Your Marketing Plan Template

During my research for popular search terms, I found that “marketing plan template” was on the rise. I decided to take advantage by writing a post about it. The research that provided this data was performed using Google Insights, which is a tool that I use regularly. Using this along with Google Trends, and you have yourself an excellent tool for finding out what hot topics will bring your blog some traffic.

Marketing Plan Template

Your marketing plan template should include solid research to determine what would bring in the maximum amount of traffic with the least effort. The good thing is that it is easy for regularly updated blogs to dominate key popular search terms. As a matter of fact, when you do a search, you are likely to see multiple blogs turn up on top with articles related to what you searched for. I find myself often seeing blogs pop up on the first page no matter what I am googling.

Research is a must for pretty much anything you are doing. You may be a niche site expert, and you know how vital it is to do your research before choosing a profitable niche. Or perhaps you are into statistics, and obviously you must do research. The problem is that people who unfamiliar with industries that require this kind of research do not know how important it is.

Video Marketing & Branding

Luckily, after your research, the next parts in your marketing plan can be fun. One thing I have noticed that people neglect, is their video branding. Not everyone who is trying to utilize YouTube for traffic brand their videos. When they are new to the video marketing game, they simply do not know and they risk potential theft by unethical internet marketers who do know about branding.

When I speak about video branding, I am clearly talking about the text that you add over the video. It is generally your URL where you want people to go after watching the video.

Tags, Categories, & All That Jazz

Something I have noticed in blogs owned by my clients, is that most of them have noindex, nofollow on tags and categories. This is functionality created by the All in One SEO plugin and others. It is the default setting for the plugin, and clearly the developers of that plugin knew nothing about search engine optimization and blogs. Your tags and categories are not recognized as duplicate content, but rather an alternate method of locating certain content within your blog. By not allowing these pages to be indexed and followed, you are closing doors on opportunities to get ranked in natural search. I have had multiple tags and categories outrank specific articles on some of my blogs, and I quickly make sure these are all indexable when I setup a new blog.

What is important is to make sure you are not abusing your tags. You want to use maybe 10 of them that are truly related to your content. This helps your search engine optimization immensely.

Make Your Article Important

There is one great way of showing search engine how important your content is. That is by linking to related pages that have already been indexed by search engines. Do you ever notice that articles you read often link to Wikipedia articles related to that subject? That’s because Wikipedia is loved by Google, and referencing a related article in the Wikipedia database is showing Google that your article is very relevant to that subject.

I often avoid linking to Wikipedia, and I opt to interlink to articles on my own blog instead. This helps my older articles attract commentary, and it shows Google that even my old content is updated and receives traffic.

Your article is only as important as you make it though. As I write this article, I am very much aware of the keywords I am using within the article, and what tags I am using around specific words and phrases. Notice up above where I bolded and italicized marketing plan template. Also, by using the word just now, I added to the keyword density of this article for that phrase while accounting for the amount of words I am using in this article.

Keep in mind the various seo obstacles that you face when writing an article. People always want to show off and say “just focus on the reader and not the search engine”. Well, I say that you can do both without sacrificing quality. I can easily insert a bit of seo by simply pointing out the techniques I am using in this article itself.

Blog Hopping is a Science

You obviously know by now that blog-hopping is an immediate way to get traffic. Did you know that how you blog hop is important as well?

What I mean by “how” is that for example, if I want to sell some ad space on my blog, I would use my direct link to my advertising page rather than to my homepage. When someone clicks my name from a blog that I commented on, the first thing they would see is my ad placements and rates. If I wanted to sell a service like web design or search engine optimization, then I would link to those pages instead.

For the purposes of seo, if you are smart and listened to what I said about categories and tags, then you can link directly to one of those from a related site. When Google follows the link, they would see updated content on those categories or tags often as you update your blog with new content. Are we connecting the dots here?

I like to think of blog hopping as a targeted marketing method. Not just because you blog hop on relevant blogs, but because you target specific content on your blog with your hopping activities.

Relevancy of Advertising

Do you take money just because you need it? I don’t. Well, I don’t really need it as much as I used to because my business is fairly successful. But if you are new to working at home, or simply not yet making money, then it could be tempting to accept advertising that is not relevant to not only your blog but your specific article.

Did you notice the ad to the left? It is related to what I am talking about right now… Working at home. If I placed an ad pushing beauty products, then it would obviously not be targeted advertising. I am sure there are some beautiful women who read my blog, but I wouldn’t target them alone. I am targeting my entire community of readers because we are all interested in working from home.

If you checked out my advertising page, you would notice that I offer a paid review service. Did you notice the cost. Presently it is $500 for one paid review, and I only offer one paid review slot per month. This ensures I do not mess with the quality of my posts in lieu of cash. I am not that hard-up, sorry. I have had to turn down money on this blog many times because the product either was irrelevant, or not containing the quality that I would recommend to my readers.

Discussion

Based on the many things I discussed above, it is important for your marketing plan template to pay attention to detail. Focus on quality while not taking away from search engine optimization. Make sure your content is in the right place before it gets published.

What steps do you take to ensure your marketing plan is on par with the top blogs in your niche?

Tagged with: Google Insights • Internet Marketing • Marketing • marketing campaign • Marketing Plan • marketing trends

Filed under: Advertising • Internet Marketing • Marketing • Research • search engine optimization

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