Many people who start their own network marketing business never take the time to write down their goals and define how they are going to achieve them. For many network marketers just getting started, this is the first mistake they make.

While it doesn’t need to be overly formal, creating a game plan for your business will help you stay on the right path and prevent you from trying to aimlessly build and grow your business.

If you’ve never written a business plan before, then you may be wondering where to start. This helpful guide will walk you through the process of creating a basic plan for your network marketing business.

Step One: Establish Your Why and Set Your Goals

The first part of your business plan is setting the primary objective for your business — that begins with establishing your why. Ultimately, your why is the reason you are going into business. It’s the motivation that keeps you going.

Write one or two sentences that establish precisely why you are starting a business. Go beyond the idea of just earning a little extra money and be specific.

Once you have your why, it’s time to focus on your goals. Spend less time on long term goals and more time on short term SMART goals. This will make it easier for you to create a strategic plan to achieve them and allow you to remain more flexible in your approach as you learn what does and doesn’t work for your business.

Step Two: Create a Selling Proposition Unique to You

Developing your unique selling proposition (USP) is the next step to creating an MLM plan. Your USP should be two sentences that outline what makes your business different from your competitors. For example, you may have specialized knowledge about your products or a better reputation in your industry.

Writing down your USP will help you recall why people should do business with you when you begin to doubt yourself. You’re a unique person with talents and abilities others can’t offer, establish why a prospect should choose to work with you over someone else.

Step Three: Define Your Strategy

Once you know what makes you unique, you can design a strategy that takes advantage of those skills or attributes.

Some network marketers choose to write blogs, others share their lives on social media channels updating their streams with new photos continuously. You may want to visit trade shows or events, throw home parties, or deliver one-on-one presentations.

It’s also important to listen to your upline sponsor and other team members that have been successful. Take the time to learn from them. Understand what works well and see how you can improve upon the strategy by using your unique skill set.

Take time to document these strategies and how you plan to implement them. Remember to stay focused on the short term and understand that finding the right strategy can take some time and your approach may evolve.

Step Four: Create an Action-Oriented MLM Plan

Now that you have set your goals and outlined your strategy, it’s time to create an action plan. This is the part of your plan that is going to define what specific actions you need to take on a daily basis to help you reach your goals.

It’s critical to be specific in this part of your plan. Don’t just say you are going to write blog posts to help market your business. Instead, define how many blog posts you are going to write and at what frequency.

Taking the time to define your short term action plan allows you to wake up each morning with a specific list of steps you need to take that day to reach your goals.

Step Five: Learn & Iterate

While having a plan in place is critical for success, having everything right on day one is rare. With that in mind, it’s important to remain flexible.

Take the time to evaluate your performance over time and don’t get discouraged when you fall short of your goals. Instead, take the time to understand what went wrong and come up with ideas on how to improve your performance. Slowly adjust and tweak your plan as you discover what works best for you.