Developing an Internet Marketing Plan for 2010

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Well, it’s that time of year again. Time to take stock of what worked and what didn’t in the previous year and to make a plan and set goals for the new year.

An Internet marketing plan has lots of parts, and they don’t all work for every business model. Here are some areas Internet marketers should concentrate on in the coming year.

• Blogging Regularly. I’ll be the first to admit that I struggle with this one. I have clients to write for, newsletters to put together, article marketing to attend to, and only when all that is done do I think about my blog. But regular blogging is important for building and keeping a readership, so my plan going forward is to develop an editorial calendar so I can write and schedule blog posts in advance.
• Social Media. Twitter, Facebook, StumbleUpon, Digg, and hundreds of other sites are all good for bringing in traffic. To be successful, you have to remember the social part of social media. Talk to other people, don’t make everything about you.
• Article Marketing. This is an effective way to find new readers for your blog or drive traffic to a sales or squeeze page. You don’t have to submit hundreds of articles, but you do need to be consistent, and to realize that article marketing is a long term project, not a flash in the pan.
• Forum Participation. Niche forums are the perfect place to find topic ideas. What questions are people asking? What do they talk about? These are the topics you should be writing about on your blog. But be careful…it’s so easy to spend a lot of unproductive time on forums. Don’t mistake socialization for work.
• Guest Blogging. Guest blogging is similar to article marketing in that you are providing content for someone else to publish. The difference is the audience. Since you’re writing for another blog in your niche, their readers are already interested in your topic. Guest blogging is great for driving targeted traffic back to your site.
• Blog World Tour. A blog world tour is like guest blogging, but much more intense. Typically, a blog tour involves spending a few days on each of several blogs in your niche. Nicole Dean did this with great success this past summer, and since then many other bloggers have followed her plan. You can find out more about how a blog tour works in Nicole’s Blog World Tour Planner.

The real key here is to stay active and stay involved. You can’t write and publish one article and then sit back and wait for the traffic to roll in. You can’t Tweet once and expect to gain a following (never mind what all those spam @replies will tell you).

Have you worked out your marketing plan for 2010 yet? Share your plans with us in the comments

P.S. One last thing–continuing education. This is absolutely vital if you want to be successful. Internet marketing changes constantly. What worked yesterday will not work today, so you need to keep up. The best way to do that is to get involved with a group of other marketers. I belong to one of the best on the web: Self Starters Weekly Tips, which is led by Lynn Terry. I highly recommend it.

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