One of the best moves you can make for your business is to create an online marketing campaign. You'll spend far less money on online marketing than traditional forms of marketing. Some aspects of online marketing require no money, and you can still reach a large number of prospective customers. It's important to formulate a plan first, before you engage in any marketing activity. Here's how:

Select Your Online Marketing Mix

You have a number of options for the activities to include in your online marketing campaign. Not every option will work well for your business. Your job is to cherry pick which online marketing strategies will be most effective based on the customers you want to reach. A few examples of the activities you can include on your list are:

• Blog
• Article marketing
• Search engine optimization
• Email marketing
• YouTube marketing
• Social media marketing
• Pay-per-click advertisement
• Joint promotions with related companies

When you try to do everything, you'll spread yourself too thin and your marketing will suffer. Pick six or seven marketing methods and do them consistently and focus on quality.

Assign Frequency to Marketing Tactics

Write down the tactics you plan to use in your online marketing campaign, and assign a frequency to completing each task. Let's add to the above list, to show an example of what your list might look like:

• Blog: Daily
• Article marketing: Weekly
• Search engine optimization: Once a month
• Email marketing: Bi-weekly
• YouTube marketing: Weekly
• Social media marketing: Daily
• Pay-per-click advertisement: Once a month
• Joint promotions with related companies: Quarterly

Organize your list when you're done, so that marketing tactics are grouped according to frequency.

Determine Who Will Complete Marketing Tasks

You'll be doing much of the marketing yourself, especially in the beginning. Some tasks may need to be delegated to family members or professionals, when you lack the required skills or time to do it yourself. For example, if you're launching a highly technical website, you'll need to hire a web developer to do it for you if you've never built a website before. If you know the names of people you want to hire when you work on your online marketing campaign, then add their names to tasks. You can write "delegate" next to the tactic if you don't have someone in mind. Write the name after the frequency, so that it looks like this:

• Search engine optimization: Daily: Delegate

Research Your Top Competitors' Online Activities

Your competitors shouldn't drive your online marketing campaign, but they should help you close the gaps in your plan. After you've come up with one, check to see what your competitors are doing and how effective they are. For example, if they're getting 3,000 unique visitors to their website on a daily basis and you're only getting 300 a day, it's worth your time to figure out why. Pretend you've been hired to draft their online marketing plan, and write out what they're doing based on research you do on the web. Compare what you come up with to your plan, and either add more ideas to your plan, or modify it.

Post your online marketing campaign where you work the most when it's ready. Refer to it, and follow the plan according to what you wrote down.

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Daphne Mallory, Esq. is the co-owner of Mallory Writing Services and has written more than 100 articles helping home based business owners and entrepreneurs start and market their business. You can learn more about her here.