Where are these articles?

We’ve made it easy on you.  You’ll now see an ‘Articles‘ tab at the top of every page on Bizplan.com.

What kind of business advice will I find there?

We’ve done our best to build out a really comprehensive library of startup business advice including topics such as  incorporating a business idea, distributing startup equity, and even tips about how to approach an angel investor.

We’re constantly adding helpful articles as a resource to our members.  If you have any topics that you’d like us to address, please leave a comment here or contact us directly and we’ll put our team on it!

Getting to the Plan Library:

You’ll see a ‘Plan Library’ button on your Dashboard when you are logged in to Bizplan.com.  The library is available to all members that have purchased the ‘Professional’ or ‘+Funding’ packages.  If you haven’t purchased one of those packages, you can always upgrade when you need to.

How to Use It:

The plan library is where we store all of our sample business plans.  You can find plans for nearly any industry or type of business in there.  If you can’t find a plan that exactly fits your industry, you can probably find one that is close enough.  Or piece together sections from several different sample plans.  The library can’t possibly have an exact plan for every business that you can dream of creating.  If it did, then your idea wouldn’t be very good…because somebody would have already written the exact plan for it!  Every business is unique.  Sure, a restaurant is a restaurant.  But, one restaurant might be in a different city than another. And, one might be a high end steakhouse that caters to a certain demographic while another might be a fast food joint in a strip mall.  You get the point!  Even similar businesses have a lot of differences.

The moral of the story is that you should only use the Plan Library as a reference point.  Don’t expect to find a plan that exactly fits every single piece of your business.

A short time back, we added a ‘Feedback’ tab that you’ll see along the right hand side of nearly every page when you are logged in to Bizplan.com.  You can also click on the ‘Feedback’ link at the very bottom of the site regardless of whether you are logged in or logged out.  This is a great way to let us know if you have any suggestions for features that we can add or any other improvements we can make to the site.  Many of you have already offered some great suggestions.  Keep them coming!

In the Feedback area, you can see suggestions that other people have added and you can vote on whether you’d like us to make those changes to the site.  If you have an idea that you don’t see, go ahead and add it.  The ideas with the most votes get built the most quickly.  Also, you’ll often see comments that the Bizplan team has made on some of the suggestions.  This is our chance to explain why a certain feature works a certain way.  We also use the Feedback area to let you know how quickly we’ll be able to build each of the top suggestions.  Remember, the majority rules in most cases (not always though).  So, if one idea gets 200 votes and another only gets 2 votes, chances are pretty good that we won’t spend much time on the less popular idea.

So, get busy in the Feedback area and let us know how to improve the site!

Images:
A number of people have asked us to add a feature that allows them to upload images of product sketches, photos of prototypes, charts, screenshots of web pages, maps, and even blueprints for a building.  Now, you can upload all of the above using the Appendix section.  We accept just about every popular type of image file (jpeg, png, gif, etc.).

Documents:
For quite some time, you’ve been able to upload financial spreadsheets and charts in Microsoft Excel format within the ‘Financial Charts’ section under the ‘Editor’ tab.  This is a great place to upload Sales sheets, Income Statements, a Balance Sheet, or your Cash Flow statement.  However, if you have non-financial related documents, spreadsheets, or Power Point presentations that you want to upload, you can do that in the Appendix.

Videos:
You can now embed videos that are already hosted on another site such as YouTube.  Simply find the video on YouTube (or any other website) and copy the ‘Embed Code’.  In the Appendix section, you can select ‘Video’ as the ‘Asset Type’.  From here, you simply paste the embed code that you copied from YouTube.  It’s important that you copy/paste the embed code, NOT the URL of the video.  Sometimes YouTube hides the embed code under the ‘share’ button on their videos.

Let us know how you like the new Appendix section and if you can think of anything else that you’d like to be able to upload.

To edit the main section names on your plan, follow these steps:

1) Log in to www.Bizplan.com and click on the ‘Editor’ tab at the top of any page.

2) On the Editor screen, you’ll see a ‘Table of Contents’ along the left hand side of the screen.  These are all of the major sections of your plan.

3) To edit any of the major sections, simply click the ‘Edit’ button at the bottom of the Table of Contents.  From here, you’ll be able to rename, add, or delete any sections.  You can also ‘drag-and-drop’ each section if you want to rearrange them.

To edit any subsections within a main section, follow these instructions:

1) Log in to www.Bizplan.com and click on the ‘Editor’ tab at the top of any page.

2) On the Editor screen, click on one of the main sections from the ‘Table of Contents’ along the left hand side of the screen.  From here, you will see all of the subsections in the middle of the screen.

3) At the bottom of the subsections (look all the way to the bottom in the middle of the page), you’ll see a ‘click to add a new section’ link.  From here, you can create a new subsection.

4) To delete a subsection, simply open that particular subsection and click the ‘Delete Section’ link.

5) To re-arrange subsections, simply ‘drag-and-drop’ the subsection anywhere within that main section.  You can do this any time.  But, you need to keep it within the main section where you are working.
We hope these new features help you create a better business plan!

This new look will be rolling out in about a week and should make for an even easier time creating and editing your business plan.  Plus, the new design leaves a lot of room for us to add some really cool features that we hope to be launching in the near future.

As you get settled in with the new Editor, please feel free to leave any comments about what you like/dislike.  Also, let us know which features you think we should add to make things easier for you.

LinkedIn is the last of the three major social media platforms that every business should be working to establish a presence in.  Remember, the easier it is to find and connect with your business, the easier it is for community to be built around your product or service.  And make no mistake, community equals loyalty, and loyalty equals referrals and repeat customers. If you’ll remember, as I figured in my first post, the only reason someone isn’t using social media for their small business isn’t because they’ve never heard of it…it’s because they don’t see the value in it.  So I’ve set out to give five compelling reasons that you’re small business should be using at least one, if not all, of the three major social media platforms – twitter, facebook, and linkedin.

Here are my top five reasons for using LinkedIn for your small business:

1. LinkedIn is comprised of over 53 million users who are mostly there for business – which means this is a large but very focused group of people who could vastly expand your B2B contacts.

2. While you might want to check out a potential new employee’s facebook to get an idea of the type of person they are, you’re most likely NOT going to find a full resume with references.  LinkedIn however has included detailed professional information, including education, experience, recommendations, interests, honors, and awards to it’s main features.

3. Just like on Facebook, you can use LinkedIn’s search feature to find people who are connected to those you already know.  But here, you can also search for job titles and company types to target your search for new contacts or potential employees.

4. LinkedIn makes it possible to locate thought leaders in your industry and allows you to interact and maybe even join their ranks.  One effective way of doing this is by starting and/or joining a group for your industry and answering questions from others in the group.

5. Once you’ve built up a large group, using LinkedIn’s powerful “group update” tool can send a target message from you to thousands without ever having to use an email client or crm.

This Week:

Twitter started out as place to simply update your friends (in 140 characters or less) on what you were doing.  Over time this question has been ignored more often than not, to answer the question: what do you find interesting? Or, what do you think your followers should know about?

So why should your business be using this service to connect with your customers and business partners?

1. Current stats put twitter users at 13-18 million, with the data generated per tweet reaching an exponentially larger audience through various services that pipe in twitter feeds.  That’s a pretty big audience…and it’s growing rapidly.

2. It’s real time.  Why is that a big deal?  What other service allows you to simultaneously send a link to your website (or pay-wall) to thousands – potentially millions – at the same time?  Answer?  No one.

3. Twitter allows you to monitor and manage customer issues and feedback in real time.

4. The immediate access and drastic transparency of twitter makes it easy to send messages and helpful content to your followers  that gains trust and loyalty before problems arise.

5. And finally, influence. If you’re a start-up or small business, twitter just gave you a huge step towards leveling the playing field.  What your company may lack in size or spend, it can make up in influence.  Social media (and particularly twitter) gives you the opportunity to rapidly share ideas, which in turn, could result in you – out-teaching your competition.

There are a number of different platforms you can use to make the most of your social media efforts.  Rather than give you a run-down of all your options, I’m just going to recommend one.  It’s free, and it’s the best client I’ve used so far.  Hootsuit.com

For more resources I recommend heading over to Mashable.  They have a number of great lists, tips, and guides.  For a more in-depth experience, try catching some webinars via Hubspot, BrightTalk, or Marketing123.

NEXT WEEK: LINKEDIN