Before you begin putting your new online marketing plan in place for your business, you should analyse what exactly you have done to date in terms of your website and online marketing and therefore what is most pressing. You cannot achieve everything at once, so by being thorough about it, you can effectively spot where best to begin.

Evaluate your current status so you get a clear up-to-date picture of where you are starting from, where you want to go and what must be done to get there.

Analyse Your Overall Online Marketing Plan

Ask yourself the following questions about your current online marketing:

• How do you market your company?

• How do you promote your web presence already?

• Do you use Pay-Per-Click ads?

• How much do you spend on those ads?

• Are they working?

• How many unique visitors does your site get per month?

• What type of training does your sales team undergo?

• Why do you want to put an online marketing plan in place?

• What is the value of your average sale?

• Are you capable of exponential growth?

• What percentage of your revenues comes from leads generated by the Internet?

• How many sales / leads do you get per month from your website?

• What traffic techniques do you currently use to drive traffic to your website?

• How much are you currently spending each month to get that traffic?

• What is the average revenue per sale?

• What is the average profit per sale?

• On average, how often does a customer buy from you?

• Approximately how many current customers do you have?

• Approximately how many customers have ever bought from you?

• Do you periodically touch base with them?

• If so how often? How?

At the end of these questions, you should have a good report card on the overall health of your Internet marketing plan as it now is for your business. The answers to the above questions will let you know if it is working or not. It also starts to uncover some of the potential for growth that your business has!

Analyse Your Online Marketing Plan for Each Line

For each specific service or product you offer, ask the question:

Do you target Local Business Results on Google?

Are you registered with the online local business directories?

Do you use search engine optimization to show up for the natural search results?

Do you use article marketing?

Do you have a blog? If so, how often do you post?

Do you have videos on your site?

Do you use videos on YouTube and other locations to promote your site?

Do you use online press releases?

Do you use Pay-Per-Click?

Do you test and track you main web pages?

Do you use online Classified Ad Sites?

Do you use online Local Forums?

Do you use Audio Marketing on your site and also syndicate the audio on other popular sites?

Do you use email list building on your website?

All of the above methods should be in place in order to effectively market your business through your website. In fact most of these things should be done for each of the different product lines or services you carry. This is especially true if you target different markets, like residential and commercial. You need different approaches to reach each and while you may send them back to the same site, your Pay- Per-Click campaign, landing pages, classified ad site, local forums, email lists, videos, audios, articles and blogs should be tailored to each market.

Once you have done this vital homework prior to putting your online marketing plan in place, your online marketing plan has a far greater chance of success.