Stratgic Internet Marketing Scheduling - Key to Sanity and Profits?

Setting your strategic Internet marketing scheduling may be the key to your sanity and profits...


Now I've recently completed a third course this summer in marketing and web building. To say the least, my head was full to bursting - until I sat down and scratched it all out on a yellow pad.

The simple priorities are these:

1. You have to make profitable sales to stay in business.
2. You have to market to get leads and convert these to buyers.
3. You have to research and review your progress against plans you made.

Now, these three programs agreed on these three, but differed in how to get them done - and in the sequence you should work on them.

There were simply a few points they also agreed on as to how to do this - but they didn't agree on an order:

• Build your web presence with a web host and a domain name.
• Use a WordPress blog to add content.
• Add monetized links that are relevant and contribute to the content.
• Promote actively - often three times more than you would spend on anything else.

Since these courses were all built on search engine discovery, they all had basic SEO tactics in that training. Two of the three were hinged on social media marketing (which is a bit of an oxymoron, since social media shun marketers...)

But our point is how to organize this. I've read the stories where a person spent months on building up an ecommerce site only to make nothing on it (and thank Gawd for his day job...) My first training was devoted utterly to learning how to use their proprietary web-building software.

And the other extreme was a course where they spend hours telling you how to do social marketing - 15/16's of the course, in fact - and then gave the final hour was on how to monetize. Meaning that the bulk of their students would simply opt for more training - since what they taught in that sequence would keep the person broke.

However, the breakthrough was in the third one. Here, they said to do your research and find your market first - but that you were also finding how to monetize it as part of that research. Then you built your blog and started promoting.


Let me break with all three - they are all right and also wrong.

• You don't build anything overnight.
• You do continuously build and refine what you already had going.
• Promotion is a big part of marketing, but you also have to monetize constantly to convert viewers to buyers.
• And you have to have a plan, plus review the metrics of that plan to make any success.

Part of this was learning and breaking down a 60-day plan. Which was great - but it really was a finite recipe and couldn't be used without a great deal of other data. (Which is why they only gave it to you behind a hefty paid subscription.)

When gridded out, that plan really boiled down to a repeating set of actions, plus adding one or two new promotional outlets each week. 8 weeks of basic content addition, plus tons of promotion.

But it was even simpler than that.

Weekly schedule:

1. Research and Review:
   Review your previous week, all metrics, and create your to-do list.
2. Monetize:
   Find new income sources (affiliates or new products) that you can add - and sign up for them or create them for your sales funnel.
3. Promote:
   Content - add more linkbait (truly memorable blog posts) to your site.
4. Promote:
   Comment - find where people are linking to your site and comment on theirs. Or Stumbleupon, Digg, or Twitter about them, if no direct comment possible.
5. Promote:
   Converse - join in the conversation on various forums which have to do with your niche.

So: Research/Review - Monetize - Promote - Promote - Promote.

This also follows a longer cycle of what you are going to be doing. In the beginning, you need to spend a sizable amount of time defining your niche and the long-tail keywords you want to optimize for (and write content about). Part of this will be finding if that niche is actually one where people spend money - and you'll be finding affiliates or products that can be sold within that niche. Once you have these two established, you can spend the rest of the time promoting and getting yourself - and your products - known.

Those are the bare bones - and you can see that this has lots more below it to make it work.

But I hope you can use this to streamline what you're doing and so become more profitable...

Your views?

PS. Note that this is only five days worth of work. Take the weekend off with your family - or go read a book - or go hiking -- or do some more of whatever you still need to get done withyour jobs.. Your choice.

(photo credit: stayviolation.typepad.com )