I started out with one business which morphed into four businesses, each with its own name. While they are all related to the real estate investment and training businesses, they evolved independently over time. As such, they don’t leverage one another in the online space.

Your posts are helping me change my thought process and to develop the disciplines necessary to create leverage between my various lists and online activities without spamming. I need to define my target customer, my blogging schedule, focus more on conversation development and less on teaching the whole lesson. I get a fair amount of positive feedback on my blog but it fails to engage conversations. I recently began using Facebook and Youtube without a written plan.

Until now I have relied on others with more tech savvy than me to assist with my online strategy. It is my business and my responsibility to develop the plan, even if someone else assists with implementation. This post and the planning post have effectively put a temporary hold on my implementing any changes until I have fully thought this process through. This will save me time in the long run and ensure that I’ll initiate effective actions.

I look forward to future posts.

You make a great point about not being a “people person”. When I started sales training, I learned immediately from a mentor that if I wanted to be effective I was going to need to develop some of my weaker personality traits. When I deliberately focused on building my leadership qualities, that’s when I (not coincidentally) became very successful in helping my clients make more money. In other words, I was not always a top sales trainer. In fact, I was the opposite. But I learned. Hard work pays off.

It’s crucial to know that we ALL have the social personality traits necessary to be very successful in online marketing. Some of us have those traits buried, but they’re there. Don’t think of yourself as “not a people person”. You are. It just takes practice. It’s like working out. The more you do it, the better you get

Your best point is that you can’t set up a blog and expect to begin making money overnight. Even as a supplement to my main business, I have to spend hours getting out there on all forms of social media, as well as in person-to-person networking events. It’s hard, and if you’re not a people person, at least to start, you’ve got an uphill battle ahead.

Looking forward to future posts; thanks!

Having a plan makes a lot of people feel constricted, like they’re locked into something and that their creativity is stifled. That somehow by having a written business plan, they can no longer be free and creative. This REALLY is not the point, and I think we can really take these things too seriously sometimes!

The process of writing a business plan for your blog is vital. It’s absolutely mandatory if you want to maximize the results you get from your efforts. But it doesn’t lock you into anything. The process of writing the plan is more important than the plan itself. It forces you to think things through in detail. Revisit your plan often, and change it…the point is that you’re thinking things through in detail and forcing yourself to look at your ambitions critically. By doing this and putting those concerns to rest, we are able to be MORE free, not less

I’m writing Next Level Blogger specifically for people who want measurable financial gains from their blogging, social networking and internet marketing. This can be done, but it requires running it like a business. There are pros and cons to this approach of course. Not all blogs are run this way, and I’d certainly never intentionally imply that what I do is the ONLY way to do it! But if you want to make money online, you’ll be best served running your business like a business, and that includes having a written plan that you follow daily.

I think blogs fail primarily because authors lack enough passion for a niche to freely share their best ideas on an ongoing basis. A business plan may help but frustrate when you start something totally new. We learn as we go and . Blogging can change you.

Frankly, I did no formal research when I started blogging in early 2007. A general blog morphed into one for consumers (revealing how the wealthy tame their financial risks) and one for financial advisors (sharing ideas, insights and best practices).

Even now, I can’t quantify the results the way a business plan would demand. Yet I know my business success has increased.

I have been going through an evolution in defining my own blog. I have seen it go from being about owning a small business, to being creative about owning a small business, to entrepreneurship, to baby boomer entrepreneurship, to creating a retirement business, to baby boomers who want to be aggressive about designing the perfect retirement business that fits your personal needs.

I have gone from a solution in search of a market to a market in search of a solution. That is probably not obvious in the view of one reading the blog today. But it is the shift in focus that I think you describe. The shift will become visible and hopefully exciting to those who are out there looking for that solution. Thanks for bringing me one step closer to clarity.

Shallie Bey
Smarter Small Business Blog