3-Step Guide To Writing An Internet Marketing Business Plan

Writing an Internet marketing business plan should be a top priority if you are just starting out building your online “empire”; this can be the map that your business follows over the coming months and years to guide it to where you need it to be.

It can be a little daunting for some people who have never written a business plan before so we have broken it down into 3 steps that we ourselves have followed at Melbourne SEO Services.

1. The Back End Of The Business

You need to create a stable foundation for your business by automating the back end; that means creating seamless ways for the sales funnel to attract and convert leads into sales of your products and services.

At Melbourne SEO Services we set up the following:

• The SEO free report – leads are sent an auto-responder sequence of emails over 3 months – pointing to different parts of the website including products and services; introducing the client to the business, bonding and creating buying opportunities.
• 4 different products –SEO Course/Outsource Course/Web Video/Small Business – info products that teach small business owners how they can look after their own marketing strategies.
• Workshops /Masterminds Sessions/ Coaching/ Services – SEO, ADP, Press Releases, Web Video etc (these are “done for you” services if you don’t want to learn how to do them yourself via the info product)
• The Affiliate Option – whereby affiliate marketers can promote our products like the SEO Method; this is $1300 and the affiliate can earn 40% for each sale with the other 60% coming to us.

2. The Front End Of The Business

Once the back-end web-based products, services, lead capture and conversion processes are doing their jobs, the next stage of our online business plan looks at organising the front end of your business; that means focusing on marketing and branding, which ramps up lead generation and sends more traffic to your website.

For Melbourne SEO Services this included:

• YouTube – creating video snippets and pushing leads to the back end through these videos
• Facebook and Twitter – mainly for bonding and positioning ourselves as experts in the field
• The Melbourne SEO Blog – to generate traffic and again demonstrate expert status with SEO
• DaveApproved – product reviews which provide industry tips to others
• Podcast Interviews – again helps with expert positioning

All the above provide free content and actively collect leads and send them to the website where they can enter the back-end sales funnel.

3. Monitoring And Finding The Magic Number

The final stage is to monitor your conversion rates and find the cost of each customer to you; then you can effectively go out and buy more leads through paid media like banner ads, Google Adwords etc.

As we pointed out in an earlier blog post you should be able to work out the average lifetime value of a client and then how many prospects it takes to convert one – then you know how much a single client is worth to you and you have the magic number that allows you to create a budget for “buying” new leads.

The above Internet marketing business plan creates a sound model that you can work your business towards. Once you finish stage 3 you should be able to step back, watch it look after itself and move more into acquisitions of complimentary businesses.

The Competition Crusher workshop has plenty more great tips on how to plan, structure and execute best business practices that help get you to where you want to be. Check it out by clicking here.