When writing your marketing plan, you start with your long term marketing strategies. Long term marketing strategies include search engine optimization, affiliate programs, and linking. Next, begin using shorter term marketing strategies like writing articles and press releases.

Short term strategies include joint ventures and classified advertising.

Regardless of which internet marketing techniques you choose to use, you need to implement these in the right order.

Some parts of your marketing plan, like search engine optimization and submission can be done one time. Now that many search engines use crawlers to crawl websites, your site will automatically spidered by the search engines.

If your site isn't getting completely spidered and all of your pages indexed, you may need a sitemap. Once you create your sitemap, you'll only need to update as necessary.

Other tasks, like writing articles and press releases will be an ongoing task.

To get the most from your marketing plan though, you need to be consistent. Jack Canfield writes about The Rule of 5 in his book, "The Success Principles". This is the technique he and Mark Victor Hansen used to promote their "Chicken Soup for the Soul" books.

Basically, the idea is to do five things every day to promote your products or services. This will be five marketing tasks.

You can select these from your marketing plan, or you can create new tasks to do. The idea is to market consistently.

For example, one day you could post your site to five new directories. The next day you could write an article, write one or two forum posts, and post to a couple of new directories.

The point is be consistent about your marketing efforts. Real success in marketing comes from doing it regularly.

If you track and test your efforts, you'll see success more quickly. You'll know how successful any internet marketing technique you use is by the results you get.

Some methods are easier to track than others. With articles, you can find out what sites offer your articles by doing a search in Google for the

title of your article. By reading your server logs, you can see where your traffic is coming from. This will tell you the success of each article.

Don't forget to factor in the money you are making into the equation. This may not be clear, especially if you are using articles because articles are a viral marketing technique and can't always be easily measured.

Build a foundation by starting with long term internet marketing techniques. Add other marketing techniques so you are continually increasing your exposure. The more you increase your exposure, the more traffic and sales you will get.