Tuesday, November 07, 2006

Internet marketing plan

How to develop an Internet marketing plan for your web site...

Many Internet marketers still just blindly create web site after website, hoping to collectively get enough traffic to start earning good money online.

The problem?

There's very little chance that their business will get any kind of high results because there are just so many little things to be done correctly in order to skyrocket any online business.

Lets face it. There's a lot of competition out there, not all ideas will give results and there's no way to get all the steps done without a proper plan of action...

Think about it! Without a plan, you're "on your own". People tend to get very excited at the beginning of creating their web site, but very soon they discover that it's a lot more work than they previously thought and if they have nothing to follow, they will usually leave it and get excited about another project that'll similarly go down the drain.

Most of the times it doesn't take much... just a few simple (yet somewhat time consuming) steps and a web site can become a success. This happens when a person develops his or her Internet marketing plan.

Here is what I realized: the difference between very successful web sites and "duds" (= very unsuccessful web sites) in the long run is consistent development (on page and off page).

And this only happens through thorough planning, which we'll briefly discuss here:

Even before creating a single page one should first write the general construction of the site on a piece of paper. Don't panic... very few people know everything that's going to be on their web site before they start designing it.

But a very general structure can be made, for example:

This way you'll now be able to make templates and have a good idea about your internal linking strategy. If you intend to create your whole web site as a blog, then many of these things will already be made for you.

You can very easily install a blog on your web site using Blogger or Wordpress. In my other Web site marketing blog I used Wordpress. It took me about 5 minutes to install it. It's really easy. For my other web sites I use FrontPage. Many people swear on DreamWeaver, it's up to you to decide that. Both of these programs will give you a not so clean code, but at least you'll have a web site.

The next thing you should consider is your graphics. I really recommend having your graphics made by a professional designer. There are many of them and they do a great job. You can get a header and footer done for prices ranging from $50-$97.

This is very important for your sales letters and product images. The whole package will many times cost about $120, but the results in sales are staggering -- I run several other web sites and just recently I received an email from one of the subscribers. I replied and he then immediately replied back thanking me for such a quick reply and telling me that "... other Gurus never take time to answer my questions...". WOW, I'm a Guru now :-)

It's all because my site looks professional. It's also much more appealing to buy from someone that seems to have put some work into his web site (even if he outsourced everything!).

This is it for this post. Hope you enjoyed it.

In the next "Internet marketing plan" post we'll go on with planning our web promotion. Have a great day!