Search Engine Marketing - PPC Management Services

Ad Hoc Marketing Always Fails

A failure to plan is a plan to fail. Online everything is so easy to do. It's just takes a few seconds to click over there and add this widget to you blog and a few more to add another friend to a social networking site. Unfortunately, this leads to wasted time and the important things to your business never getting accomplished. If you don't have a marketing plan for your online business, I can almost guarantee you are struggling. In this article we're going to cover some basics on how to develop your own marketing plan and make the internet work for you.

The first step is compiling a list of all the tasks you need to accomplish for your marketing efforts. Online this means things like: blog commenting, social networking sites, forum commenting, using StumbleUpon, article submissions, etc. You should be able to come up with a list of 15-20 ways to market your business online fairly quickly. Google "Online Marketing", if you have any trouble. You must ensure each one is a task with definable objectives. Also make sure they are broken down into their component pieces. An example of a non-task is "Front Page Of Digg" - accomplishing this objective involves a whole slew of other things, writing engaging articles, getting Digged, networking with other Diggers, etc. Put these tasks all in a spreadsheet.

Now you'll rank each task. Rank each one on a scale from 1-5 on how important and effective each one is to your marketing goals. People who are focusing on promoting a site via social networking will obviously have different ranks for tasks than a person who is focusing on blogging. Ensure you have a fair distribution of each number. A list of all ones or fives isn't going to help you plan where to focus your time and effort in the forthcoming month.

Now make a plan for the next month. For simplicity, just assume a five day week for the next four weeks. From the list above, sort it so the fives are on top. I suggest putting the fives into the middle of the week, Tuesday, Wednesday, and/or Thursdays. Mark these tasks down for every week. Now the fours and threes can go out to the edges of the week, most likely every other week. And the twos and ones will get some time at most once a month. When you're done you should see you'll be spending the most time on the tasks rated 5 and the least on the tasks ranked one.

The next step is to ensure you take action. Put your plan to use. Make sure it's hanging somewhere you can see it everyday and do the allotted task for the day before you do anything else. Put off checking email, phone messages, surfing, gossiping until the tasks are done. Then you can relax and do some other tasks for the rest of the day. But, only do the task allotted on the days you specify. Do not get caught commenting on forums or blogs on the days when you haven't allocated the task because these things, while important, are serious time drains.

Once you've worked your plan for the first month, it's review time! Now go over all the tasks you accomplished for the month and determine which ones drew you closer to your marketing objectives and which ones did not. Once you know this review your list and change any rankings needing changing. Next change the calendar so any new fives are being done every week and those having fallen out of five favor are more sporadically done. Once you've gone through a few cycles, you'll have a good feel for which are making you money and which are not. Once you know this, start outsourcing the ones making you money.

Making a marketing plan isn't very difficult if you take it step by step. And having a plan is very often the difference between success and failure. So start planning for your success today!

"Visit my blog and learn the art & science of separating your life from your business." -Steven Lohrenz. Here is the URL: Internet Business Automation (http://www.stevenlohrenz.com)

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