This site (ebook) offers tons of advice on planning a marketing strategy, but we'll just touch on some of the principles here. (Hey, if we told you everything here, you wouldn't have to read on. And that would be a poor marketing strategy on our part.) A marketing plan is a pivotal part of creating your business. Trying to build a business without a marketing plan is like trying to build a house without blueprints. Everything needs to be laid out beforehand to give you some kind of schedule to go by. Without it, you won't know where to begin and what steps to take throughout the building of your business. Basically, there are five parts to any good marketing plan: 1) Check out the competition. Go online and do a search for the type of business you are planning to open. Study their web sites and find out such things as how many hits the site has gotten, what kind of image the site conveys, if the site has advertising from other companies and, of course, what they are offering and for how much. Really evaluate what they are doing right and what they are doing wrong. Ask yourself, "If I was a potential client, would I be interested in what they were selling or would I simply point and click to the next site?" If the copy is good, catching, cutting edge, and really tugs at your pocketbook to "act now, act now, act now," then you know that you have a winner. Read and then reread their site. Truly study it and take detailed notes. Remember that your goal is not to try and paraphrase their copy or steal their content, your goal is to use their site as a guide to determine how similar businesses are marketing themselves. Your goal is to determine what makes them so great and how you can make yourself greater. Remember that you want to stand out from the rest. You want to be better than them and you ultimately want to steal their customers. The only way to do this is to determine why they seem to be pulling in a lot of customers, take what they are doing, make it your own by incorporating your image and uniqueness and make it 1000 times better.

2) Find your customer base and research it. Every business has a customer base, a certain type of consumer who it targets in its marketing strategy. Even a store like Wal-Mart that sells tons of different products caters to a specific customer in their promotions and their image. They may sell things that interest all types of people -- upper class, middle class, black, white, urban, suburban -- but they mainly target the demographic who they believe are most interested in their products. It goes back to the idea that you can't please everyone all of the time. One business can't cater to every single type of person, so its owners have to decide who they want their customers to be and base their marketing strategy around that. Using our trusty online thrift shop example, you would research fashion magazines and visit thrift stores to see who is buying vintage clothing. You may even consider handing out a questionnaire to people in those stores to find out if they'd be interested in an online site like the one you're planning on starting. Include a section on what they'd like to see on the site and what would make them shop there instead of at a similar site or store. Another (but more costly way) to determine your market base is to hire a freelance market researcher to do your research for you. They can conduct online and offline research, conduct surveys, etc., and really help you learn whom you should target. 3) Decide what you're going to sell. You've already figured out what type of business you want to start and perhaps even one product or service you will offer. Now you need to expand on that. Most successful online businesses don't just offer one thing. If their main goal is to sell a service, such as resume writing, they might also sell products like books on job hunting or quality resume paper. Or they might give away something for nothing, which is an excellent and powerful marketing tool. Along with information on their paid service, they might feature free tips and tricks on job searching, interviewing advice and articles about effective resume writing. They might even feature a free resume database where potential employers can come and search for potential candidates or a message board where candidates can exchange job hunting tips. On the other hand, if the business offers a main product, such as a resume writing software program, they might feature that product, but also offer several other related products or a related service. They might offer a downloadable free 30-day trial to hook in the clients to their great product. Then they might offer customers who purchase their software access to another program that automatically sends their resume to hundreds of employers at the touch of a button. Basically, you want to make your business and your web site more intriguing by offering your customers as much as possible. You want them to come back. You want them to send their friends and you want them to send their family members, too. Plus, this also lends credibility to your business and credibility is always a good thing!

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4) Create an image for your business. We'll get into this further in Part Five, but creating a unique image is as important a part of your marketing strategy as what you're selling. Image may not be everything, but it's definitely a crucial thing. It is what pulls together all the other aspects of your marketing plan. It helps set you apart from your competition, it helps define your customer base and it gives customers something to remember. Therefore, you have to choose a good and trademarkeable domain name, one that people can remember and that ties into what you're offering. You also have to decide on such things as a corporate logo. 5) Decide how to promote your business. Obviously, if you have an online business, you have to have a web site. Even if you already have a business and are planning to expand to the Internet, a high quality and professional web site is a necessity. We'll discuss this in more detail in Section Two. But how will you promote that site and bring in traffic? Chapter Three describes ways to market and promote your business. And, of course, 101 High Profit Businesses You Can Start Online With Little or No Money has all of the information you need to get started implementing your marketing plan. But when you write your plan, you should consider things like how and where you will promote your business. Will you use press releases, e-mail, banner ads, joint venture marketing or direct mail? Don't be intimidated if you don't know what all of these things are. Everything is explained further in Chapter Three, I promise. For a quick look at a sample marketing plan, please check out the next page!  Proceed To Chapter I Part 5: Creating An Image

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