Marketing Plans For Success
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.
First, you need to know what things you are going to be doing to market your product. Is it commenting on blogs or forums? Using StumbleUpon or Delicious? Submitting articles? Maybe you’ll optimize for the search engines or use web video sites. Whatever the list compile it into a spreadsheet program. It’s perfectly reasonable to make generic categories for each task because you don’t want to be commenting on forums or blogs every day. It’s terrible inefficient and probably costs you more than you realize.
Next, rank each task. Rate each task on a scale from 1-5 on how important or effective each task is. If you’re promoting a blog, blog commenting might rank a five, as would submitting to blog carnivals. Networking on video web sites might rank a one. Initially you need to decide from your own experience or, if you’re unsure, use other’s experience to how effective each task is toward meeting your marketing goals. Make sure you rank each one honestly. A list of all fives is not going to help you when you go to plan out the month ahead. We all want to do everything, but most of us are limited by the time we can spend on each task.
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.
Once you have the plan finished, put into practice! Accomplish the tasks for each day before doing anything else. Don’t let email, phone calls, pet or other tasks distract you before you’ve finished. Once it’s done, you’re free to work on other business related tasks or take some time off. This is just a suggestion, as different people work differently, but the important bit is to make sure you finish the tasks for the day on the day. Work your plan!
Once you’ve gone through one month of your plan, take a few hours and determine which tasks moved you closer to your goals and which ones did not. Did you get more traffic, sales or leads from some tasks and none from others. Switch around the rankings for each of the tasks and based on those rankings come up with another plan. Other things may factor into your plan, can’t seem to get up the willpower to write blog posts on Monday’s, but the will is there on Tuesdays? Switch it around then! Keep refining your plan until it’s working the best for you. Then start outsourcing the tasks making you the most 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!
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:: Oct.03.2008 :: Marketing :: No Comments »
