| 1. Determine your current
situation. How are you currently positioned in the market? How do
you compare to the competition? Where would you like to be in a
Year or in five years and how would you like to get there? Or more
appropriately how can you get there, as it is not always the way
that you want that works. Planning requires that you understand
how you currently stand.
2. Calculate your operational budget and
determine how much you can afford to spend on an Ad campaign. Also,
this is the stage to decide your campaign mediums and the
effectiveness of different mediums of advertising as it applies to
the specific nature of your product and or services. It also helps
to retain a percentage of your earnings towards future Ad campaign
on an ongoing basis.
3. Since customers are the life-blood of
any business, be sure to develop a good rapport with your
customers. To keep your customers visiting, buying and begging for
more let them know how much you appreciate their business. Do not
spare any personal touch you can invest in the relationship. It
will pay for your time and effort tenfold.
Create an Ezine to communicate with your
customers and to generate new leads. This can be achieved by
offering an opportunity to your visitors to subscribe to your
ezine from your website or purchasing leads from a leads company.
4. Now, depending on your current position,
you may not even have customers yet. If you are starting from
scratch, your first order of business would be to start growing a
customer base within your budget of course. Create or have a
Strong Sales Copy done for your promotions. Consider targeted Ad
campaigns through Google or other search engines.
You may also consider some of the other
‘Viral’ marketing Traffic Exchanges out there. Online
campaigns consist of generating traffic to your website as this
would improve your ranking with the traffic exchanges. Your
ultimate goal is to generate free traffic which comes from a high
ranking in the traffic exchanges. In other words, you need to
generate traffic first and then you can work on converting the
traffic into buying customers or better yet, return customers.
5. Hire, rent, or buy a coach/mentor and if
you can not afford one, get some of the informative ebooks and
magazines out there. Your decision making prowess would be much
better with this kind of backbone. Take note that even with all
the information you may acquire from books and magazines, nothing
compares to experience. Now, if you have to go on your experience
then you are setting yourself up to learn the hard and costly way.
6.I hope you are getting warmed up by now.
This one is a must-do for all Internet marketers. I am talking
about Forum participation and membership. In fact, this whole
article could have been written around link promotion, and only
one other means compares to Forums when it comes to promoting your
link/website and increasing your ranking. Join a Forum that
concerns your line of business. The Forum would promote your link
as a result of your participation in discussions and postings. The
flip side is that it also provides you for free, knowledge base
that compares to hiring a mentor.
7. Position your business to benefit from
other webmasters traffic. There are several ways to achieve this.
The most prominent is link exchanges with other websites that are
similar or complementary in nature to your business. You can do
this by writing to the owner or webmaster of other sites, you can
buy a link exchange program or join a link exchange. Most are free
to join and some charge very minimal fees.
8. As your customer base grows and you
start to reap the benefits of your actions. Be sure to acquire an
Auto-responder to manage email campaigns and Ezine delivery. By
now, your actions should start to show returns and you can
complement your campaigns by purchasing a leads building campaign
if you do not have one in place from the start. It is common
knowledge among the big hitters that a lot of sales come from
email campaigns. Use your Sales copy Ad to develop an email
campaign, and stay in touch with your existing customers. This can
also be used to sell new subscribers you generated using step#3.
9. Is your head spinning yet? Well if it is,
you are on the right track for success and should now learn to
relax and balance work and social responsibilities. This is a very
crucial step to achieving anything in life. We all need to step
back a little, so we can see more, refresh and increase
performance. Everything contained here would be useless if you can
not find balance. As you find relaxation, in whatever way you
choose, remember to build a support system and share your
experiences with acquaintances. You just might increase your
network while doing something that relaxes you. The country club
offers recreation and relaxation but, it also comes with
networking opportunities.
10. At this point you should evaluate your
performance and how much you are on Target or off. Go back to step
#1 and reinvent the wheel again. By now you have some experience
with your business and know what works best for your business. If
at any point you find yourself too comfortable, go over your
business plans with a fine toothcomb until you experience a little
discomfort. This step would always keep you sharp, focused, and
abreast of what needs improvement and adjustment. Remember, your
goal is to increase sales and not to get too comfortable. Stay
motivated and fairly dissatisfied. |
