1. Create a web site marketing plan - if you fail to plan then you default to a plan for failure. When designing your web site, create a plan on how to market it as well. Try to put yourself in your customers shoes when doing this. It's too easy to just view your web site from your own perspective. You need to have a clear vision for your business, goals (short and long term) you wish to achieve and strategies of how you will accomplish them.

2. Define your target market - many online marketers promote their web site aimlessly in a field which is too large i.e. they may use bulk mailing as one of their promotion strategies. Of course you may get some visitors but chances are you will not make many sales. Why? You have not narrowed your field of customers and targeted them. If you sold Cadillacs online for instance, you are not randomly going to market to every person on Net. Your target market may be previous owners of cadillacs, or people who routinely purchase luxury American cars.

Getting targeted customers to your web site, will increase sales, because they will have more interest in your product or service than marketing to a general audience.

3. Use several promotion strategies - don't just stick to one form of promotion because you never know which one will work best for you. If you use many channels i.e. search engines, email marketing, forums, writing articles etc you have a greater chance of getting more traffic to your web site.

When to create your web site marketing plan. Most of us probably create a web site first before we plan to market it. However just like a business plan, you should prepare your marketing strategy ahead of time. What's benefit of doing this? The further you plan ahead easier will all pieces of your web site fall into place.

Give me an example please Recently I was working on an ebook. Before creating it, I worked on creating sales page for web site. This meant I had to think first of all benefits ebook would be to my customers plus research appropriate keywords to weave into my web copy for my web page to rank well in search engines.

If I had done this backwards and created ebook first, I would have wasted hours of time redoing my web copy to fit my web site marketing plan.

Here are 7 steps to creating your web site marketing plan 1. Begin with end in mind - create a vision what you want your web site to accomplish. Define a vision statement i.e. “I will develop a highly profitable web site within 6 months”.

2. Set doable goals - depending on your product or service, write down one or a set of goals you BELIEVE you can accomplish i.e. “I will turn a profit of $500/month at end of 6 months”.

3. Choose a few marketing strategies - based on your research, pick a few strategies to begin with that you know you can accomplish. This could include optimizing your web site for search engines, placing an ad in an ezine, or writing an article to submit to online publications.

4. Create a time line and set a deadline - create a horizontal line on paper or on a white board (where you can easily view it each day) and divide this line up into days, weeks or months (or whatever duration you decide) of your marketing campaign. Then mark beginning and ending dates of your campaign, plus what type of marketing method you are using.