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Five Steps to Making the Most of Your Website
Create a Marketing Plan

by Charlene Polanosky

Is your web site (blogs fall into this category, too) accomplishing what you had planned for it? You don’t know? What plan, you say? Just like any other business, a web site needs a marketing plan. If you are under the mindset of launch it, blog it or sell it and they will come, you are wasting your precious resources (time and money).

How many times have you heard the following saying?

Plan your work and work your plan!

This saying holds very true to the web, too. Without goals, strategies, and timelines, you are just wandering through cyberspace hoping to get lucky.

STEP 1 - DEFINE YOUR PURPOSE

Before you even create your first web page or blog post, you must have a purpose for your site in mind. Why are you creating it? What do you want or expect your site to accomplish? Some possibilities are:

Inform potential customers about product or service you offer, information about your company and other basic information
Inform existing customers on new products, services, company happenings
Sell your product or service to a wider audience on the web
Create an online community for those with similar interests
Express your individual thoughts through online journaling (blog)
Communicate your thoughts and opinions with potential and existing customers
Generate passive income through ad and affiliate streams

Of course, there are other reasons to create a site and often times you will find yourself having more than one purpose to your site.

Take Away Activity: Create a notebook - nothing fancy - to do some brainstorming. Write down the reasons why you launched your site and ultimately what you hope to accomplish with your site. This will lead you to the next step of setting goals - and we will address that in the next segment.

STEP 2 - SET GOALS

You have defined the purpose for your site, so now you need some goals. You need to set realistic goals - some short-term, some long-term.

Define timeframes:

Get your web site marketing notebook out that you created in step 1 and write down three categories:

One month
Six months
One year

Define goals:

For each of these categories, write down a handful of goals. Depending on the purpose of your site, not all of these will apply, but some ideas include:

Number of unique visitors (i.e., a certain level of traffic to your site)
Number of leads
Number of subscribers (to your RSS feed, newsletter, etc)
Number of downloads (could be an article, newsletter, e-product)
Sales amounts (number of products or dollar amount)
Number of members (for a discussion board or similar)

Once you have defined your short term goals, sit back and think long-term. Where do you see this site in 3 years, 5 years? With technology changing at the rate it is, these are a little tricky, but you will reassess along the way. Without a beacon far off in the distance or some form of a road map for your site, you may look back and find that you have been going in circles, never really moving forward.

STEP 3 - CREATE STRATEGY

In steps 1 and 2 of creating your marketing plan you defined your site’s purpose and set some goals. In step 3 you need to lay out a strategy for achieving those goals - after all, your site isn’t going to grow all by itself. You will need to do some research and some trial and error to figure out what methods work best for you, but here are some ideas.

Search Engine Optimization and Submission

Take some time going through your site and make sure you are using standard search engine optimization techniques (Self SEO has great tips) and hand submit your site to the major search engines (some say this isn’t necessary - I say it can’t hurt).

Keep Your Content Fresh

Your site will get indexed more efficiently and visitors are more apt to come back if they see that your site has regularly updated information on it.

Social Networking

Posting comments on relevant blogs and getting involved in discussion boards/forums is a great way to get the word out about your site. The key is to get involved in a meaningful way. Don’t just spam. When leaving comments on blogs, add to the conversation. Forums can be an excellent way to boost traffic, establish yourself as someone in the know, and to network. Again, do so with the attitude of giving more than you get and you’ll be happier with the outcome. (Great article on Using Forums to Promote Your Website)

Traditional Advertising

Depending on the type of site you have and/or the product you are selling, don’t forget traditional advertising vehicles. At a minimum, you want to make sure you have your web address on your email signature, your business cards, and printed collateral. Newspaper, magazine, radio and TV spots may be worthwhile too; you just need to know your audience.

New Media Advertising

Is a pay per click campaign just what the doctor ordered? Maybe, maybe not. From link exchanges, banner ads, Adwords, Overture, and affiliate campaigns, it just depends on what you are trying to accomplish with your site. If you choose these options, be sure to allow sufficient time for them to work. Many companies abandon marketing campaigns before they have had sufficient time to be successful. Do your research!

You will need to prioritize your tasks and allocate the proper time and monetary allowances, then get ready to work your plan. Tomorrow we will focus on working the plan, because you are ultimately the one who must put the wheels in motion.

STEP 4 - WORK YOUR PLAN

Step 4 of creating a website marketing plan is kind of like embarking on a diet or other life enriching activity - you may know what to do, but if you don’t work on it, nothing will come of it! You have defined your purpose, set goals, created a strategy and now you have to follow through and work the plan.

There are many tools available to help you stay on track, but you have to actually use them. Find the tool that fits your personal productivity style and use it.

David Seah has some wonderful printable task planning sheets available for download. These can help you allocate time and resources for your marketing tasks throughout the day/week/month. Some tasks will need to be done daily and others weekly or monthly. Pencil them in on your calendar for the entire month and they will be less likely to be forgotten.

Another method is to look at your week and set certain tasks to occur on certain days. Maybe you spend 30 minutes on Mondays planning your posts or news for the week, Tuesday’s marketing time is spent reviewing and tweaking affiliate and other monetization links, and so on. If you have multiple sites, you may want to set aside different days for different sites or similar activities for all sites on the same day. Whatever works for you!

STEP 5 - TAKE STOCK AND REASSESS

How do you know if your plan is working? Periodically you have to step back, evaluate and reassess your methods.

One of the most frequently made mistakes in small business is not giving your marketing efforts enough time to work. These things take time. You are not going to get indexed on all the search engines overnight. You are not going to build a newsletter subscription list overnight. You will not sell 100,000 mega-niche widgets overnight, either.

Set a schedule for reassessment. Check in on your results monthly, do a bit of tweaking along the way and look for patterns. Most marketing efforts take a good 3-6 months to really do their job. Look at your plan and results after 6 months. What is working? What is not? Have you learned some new tricks along the way? Use your orignal marketing plan (you know, the one you have been creating with me this week) as a first draft. Revise and re-implement.

Continue your cycle of assessment, revision and implementation every 6 months or so. Over time you may discover that you only need to do a major revision yearly. Again, these variables ultimately depend on your website and its goals.

P.S. I really hope this series was useful and that it will help you achieve greater success in your business! If you wish to use the article on your site, credit it properly.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Charlene Polanosky is a mother of three who has been making the 30 Second Commute since 1996 as the owner of Keystrokes Design & Marketing,