10 Steps to Creating Your Internet Marketing Plan
Copyright 2006 Donna Gunter

If you're the owner of a small service business, having a
solid Internet marketing plan in place can both increase
your name and brand recognition locally in your geographic
area, as well as expose you to a whole new set of potential
clients throughout the world. If you have a business plan
or vision that is written, you only need to integrate this
Internet marketing piece into that existing plan. However,
if you are like many of my clients, you carry your business
and marketing plans in your head without bothering to
commit anything to paper.

Here are ten considerations you need to make as you
complete your Internet marketing plan:

1. Objective of Internet Marketing Plan: What do you want
to accomplish by using Internet marketing? To find new
clients? Provide services and info to existing clients?
Sell services or products? Educate your target market or
your staff about your product or service? Create an online
community for your target market? How much money to have to
spend each month on this Internet marketing plan? Having a
goal and budget in mind will make your marketing more
effective.

2. Marketing Funnel: The most successful online business
owners have a marketing funnel (think of it as an upside
down triangle) through which they "funnel" clients. The
process begins from the wide top of the funnel,
representing low-cost products or free give-aways, and
moving clients down through the funnel to the narrower
portions which represent gradually increasing investments
from the clients from your higher-priced products and
services. What products and services do you currently
offer? Are they at varied price points that would create a
funnel effect? What plans do you have to increase your
product or service line? Will those new offerings plug
gaps in your marketing funnel?

3. Your Competition: Knowing and understanding where you
stand among your competitors can you help you strengthen
your marketing message. Do a keyword search for the terms
someone might use to find your business online. Write down
the URL's of your top 5 competitors. How popular and
relevant are their sites? You can check their traffic
ranking with Alexa, http://www.alexa.com/#traffic, as well
as see what other sites link to them. Does your competition
offer something unique? Where are the gaps in the service
or product offerings?

4. Target Market: Instead of trying to marketing to
everyone (the shotgun marketing approach), find a clearly
definable target market that you can easily describe and
locate. Are they male or female? What age group? What
industry? What socio-economic group? Where do they hang
out on- and off-line? What do they read? To what groups and
associations (real and virtual, personal and professional)
do they belong? How much money do they make? Can they
easily afford your product or service? What keywords are
they using to search for businesses like yours online?
(Note--you can do keyword research with free downloadable
software, http://www.GoodKeywords.com).

5. Solution to a Problem: The reason that someone will
buy your product or hire to you to provide a service is to
solve a particular problem that they have. What problems
and issues plague your target market? How does your
product or service solve that problem? How does your
solution differ from that of your competitors? What makes
you uniquely qualified to provide the solution to their
problem?

6. Branding Your Business: Your domain name can either
help you be memorable or cast you into a sea of "brandless"
solutions. At a minimum, you'll want to buy both your
personal name as well as the name of your business in the
.com version, if it's available. Then buy the .com
versions of your product names and program names. If you
use a full-featured domain registrar, you'll be able to
point and mask these domains to internal pages of your web
site, or use them as stand-alone sales letter pages.

You may also think of problems faced by your target market
or solutions that you provide and buy domain names in the
.com version of those as well. Internet marketer Dean
Jackson brands his ebook on how to stop a divorce by owning
the domain name, StopYourDivorce.com, This is a compelling
solution to his target market -- men who have been ignoring
their wives' complaints of marital dissatisfaction and come
home one day to an empty house and a note telling him that
she's filing for divorce.

7. Assess your website. Your web site should be visually
appealing, with one primary font for the text and a simple
primary color scheme, along with an easy-to-navigate
layout, and readily identifiable buttons to link to other
pages in the site. Your content should focus on and
address the problems of your visitors and how your product
or service can help solve their problems. Rather than
listing the features of your product or service, detail the
benefits they'll gain from purchasing your product or
service. People rarely buy features -- they buy benefits.
Don't depend on your web site designer to write your
content -- that is best done by you, as you know your
business and your target market better than anyone.

Present a clear call to action that is clearly shown on
every page of your site. In an online business, your
primary call to action should be getting the visitor's name
and primary email address by asking him subscribe to your
ezine or by giving him access to a free ecourse, special
report, audio recording, or ebook. Lastly, provide an
abundace of readily available information to demonstrate
your expertise (articles, blog posts, free downloads,
giveaways, contests). Your visitor is always asking WIIFM
(What's In It For Me) -- make your web site about your
visitor, not about you.

8. Online Business Management Technology: Do you have
access to the appropriate services and technology that will
help you sell your product or service online? At a minimum
you'll need a merchant account (permits you to take credit
card payments) that includes a virtual gateway (enables you
to process transactions online) and a full-featured
shopping cart that will permit you to sell both physical
and electronic products and create a series of
autoresponders to follow up with buyers and non-buyers
alike. Depending on your marketing plan, you may also want
to investigate email newsletter distribution services,
online appointment setting services, stand-alone
autoresponders, blogging software, article submission
sites, online press release distribution services, website
content management services, and links exchange management
services and software.

9. Internet Marketing Strategies: How will you create
traffic to your website? There are countless ways to do
this, including: pay-per-click purchases (in which you buy
a keyword at a search engine and pay for placement on that
search engine for that keyword and pay for each visitor who
clicks on that link and is sent to your site); organic
search engine listing ranking (in which your site comes up
at the top of the non-sponsored listings on a search engine
by having keyword rich descriptions in the page title and
page desciption meta tags and then optimizing each page for
no more than 3 keywords in the first 250 words on a page);
well-written email newsletter that is published on a
regular basis; submission of articles on topics related to
your target market to article submission directories;
regularly post entries to a blog aimed at your target
market, full of content discussing issues related to that
target market; series of podcasts containing interview with
experts of interest to your target market; ongoing series
of teleconferences containing value-added content for your
target market; submission of online press releases with new
tips information for your target market; exchange relevant
links with others in different industries with the same
target market;

10. Building a Team: You'll never be able to do this all
alone. The most successful business owners don't even try.
You need to add experts to your team who are great at what
they do so that you've got the time and energy to go out
and do what you do best -- selling your products and
services to your target market. Some great experts to add
to your team include a virtual assistant or online business
manager, an online business coach, a web site designer, a
graphic designer, a writing expert (editor, ghost writer,
proof reader or copy writer), a bookkeeper, and
intellectual property attorney, to name a few.

To conduct a successful Internet marketing campaign, you
need to integrate your plan into the overall marketing
plan/business vision that you have for your service
business. Some businesses will thrive off Internet
marketing alone; however, for most, Internet marketing
simply complements and enhances your offline marketing
strategies.
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Tomas Hoff
Pay It Forward 4 Profits
The Sun
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