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There's a quote: "A failure to plan is a plan to fail". I've found it to hold true. When things are done ad hoc or willy-nilly, they almost always end up in the wrong place. A marketing plan can give your online business focus and resolve to accomplish the important things while leaving out the unimportant. If you don't have a marketing plan, it's very likely you're struggling to make money and make your business a success. In this article, I'm going to cover the basics of putting together a marketing plan that will 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.

Next, rank each task. Rank the task on a scale from 1-5 based on how effective the task is at bringing you closer to your goals. If you're focusing on getting to the top of social bookmarking sites, writing articles and headlines are going to get a five rating as is networking on those sites. Other tasks, like video promotion might only receive a one. I can't say for sure what is working or what will work for you, but based on your best guesses at this point rank them all. Be sure you're fair in your assessments and priorities. A straight ranking of fives for everything is not going to help you determine where you need to focus your effort and time.

Now you construct the plan for the next month. For most people, we can assume four weeks with five working days in each. Now take your ranked list from above and sort it so the fives are on top. Starting from the top, start putting the tasks into your calendar. I suggest you mark off Wednesday for fives as this day is less likely to be missed by long weekends and holidays. Mark the fives down as a task in every week, if you run out of time on Wednesday, put other fives on Tuesday or Thursday. The fours and threes then go more toward the edges of the week and are only done every other week. The twos and ones go on Mondays or Fridays at most once per month. When you're finished you should be spending the most time on the five ranked tasks and the least on the one ranked tasks.

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!

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