From the outside, it may look like the perfect ideal that anyone wants. For example, I’ve had people tell me that I’ve got the best of both worlds; that I have a home-based business as a freelance writer and I get to be with my kids all the time. They perceive that my freelance writing career comes with no worries, there’s not much ‘running around’ to do because my home-based business is a pretty ‘straight-forward’ one and that my kids are angelic all the time.

How I wish it was all true.

You see, as a freelance writer with more than ten years of experience in my pocket, I dare say that anyone with a home-based business can tell you that it’s impossible to start a business, yes, even if it’s just a small home-based business, without some planning. Because there’s a certain amount of passion and emotion that you’re going to be pouring into this home-based business of yours, you’ll certainly be yanking all your hair out trying to make sure that there aren’t any loopholes and that it would run as smoothly as a yacht on a hot, sunny, cloudless day.

Never truly prepared for your home-based business
As with becoming a parent, you can never be truly prepared for your home-based business. That’s the sad truth about life, about a freelance writing career and also about your home-based business. What you’ve planned for your home-based business may not roll out the way you have planned it to roll out and along the way, you will discover that you could burn all those strategic marketing and online marketing plans that you’ve painfully drawn up without causing a dent in the way your home-based business works.

But does this mean you ought not plan your business at all? That if you’re a freelance writer like me, you can start pounding on every door that you see, asking to be hired as their writer or blogger?

Essential to write a marketing and business plan even for home-based businesses
Far from it, I’m afraid. As unpredictable as it is, it’s still essential for home-based business owners to write out and plan their home-based business’ marketing strategy. No ship can sail without knowing where they’re heading and if you head in blindfolded, you’d better be ready for a surprise, then. It’s ‘good luck’ to you!

And if you’re thinking, ‘I don’t have anyone to answer to apart from…well, myself, what’s there to worry?’ but that’s what the whole worry is about. This makes your whole home-based business a very direction-less and eventually a very messy one. And the worst thing is that one fine day, you would start comparing your own home-based business with others and realize that they’re doing much better much faster – where did you go wrong and then you remember the marketing plan that you burned.

The way the home-based business works will change all the time
But this is the way business works – you’ll need to change and revise all the time but it DOES NOT mean that you can do away with planning out your home-based business. There are consequences to think about, a back-up plan and a strategy that you can fall back on.

One fine day, you will revise your home-based business, work on it, see that something’s not working, revise it, work on it, do it….well, until you feel that everything’s okie dokie.

And then something goes wrong.

Believe or not, this is the way the world works…this is the way your home-based business will work as well. And you’ve got to learn how to deal with this…but not without a marketing strategy and a home-based business plan.

Marketing includes matters such as pricing and packaging of the product and creation of demand by advertising and sales campaigns. There are other options, of course, like product creation, resale rights marketing, joint ventures and the likes, but they are merely secondary to the above.

If you take the freelance route, it is important to ensure that all rights to profit from the final product, or any materials produced in its making, remain yours. Bookkeeping, physical product creation or delivery of goods can be done better with specialized help. Determining the purpose of the product is vital in niche product creation.

Implementation of Methodology – The choice of implementation of Six Sigma methodology depends on whether development is required on existing processes (DMAIC) or on new process/product design creation (DMADV). Determining what you really want to sell, something that you can be relaxed selling is the first step at the creation of a niche product. With the technological advancements in the hosting industry, from automated control panels and scripts that simplify creation of accounts; to complete turnkey solutions, there is no excessive need to worry about spending time on the actual product sold to the customer.

For instance, you should be prepared to either perform yourself or to subcontract the completion of the following tasks:- Product idea research (are there any existing products or patents already existing for this idea)- Product specification document training (what it will do, how it will look, how will it be powered, and how the user will interface with it)- Marketing study (what it will be named, who would buy this, how much would they pay, how will we get customers to purchase the product)- Schematic or electronic circuit design process- Creation of a bill of material or BOM and an approved vendor’s list or AVL for each component in the design, preferably with multiple sources identified, with a BOM and AVL for each assembly level in the product- Printed circuit board layout design process (single sided board, double sided board, or multilayer board; size of the PCB; board material)- Mechanical packaging design with user interfaces (displays, buttons, switches, key. This removes all product creation costs from your budget as a marketer.

No other database of affiliate programs offers such a possibility for profit on either the affiliate side or the product creation site. Your chosen niche should allow for the creation of more than one product or service.

There are several marketing strategies that are necessary in the creation of a successful e-commerce web site – Email marketing (broadcasting) of prospects/customers – Effective use of auto responders (generate automatic email messages) – Online Newsletter – Online Form / Survey to capture your prospect’s email address – Electronic Product Delivery (if you sold a digital product) – Advertisement (Ad) Tracking – Back End Sales – Affiliate program etc.

One of the keys to succeeding in information product creation is to break the process up into discrete steps. This frequently isn’t an instinctive reaction for the typical information marketer. Especially on the internet where small sized learning products are the norm.

However, it is extremely important to your ultimate success. In fact, I would go so far as to say that if you don’t do this you probably won’t succeed… even when you are starting out let alone as you move forward.

Your product creation system should do this for you if only to help you to understand the overall task.

But why?

In this article, I’m going to ignore chunking and focus on the practical aspects. That’s not to say that chunking isn’t important. It is. It’s important to understanding and to learning the process. But while you can use the same chunks as you move forward, long term your focus needs to be on the operation of the system not the understanding of it. Unless of course you are constantly training new people!

So why is chunking important to long term use of the product creation process? (Yes, I know systems design uses a different term for this process but I’m not teaching you systems design. So I’m going to use the word learning content designers use.)

The first reason that having individual discrete tasks is important is one of schedule estimation. Frequently it is very difficult to estimate how long the total task of creating a product will take. After all, the size and type of the products matters as does the number of products in your product funnel. And those are just the most obvious elements. However, estimating a discrete task is often much easier. The total can then be estimated as the total of the discrete tasks.

Secondly, scheduling a large task can be problematic. However, by segmenting the task into a number of discrete tasks, you gain a much greater flexibility in scheduling. Not only that but as your business begins to add people you are able to schedule multiple people to the product creation.

Finally, segmenting a large task into smaller discrete tasks allows you to have much better control over the product creation. This affects two different areas — status and quality.

By segmenting your process into discrete tasks you are able to schedule and record the progress at much more detailed level. As a result you are more in control of the status of the product creation. You know what everyone is doing. When they should complete it. And how much it should cost. You also know exactly what has been done.

You also improve your overall quality. Instead of waiting until everything is done you can check quality as you go. This allows you to immediate react to low quality products without absorbing their costs. This means that you have less rework and your rework costs less. And if the product is not going to meet its quality requirement you will know about it in time to stop the development, change the requirement or fix the product.