This being my three hundreth blog post I am going to publish an Internet Marketing Plan in several parts. With so many sites competing for traffic you have to stand out. What I hope to do with this series is to give my readers a clear strategy to building/marketing an e-commerce website and getting traffic to those carefully crafted blog posts. I will be publishing a step for step on how to best do that .

Goals

One needs to start somewhere and I am sure that if you are reading this you already have an idea of what you want to create. Goals are intimately related to every aspect of your business plan. You’ll want to massage your goals again and again as you research various aspects of your marketing plan. Goals ought to be both financial and non-financial and be related to the length of your marketing plan’s timeline. Below are some examples:

Non-financial goals:

To grow steadily in market share each year from the current ? to 32% over five years.

To grow the percentage of sales from our store’s website from 5% to 45% over five years.

Move from hobby site to a profit centre within two years.

Year one: add e-commerce capability.

Year two: develop an advertising revenue from both website and Rss/e-mail newsletter.

Increase the number of visitors and page views per a month, respectively over a period of six months using a combination of traffic-producing strategies.

Redesign the site using Web 2.0, E-commerce technology. Make the site visually attractive, interactive, and easy to maintain, over the next 9 months.

How to do it – Months 1-3

Links

• Inbound links not only bring appropriate traffic to one’s site but also improve rankings in certain search engines, such as Google.
• Find informational sites on writing, on small business and on marketing and submit pages from your site as suggested links.
• Discussion groups; Join and participate in about six discussion lists/forums (topical discussions carried on among subscribers by e-mail). Serve as a moderator of one of these. Of course, there are lots more where I can have an influence and attract subscribers, visitors and clients.
• Post something related to this month’s new product in each of my regular discussion haunts.

Web site and infrastructure

A web site is an ever-evolving entity. It is constantly changing, and needs adding to and improving.

• Make sure every article and feature at my site contains appropriate keyword metatags, which help for some search engines’ rankings.
• Revise or remove outdated information.
• Create and install “e-mail a friend about this page” utility.
• Install bookmarking tools
• Ponder changes I could make to convert more visitors to buyers.

Starting a Member Web Site?

Setting up a member website where distributors and sale agents can meet on line and gain product knowledge, and discuss products in a closed website that is only accessible to selected members. Websites like this can give a big input into you business. Such websites like this can be set up using technology from http://www.ning.com/ or www.drupal.com

Search engines

• Continue to monitor the amount of daily traffic which search engines are sending to you- where your visitors are coming from and which keyword phrases are bringing people to your site.
• Search engines can provide a wealth of information , in particular when used in relation to competitors website.

Publicity

• Decide on 6-12 industries to target for the rest of this year and compile PR contact lists for each niche.
• Distribute at least one press release this month designed to produce more Web site traffic and more RSS/Newsletter subscribers.

Direct mail

• Send Webcards of your business to executive directors of professional organizations for selected niche markets.

Product development

• Convert existing special reports into downloadable products and use them for selling material for users/distributors. Find third party outlets on the internet to sell your products.
• Persuade appropriate site owners to sell course/product knowledge from their site in exchange for a commission.
• Convert special information into audiotapes and make them downloadable

Posting content

Write, Post and Convert press releases into an articles
Post Press releases & Internet Marketing articles (previously written) at free content sites.

Is there anything you would add?

Check back soon for part 2