Lesson I Guide to Creating Planners

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2 INTRODUCTION A planning template is a written description of your business's, Goal s and future, a document that tells what you plan to do and how you plan to do it. If you jot down a paragraph on the back of an envelope describing your business strategy, you've written a plan, or at least the germ of a plan. Planning Template is inherently strategic. You start here, today, with certain resources and abilities. You want to get to a there, a point in the future (usually three to five years out) at which time your business will have a different set of resources and abilities as well as greater profitability and increased assets. Your plan shows how you will get from here to there. Planning should always be the first step in developing a business or in any life s plan. A plan gives you direction and helps you prepare for a lot of what you may need to overcome in the future. After consultation with business intermediaries, business.gov.au has developed a suite of free planning templates and checklists to help guide your business.

3 Lesson I Guide to Creating Planners Planners help your followers accomplish their goals. They help your customers get and stay organized. For example, you run a travel blog aimed at busy moms looking for family vacation destinations. You could create a planner titled Our First Vacation at Disney World. Your readers could use this planner to track all their travel arrangements and agenda for the trip. Planners help your community act. It s easy for your readers to skim through your latest blog post on organizing your closet. But what if you took that same information and turned it into a planner? You could create one divided into seasons called An Organized Closet Is a Happy Closet: How to Keep Yours Neat & Tidy All Year Long. Now with a planner, your readers are more likely to absorb and act on your information. When they know your suggestions work, they re more likely to recommend your blog to their friends and family! Planners eliminate procrastination. What keeps your followers and customers stuck isn t how big a task is or how long it will take. The challenge for most people is not knowing where to begin. But when you offer a planner that s broken down into individual steps, you help your customers get started. For example, you run a web design blog. You know a lot of your customers that keep putting off the rebrand their websites desperately need. Why not create a planner called 12 Simple Steps to Redesigning Your Website? Break each step down into tiny, manageable tasks. Explain what needs to be done and why it needs to be done in that order. Make suggestions that will guide your customers through the whole process. For example, you might say, Now is the time to choose your WordPress framework. I love and recommend the Genesis Framework from StudioPress because it looks fantastic out of the box!

4 Lesson II Include Planners in Your Content Marketing The wonderful thing about planners is they can be used in almost any niche and adapted for almost any purpose. You could create a planner for everything from weight loss to puppy training to budgeting. Here are three quick ways to share planners with your community: Offer it as part of a course. If you already have a lengthy report or an MP3 on a topic that s important to your customers, take it a step further. Add a planner into your product and sell it as a self-study course. The great thing about a self-study course is that you only do the work once. You may occasionally have customers with questions but for the most part, you re free to spend your time marketing it. But if you re looking to bump up your earnings, create an upsell offer for your self-study course. Give customers the option to get group coaching from you. Not only does this add income to your bottom line, it also helps you build a community of people who are eager to act. Put it on Amazon. Millions of shoppers visit Amazon each day looking for solutions to their problems. So, why not give them the opportunity to purchase your shiny new planner, too? The advantage of selling your planners on Amazon is that it helps you find new customers. You simply need to format and upload your planner. Amazon will take over and do the heavy lifting for you! Make it an opt-in gift. Planners are very popular gifts to website visitors. That s because they re easy to download and implement. You re not just telling your community what to do; you re showing them step-by-step. But don t feel like you must create a massive planner that s four hundred pages long. You want your planner to be short and focused. A planner based around the concept of pet care is too broad. If you focus it on a smaller topic like puppy training, then you ve made the topic more manageable. Another way to shrink a topic is to apply a timeline to it. For example, you could create a planner titled, 30 Days to a Better-Behaved Dog.

5 Lesson III Make a Planner that s Amazing and Actionable Creating a planner doesn t take a lot of text or require that you spend weeks working on it. If you re familiar with your topic and you know your niche well, you could make your planner in just a few hours one afternoon. Here s how to get started... Look at what s there. Start by doing a bit of research. You want to look up planners online to get a feel for what your community will expect from yours. You can search by going to Amazon and typing in your niche and the word planners, like this: puppy training + planners (without quotation marks). Don t be discouraged if you see a lot of planners in your niche. This is a good sign. It means your market is hungry for actionable information and is likely to enjoy your planner. You can also use this time to compare the various planners. Which ones stand out to you? Which planner has the best reviews? Which one is the easiest to use or the simplest to implement? These factors can help you as you create your own planner so be sure to take notes about what catches your eye. Think about the end. Once you ve done some research, it s time to get started creating your own planner. Begin by thinking about the end goal for your readers. If they implement all your advice, what will they have by the time they re finished? For example, if yours will be a fitness planner, then your readers will most likely have: better health, more confidence, and maybe even some weight loss. Knowing this result will help you craft a better planner. Break it down. Now, brainstorm the stages your community will have to go through to get the results you promise. For example, the first stage of redesigning a website might be deciding on the goal of the redesign. Are your customers just tired of the old look? Are they shifting their business and in need of a complete re-brand? Consider the steps that need to be taken. As you break the planner into stages, think about the steps that are necessary for each stage. If your planner is focused on helping home owners prepare their homes for sale,

6 then stage one might be clearing out clutter and stage two might be minor repairs. Steps taken during stage one could include: getting rid of old or unused items, renting a storage space, and packing away non-essentials out of sight. There isn t a perfect number of steps. Focuses on helping your community achieve their goals. If that requires 50 steps, then write out all 50 steps. If that means they only need 7 steps, then only include 7 steps. Don t fluff your planner with useless information. Brand it. Once you have the information in your planner, the only thing left to do is format it. Make sure your logo or website address is on the front cover of your planner. That will help your community remember where they received the planner and encourage brand awareness. Remember to keep your planner as simple and streamlined as possible. This makes it more likely that your customers will implement the information you ve shared with them.

7 Conclusion This is your chance to discover any weaknesses in your business idea, identify opportunities you may not have considered, and plan how you will deal with challenges that are likely to arise. A well-written business plan can help convince investors or lenders to finance your business. This is your chance to discover any weaknesses in your business idea, identify opportunities you may not have considered, and plan how you will deal with challenges that are likely to arise. A well-written business plan can help convince investors or lenders to finance your business. Most people know how to set SMART goals. The challenge comes in creating and following a plan to make those goals a reality. During the initial days of setting a goal, enthusiasm drives motivation to achieve results, but it isn t long before its life as usual and the goal is a distant memory. As you gain knowledge and refine estimates, requirements become clearer, and tasks may take longer or faster than expected. A plan defines everything about your build process, including what gets built, how the build is triggered and what jobs are executed.