An online business strategy is a focused plan of action created to propel your business specifically online. With a proper strategy you can create an environment where you are creating your business instead of reacting to your business;  where everything you do will create an opportunity for growth and your efforts are analyzed along with the results, so that your next steps come with ease and great knowledge. This is particularly important online where the competitive market is so rich and marketing can be expensive or time consuming.

There are three parts to this process:

• Planning
• Implementation &
• Reporting/Analyzing

Here is some more information on the planning portion:

Having a focused plan the meets your business needs is the foundation of this process. Your plan should include at least your current business model, future business model/outlook, online marketing plan and reporting data. By seeing your current business as it relates to your future goals you can immediately start to see the amp-ups needed; this creates a plan to fill in any holes you have in your business model and will lead the way into the rest of your plan.

The Online Marketing Plan can be created in several different ways. Based on our own experiences we suggest incorporating several mini strategies within your marketing plan:

1. Create an online prospect funnel - where and how you funnel prospects into your business
2. Create an annual or monthly editorial calendar - in an online business with blogs, article sites, social media and other content needs, it is important to know where your efforts are needed.
3. Map out the marketing needs of each individual product or service - having a mini marketing plan for each product launch is important
4. Map out the marketing needs of your general online business - once you know the above you can then map out how you will be creating more general traffic and what resources you have left to allocate to this plan

In addition, your plan should include any current traffic, prospect and customer information you may have. Then decide on the best way to further track and/or amp up your tracking to really understand what every effort creates in your business.  Based on the data, you can decide to continue to implement it or not.

Are you scrambling through your marketing efforts with no focus for your online business? Social media, articles, blogs, google ads, SEO; there is a lot to understand (and I haven't even listed half of it!) Did you know that 95% of online businesses fail?  If you are ready to create more success and continual growth in your online business schedule your free 1-1 eSuccess Strategy Session with me, Melinda Janicki Your Online Business Strategist and we will get really clear about what an online strategy can do for your business! Click here to schedule this business changing session today!