If you've been around the Internet trying to earn a living for a while, then you know how many marketing systems there are available to buy. Every Tom, Dick, and Harry wants to teach you how to make money for a price. However, what works for one marketer may not work for another, so you need to know how to develop your own marketing plan.

But this doesn't mean you can't learn things from other people who have been successful. It just means you really shouldn't copy them completely. Leave some room in your marketing plan to add some of your own style into the mix.

What this implies is, you should begin developing your marketing plan as a blueprint rather than using a "cookie cutter" system. A blueprint is like an outline of components that gives you your own step by step of how your particular business will run, while at the same time giving you clearance to add yourself into it.

Then, as you work out how each component fits into your plan, you can determine how much time and effort each one should get.

For example, do you want to spend a great deal of time and expense on web site design, or does your marketing plan allow you to go with a simple blog system like Wordpress? Are you planning on lead capture for email marketing, or does you blueprint call for more pay per click advertising?

Naturally, this would depend on what you're planning to market.

In any case, a healthy portion of market research and testing can give you a better idea of how to bring all the components of your marketing plan together.

Let's say you're thinking of getting into promoting to various niches. Market research will tell you if a certain niche market is more prone to buying products off the shelf, or if they prefer information.

Promoting products to a niche more likely seeking information would obviously be a waste of time. But they may be inclined to sign up to a mailing list, or join a membership for a nominal fee if they would get the information they desired.

So as you can see by this one example, there really isn't a cookie cutter way to promote to every market. Each market has its own variables to consider, and doing your own research to find out what each niche calls for is the only way to reveal it.

However, there are sure fire ways to do the research you'll need. Thus if you're going to use methods from successful marketers, learn how they did the research and follow their lead in that.

Market research is especially important because, regardless of what plan you come up with, or how much of someone else's plan you incorporate, the most unique variable going into your plan is "you." You see, every successful business always has a personality of its own, and so you become that personality for your business whether you intend it to be so or not.

This might mean your market plan is better suited for certain markets, while not so much for others. Or it might mean you need to add more or less of your emotional qualities in some, while driving home your knowledge and expertise in others.

It all comes down to knowing your markets, and knowing what you're capable of adding to them. Doing the research and then testing how you and your market react to one another will give you a relatively safe marketing plan to go after and expand on.

So yes, use what you've learned from other people, especially successful people. But develop your own marketing plan by adding "you" into the mix, then do the research and testing needed to see whether you want to invest more time and money into it. Not all markets will be a match made in heaven for you, but knowing which ones are will get you on your way to success.