A Few Simple Steps to Online Marketing Success!

[caoimhghin]

I operate two successful websites and have been growing one of them for several years now. I'm also a principle developer for a major online destination to more than thirty million people every month. In my experience the number one thing I've learned is to create a plan, and then stick to it.

Especially if you're starting out or operate on a limited budget, stick to your plan. Every time you abandon one plan for another you've just thrown away most if not all of the time and money invested into making that plan work. If you abandon your plan too early, you never gave it time to work, and you'll just end up spinning your wheels and will never be successful. You'll never figure out what works and what doesn't, it will just look like nothing works to you.

Create your plan and follow it, here's how I do it in practice, using concrete terms. Implement this tiny little guide today, you will be happy you did.

Choose Your Marketing Weapons
Don't worry too much about getting this part perfect to start off, this is an iterative process, you'll see in just a few minutes. Take some time and focus instead on listing out all of the marketing weapons you can possibly think of, and be creative! People list these all over forums and in posts like this one, so browse around and build as comprehensive of a list as you possibly can. Here's a few to get you started:

* Email List: Post website updates, feature enhancements, statistics and current news to this list
* Major Directory Listings (bing, yahoo, google)
* Minor Directory Listings (all those free link directories out there)
* Run a twitter account
* Run a facebook page
* Run a google+ page
* Run a youtube account
* Post in forums
* Run display advertisements in forums
* Send personal invitations

These are just a few online marketing weapons; if you put your mind to it you can generate a list of over a hundred marketing weapons that are relevant for your product whether its online or offline.

Narrow Your List
It is a nice feeling to have an entire arsenal at your disposal, but now you've got to take a step back and ask yourself. With your limited time and budget, which subset of these weapons can you do, and do well?

What do I mean by that? Well for instance, if you choose to run a twitter account, but you only have the time and energy and know-how to tweet once per month, well that's not going to work for you. You've got to know how to use each weapon effectively, and have the time and resources as well.

You might find that producing videos for your youtube channel is fun and exciting so even though you can only do one per month, you decide to give it a go. There is no right answer except to find out what mix of weapons work for you. This is where you make some huge initial cuts and get that list down to something reasonable. But you still want to do as many of them as possible because they feed off each other.

Make Your Plan
Now that you have a narrowed list of weapons that you're going to use, its time to put down a plan. It won't work if you post to twitter 100 times today and then don't touch it again for two months. So to help you not forget, and hold regular usage of your weapons, you'll need a plan.

The plan is simple. Open up your favorite calendar application like Google Calendar, or get one of those big paper calendars you can hang on the wall. Now in each box you're going to note:

* Which marketing weapons are being used today?
* How much time do they cost?
* How much money do they cost?

Some of them you'll want to repeat daily, some weekly and some monthly. This is another area where you don't have to be too concerned with knowing exactly what schedules to use just yet, so take a wild guess if you have no idea and just put something down.

Execute Your Plan
A plan is useless if it isn't executed, so look at your calendar each and every morning and do what it says. Once you put your plan down, don't question it, just do it. Do as much of it as possible if not all of it and a little extra. Make note of any changes, anything you don't do, and anything you do extra.

Remember, don't over think this. You've got a plan, you're committed to that plan, so just execute that plan!

Measure and Revise
Over the course of a few weeks and months of sticking to your plan you will start to notice where some things are working and some are not. Here is where you iterate, and iterate fast! Drop the ones that aren't working and double down on the ones that are, its that simple. If you have some gaps or need another weapon, dip back into your broad list of weapons and pull out another one and put it on the calendar to give it a go.

Make sure you give each iteration enough time for you to measure and decide what is working and what isn't. If you act too quickly you'll cut off some things that could be huge winners and never know it. Always remember to execute and give your plan time to work.

---

That is literally all you have to do. Given a good product, and some direction, if you do what I've laid out here you will be successful. One of my websites might make a good marketing weapon for you to place in your arsenal, check out xlnkr.com and see if its a good fit.

[richard_hall22]

Thanks for sharing your opinion about on line marketing.

[caoimhghin]

Yup if there is any interest I will put together a more comprehensive list of online marketing tools or weapons and keep it updated with your contributions.

[BenNorman]

Would be cool to see more of a case study for your sites?

[Predator]

Nice share, thanks!!!!!!!!!

[Mediumcube]

That's a nice article.