When you see kickoff time in football its similar for kick starting a business. Why? It determines whether you start out struggling to regain the upper hand or get up and run with confidence. Kickoff time doesn’t determine the outcome of either a game or a new business but getting off to a winning start. To get your business off to a great start follow these 7 guidelines and you will guarantee success. :-

1) Know where your sales are coming from

Before your open you’re your business or website or spend a single dollar on marketing know where your sales are going to come from. Who is your target demographic?

One of the biggest mistakes business owners make is not knowing who is going to buy from them. Why? Because if you don’t know who your customers are, you can’t market to them. And if you can’t market to them your business will go out of business.

2) Find a mentor

Your aren’t the first person to start your own business. Hundreds of thousands of people before you have walked the same path you are about to walk down. Take advantage of the gurus and their experience. Try to talk to a few successful small business owners who have been in business for at least 8-10 years. These businesses must be successful and have gained substantial wisdom. So make sure you get all the inside info you can. If you want to succeed once you business is running and you start making mistakes stop and ask these people for some directions.

3) Research you market

Don’t just ask your family and friends if they think your business idea is doable. Of course they are going to be more positive than realistic. Go and research with a pen, paper and yourself. You can even call potential buyers or setup questionnaires to help with your research. Find our their problems and their views. This is even a great opportunity to make contacts and pre-sell your products or services as well as find out specific information about your target market.

4) Your Financing

If you are starting a new business to make money, what’s the good of making money if you are so ignorant of what to do with it that you lose it all? This is a common problem with business. You must know the basic business finance to some degree. You don’t have to get your accounting degree, but you must know some basics: record keeping, business or corporate taxes, expenses, deductions etc…..Don’t make the mistake of going into business with no knowledge of how your finances would work. Even if you trust someone else to handle your finances you should understand the basic workings of incoming and outgoing money.

5) Promoting your business

Even if you’re starting a business online or regular business you have to find the methods of promotion that will work for you.

Now just because your business is online doesn’t mean your shouldn’t promote offline, in fact some of the biggest websites to date do a lot of advertising offline with great success. You can use anything from billboards to T-shirts, brochures to TV etc. Much of your best traffic will come from offline promotion. It seems that when URL’s are shoved in front of people’s faces they become curious and will seek your out.

Having a website is convenient. A lot of times people will become curious about your business but they don’t want to call or drop by. That takes time out of their busy schedule. But most people have time to check your website out. Your website can be one of your best methods of promotion. Include your website address on all print advertising as well as any other media you use to advertise.

6) Get Full information about your business

This is a common mistake made by budding new entrepreneurs. Don’t just ignore business areas that you do not understand. Sure it takes a lot of time and effort to learn a bunch of new information, but having the right business knowledge is what will make the different between success and failure. Make the learning as palatable as possible. If you hate reading boring business books, then attend a training seminar and get advice that way. You will meet some great people here too.

7) Expect competition.

Put yourself in your competitor’s position. What would you do if a new business opened up and started stealing your customers? You’d fight back right? You would increase your marketing efforts, hold special events, and maybe even tell negative things about your competition. So when you open your business and your competitors try to put pressure on you- don’t just put up with it. Launch your own promotional assault and show them what you made of.

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