Plan Your Proposal and You Plan To Win

Proposal planning is essential to ensure that you have time to develop, write and produce a well though-out solution to the client's requirement. Everyone who has written proposals regularly has occasionally wished that they had planned better, started earlier and various occasions stayed late trying to deal with an unsatisfactory and unfinished proposal.

Think of proposals as small projects – develop a plan. Think about all the relevant issues you must cover - how to meet their problem? How you have done similar work in the past? Who will work on the project? Do you need subcontractors or partners to help deliver the project? Who will work on the proposal? How will you present yourself to the client in order to win?

Ensure you are prioritizing bid opportunities and have your best people working on the most important opportunities for your organization. Think carefully about which contract is more important. Is it the high value opportunity that will consume all your time and resources for the next several months? or is it the smaller project that allows you to maintain other client work at the same time? Whichever is the most important priorities your bids and ensure that each one receives the attention it deserves.

As with any project, when writing proposals, set and keep deadlines and allocate resources to complete tasks. This is taken for granted when running a client project, but is sometimes ignored on internal "sales" projects. Proposal writers and sales teams need to manage and run their projects efficiently too in order for them to succeed…and remember one sure fire way to lose the contract is not submitting your proposal on time. Don't jeopardize several weeks work by being 30 minutes late getting the document in.

Unless you are an individual contractor you should delegate proposal tasks to qualified team members. This will allow more time to be spent on each section and that each section of the proposal is written by the most appropriate member of your team. If you have expertise available, make sure that it is available to be used in your proposals. When delegating make sure everyone knows the deadlines and commits to them. Everyone needs to know this is an important project and you are the project manager.

Always plan time for production of the documents. Make sure that everything can be produced and checked in the final form prior to submission. The last thing you need is a well-written proposal coming across poorly because it was carelessly assembled at the last minute. Make sure the printer is working, that you have enough paper and that you have time to get it delivered. Book a courier in advance.

Having a set and well-defined process can easily streamline the time required between projects and will allow for highly organized proposals that always meet quality standards. Many people underestimate the value of proper proposal planning; make sure you are not one of them.

Within the Learn to Write Proposals (www.learntowriteproposals.co.uk) Bid Management Toolkit you will find great tools to help you – the Bid Capture Plan helps you define your win strategies and themes, the Bid Development Plan helps you structure you documents and plan the development of each section as well as the whole document and the Proposal Tracker helps you keep on top of the production of multiple bids. 

 

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Drive Traffic to Your Website with Articles

 

Many people begin their online road to riches dream by starting up a website and trying to sell a product they have created themselves. They may have written an e-book, recorded a cd of original songs, or knitted some lovely potholders with pictures of cats on them.

Enormous volumes of hype have been published with the claim that the internet is an easy, if not mindless, way to riches. The internet is now a global advertising grid, and millions of people surf each day for things they would like to buy, learn about, or discover. They search for the needle in the electronic haystack that suits their fancy for the moment. Shopping online has now become reasonably safe.

The first problem is, how will shoppers with a credit card and the urge to shop find your website? A count as of January1, 2005, suggested there may be as many as 11.5 billion public WebPages published. That was just over a year ago at the time of this writing, so that number can only be much higher today. To expose your little website selling cat potholders to prospective customers may take a little a little work.

Search engines use complex algorithms (mathematical formulae) to determine if the content of a website matches its owner’s claims. Self-proclaimed experts who follow this route for exposure must research every day to ensure their success. The search engine companies themselves keep their algorithms secret to avoid unscrupulous marketers taking unfair advantage of the whole internet shopping and surfing experience.

So what is a potholder seller to do? Search engine experts can charge upwards of $25,000 to guarantee that your site might be the first to be found when someone enters a search. That's a whole lot of lovely cat potholders. Some very easy and free methods are available to drive traffic to your website. One of them is writing simple articles. You're reading this one right now, aren't you?

Hundreds of "article directories" exist on the web just for this purpose. The main and simplest thing people search for on the internet is information. People want to know about something, and often a good place to find a snippet of information is in an article directory. Thousands of 500-1500 word articles have been written and published on the internet, and people love to read them. If they are short and informative, they will become popular to read, and not too time consuming.

Then once your website is up on the net, write a brief, helpful article about your product. Target the style and content of your writing to suit your friends and customers, and also yourself. The average newspaper is written for a grade 9 level reader, and tabloids are written for a grade 6 level or lower. Writing on the internet runs the whole gamut of education. Explain a problem that needs to be solved, and at the end provide a solution. Sales copy is more involved than this, but an article should be entertaining, or fit the parameters of a possible search.

The most important part of the article, besides the content and the attention grabbing headline, is a live link to your website in the author's bio at the bottom. More often than not, the reader will click the link, if it is live, to see what other information might be available on that particular subject. This link must lead straight to your potholder website. 

 

A reader is less likely to copy and paste your website address into their browser if another similar article is listed in the directory.  Write a short paragraph stating your expertise with cat potholders, and invite the reader to visit your website. This will be your "author's bio". If someone does read the whole article, they are often curious who wrote it, if it covers the subject they are interested in. Most article directories will accept HTML code in the bio box.  

 

Search for the words "article directory", and make a list of as many as you can. Most directories are free to read and submit your articles to. Registration is usually necessary, with your email as the username. Get another free email address to use specifically for article submission to avoid any trouble with spam.

After you have submitted your article, it may take a few days for publication. Check back to the directory to see if your article is published and your link is working. Then do it all again. The articles will stay published forever, or as long as the directory exists. Over time, people will continue to read your article, and click back to your website. 

 

If you submit your article to 20 directories, and 40 people interested in cat potholders read it, that's 800 more potential customers from one article. If you have the time to write 20 little articles, and submit them to 40 directories, and 40 people read each one over time, well you do the arithmetic.  Article submission is one easy, quick and guaranteed way to direct some website traffic your way, and at almost no cost. Give it a try, you'll be amazed.

 

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