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There's a quote: "A failure to plan is a plan to fail". I've found it to hold true. When things are done ad hoc or willy-nilly, they almost always end up in the wrong place. A marketing plan can give your online business focus and resolve to accomplish the important things while leaving out the unimportant. If you don't have a marketing plan, it's very likely you're struggling to make money and make your business a success. In this article, I'm going to cover the basics of putting together a marketing plan that will work for you.

First, you need to know the tasks you need to be doing to market your products. Are you going to focus on social networking or PPC? Maybe you'll optimize your sites for the search engines or an affiliate army. Come up with a list of no more than 15-20 ways you want to market your products. Make sure they're tasks. Something like "Front Page Of Digg" is actually a lot of other tasks - writing intriguing articles, networking with other Diggers, etc. List them all in a spreadsheet.

Now you'll rank each task. Rank each one on a scale from 1-5 on how important and effective each one is to your marketing goals. People who are focusing on promoting a site via social networking will obviously have different ranks for tasks than a person who is focusing on blogging. Ensure you have a fair distribution of each number. A list of all ones or fives isn't going to help you plan where to focus your time and effort in the forthcoming month.

Now you construct the plan for the next month. For most people, we can assume four weeks with five working days in each. Now take your ranked list from above and sort it so the fives are on top. Starting from the top, start putting the tasks into your calendar. I suggest you mark off Wednesday for fives as this day is less likely to be missed by long weekends and holidays. Mark the fives down as a task in every week, if you run out of time on Wednesday, put other fives on Tuesday or Thursday. The fours and threes then go more toward the edges of the week and are only done every other week. The twos and ones go on Mondays or Fridays at most once per month. When you're finished you should be spending the most time on the five ranked tasks and the least on the one ranked tasks.

Once you have the plan finished, put into practice! Accomplish the tasks for each day before doing anything else. Don't let email, phone calls, pet or other tasks distract you before you've finished. Once it's done, you're free to work on other business related tasks or take some time off. This is just a suggestion, as different people work differently, but the important bit is to make sure you finish the tasks for the day on the day. Work your plan!

Once you've worked your plan for the first month, it's review time! Now go over all the tasks you accomplished for the month and determine which ones drew you closer to your marketing objectives and which ones did not. Once you know this review your list and change any rankings needing changing. Next change the calendar so any new fives are being done every week and those having fallen out of five favor are more sporadically done. Once you've gone through a few cycles, you'll have a good feel for which are making you money and which are not. Once you know this, start outsourcing the ones making you money.

Making a marketing plan isn't very difficult if you take it step by step. And having a plan is very often the difference between success and failure. So start planning for your success today!