could be a process of weeks until you get the secret formula, which will give you the highest conversion rates, sales, etc.

After that, once you have analyzed some strategies, analyze their risk. Which one can make you lose more money? Which one can make you lose in front of your competition? All that kind of questions are studied in this phase, and answering them can help you to choose and implement a strategy.

Great! You have selected a strategy but now, it’s time to run your plan! That’s right, now you have to materialize all your efforts in something that you can feel proud of. It would be great for you to see that you didn’t spend time planning the project in vain, and to see how everything is working as you thought and planned before.

Everything will be working fine, everything is pretty and you will feel happy… for a while. Since the first minute your project’s life, you need to start tracking everything in order to analyze and see if going well, if you are not wasting money/time or if the consumers are doing what you expected… So it’s time to analyze the results.

No matter what’s the result, if your business is going well or bad, you need to optimize it. This is a critical phase because of it will depend the life of your project. Find the way to improve the experience of the consumer with your service or product, find how to make them stick to you and keep them using what you offer them.

The Loop

As you can see on the graph, once you are in the bottom of the chain you need to go back to the beginning. In the phase of optimization, you can improve the current strategy or look for another one. No matter what you choose to do, you need to evaluate the risk of the future changes you want to do in order to have everything under control.

I don’t guarantee anything, but if do everything well following that scheme, it would be hard to fail on what you do. Perhaps this is a very simple and general scheme, is good to have an idea of what you need to do when you want to plan something. Also, depending of the business, you should add more phases to that scheme to complement the current phases.

Conclusion

To conclude, I want to recommend you to take your time and don’t put yourself under pressure, try to define some milestones and deadlines for the project, and stick to them. If you cannot meet your deadlines, give you a second chance and extend them, but always have a top. This will motivate you to work the hardest.

To achieve great things, two things are needed: a plan, and not quite enough time.

-Leonard Bernstein

Yesterday I was thinking on creating a new blog. Due to my experience, I thought it would be easier for me in this moment to build and grow up a new blog, I have learned a lot with this blog and I could avoid some mistakes which I committed in the beginning of Mr. Javo dot Com.  In fact, I was planning everything about the niche, the logo and other things…. But how easy could it be?

To build and to grow up a blog in these days is not an easy task, in fact it’s pretty hard considering that almost all of the niches have been took and developed by probloggers. In this times, it could be very difficult to get success with a blog, but it depends of two factors, the niche and the blogger.

Taking an unexplored niche, you have more probabilities to be successful, the less the competence the biggest the success, and this is a logical thing. But also, that idea is not 100% truth because even these days, you could start a blog and be successful in your area, it’s all about your determination. Remember that people like to have different point of views, and if you are good on what you do, no matter if there are ten John Chows, you could be an important figure in your niche.

So in these days you can easily create a blog, but you need to be conscious about something… Before acquire your domain, hosting and the other things, you need to build your business plan. From choosing the logo to choosing a niche, you need to plan everything if you want to get successful in your career as blogger.

For now, you need to wait to read my next posts which will be about Building a Business Plan, step by step. This way, you could build your blog without problems, so stay tuned!