You may have a big dream with your Internet Business and perhaps an aggressive goal. All these will remain as it is if no action is taken. Furthermore the action could be very massive due to the aggressive goals. In order to realize your dream and goal, you need a strategy.

What is a Strategy?

Briefly, a strategy is a holistic approach to move systematically toward meeting the goal. As the goal is big, the approach should consist of a key direction that involve a collection of key actions intended to overcome a major issue that may prevent you from moving forward.

How to build a strategy- There are two schools of thoughts in building a Strategy, namely:

Benchmark Strategy - Firstly, you can take the benchmarking approach to adopt a proven strategy. The big advantage of adopting a proven strategy is to save time and risk at its minimum because someone has used it before.

In real business environment, not everyone develop strategy from scratch. Many adopted the 'benchmark strategy approach". What does it mean? Essentially, you look around the strategy your competitor used and adopt it for your own. Of course, you need to do enough evaluation before you apply this approach. Below are some evaluations you must do:-

1) Is the potential result match your objective?

2) Are you in better position compared to your competitor if you apply the same strategy?

3) Do you have the capabilities to implement the strategy?

If your answers to all the three are positive, then you may use this approach. Otherwise, you have no choice but to develop your own strategies.

Build your own Strategy - A comprehensive strategic planning process is used to develop a strategy for your objective and goal. It is a process that involve massive data collection and analysis using a various analytical tools such as Michael Porter's 5 forces of competitions, PEST Analysis. These tools help to gather data involve market information, competitive data, technology and internal capabilities.

Once data are collected and collated, they are analyzed with one or more of the tools mentioned. Besides data analysis, other processes are involved such as data prioritization, develop strategic options, etc. A comprehensive Strategic Planning Process should be used in this option otherwise a simple SWOT Analysis process can be a good starting point.