A plan is nothing without its favourite sister, ACTION. They walk happily down the street hand in hand, earning massive amounts of money for your business. So once you have your Online Marketing Plan on the wall in front of you, you need to pin up another piece of paper. First write at the top in nice big letters, Action Plan. On this marvellous piece of technology you write an action you will do to improve your website, next to it you write the date it will be completed.

You will notice there is no excuse column on your action plan. I know other things come up in the line of business but you really must set aside time for improvement or things will never change. Saying “yeah, yeah, when I have time!” is the surest way to guarantee you’ll never have the time. The best way is to dedicate just ten minutes a day to improvement. It sounds like a small amount (and it is!) but you’ll notice a big difference in a short space of time. Surely you have ten minutes free in your day to achieve the results you want?

The simple fact is that you’re not in the position to have a 20 page business plan and keep it up to date. I know, when I started my first business, I had a 30 page business plan! It’s a great tool at the beginning of a business and if you’re just starting out I fully recommend you do one. But once you get into the day to day running of your business, updating a huge document every time something changes just becomes too difficult.

So, what do you do? Simple, you make a one page business plan. You’ll probably need a few of these for different areas of your business but they’re a lot easier to update and you can rewrite them in no time with a bit of experience. The free resources section includes a copy of my One-Page Online Marketing Plan that I use with all my clients. This sets our direction by working out what we’re selling and setting goals to achieve. I refer to it often when working on a project and use it to measure progress at every stage.

Now you have no excuse not to have an Online Marketing Plan, so use it!

Ok, so if you’re into business development at all, and I assume you are since you’re reading this ebook, you know the importance of having a business plan already. So I’m not going to harp on, the simple fact of the matter is you need to have one if you want your business to achieve its potential. You need objectives, you need goals, and you need a plan to get there.

End of story.