Marketing Efforts Failing?

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 the tasks you need to be doing to market your products. Are you going to focus on social networking or PPC? Maybe you'll optimize your sites for the search engines or an affiliate army. Come up with a list of no more than 15-20 ways you want to market your products. Make sure they're tasks. Something like "Front Page Of Digg" is actually a lot of other tasks - writing intriguing articles, networking with other Diggers, etc. List them 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.

On to actually building the plan for the next month. Limit yourself to five day work weeks for four weeks to start. Take the ranked list and start putting the tasks ranked five into your calendar first. I suggest using Wednesday for the fives, with overflow onto Tuesday or Thursday. These days are least likely to be disrupted by holidays or long weekends and thus will increase the likelihood they are finished each week. Tasks ranked five will be done every single week. Once you have filled in the fives, insert the fours and threes more toward the edges of the week and most likely only done every other week. Next come the twos and ones and they will be done on Mondays and Fridays and at most once a month. Once the calendar is finished you should see a clear pattern of spending the most time on the fives and the least on the ones.

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!

At the end of the first month, review your plan. Ask yourself, which tasks moved me closer to my goals and which ones did not? Which ones need a while longer to come to fruition and which ones are just complete duds? Go back to your original list and change the rankings for each of your tasks. Then revisit your plan and based on the new rankings, add or delete instances of tasks. Also, if you have issues with writing on Mondays, for example, and those tasks aren't being accomplished then move those tasks around so they are accomplished. Keep refining your plan month after month and 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!

About The Author Learn how to start and build your own successful & highly profitable Internet Business in 45 days... 100% Free! I'm Steven Lohrenz and I know from personal experience. Earn Money Online (http://www.onlinebusinessabc.com)