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Failure to plan is a plan to fail. That was alway drilled into my head during my days in the Army. Do you have a plan for your business? Are you working the plan? If you have no plan or are not working the plan, this could very well be the reason you are failing to succeed in your marketing efforts. I'm going to cover some basic guidelines to help you more efficiently market your blog, website or products.

First, you need to know what things you are going to be doing to market your product. Is it commenting on blogs or forums? Using StumbleUpon or Delicious? Submitting articles? Maybe you'll optimize for the search engines or use web video sites. Whatever the list compile it into a spreadsheet program. It's perfectly reasonable to make generic categories for each task because you don't want to be commenting on forums or blogs every day. It's terrible inefficient and probably costs you more than you realize.

Next, rank each task. Rate each task on a scale from 1-5 on how important or effective each task is. If you're promoting a blog, blog commenting might rank a five, as would submitting to blog carnivals. Networking on video web sites might rank a one. Initially you need to decide from your own experience or, if you're unsure, use other's experience to how effective each task is toward meeting your marketing goals. Make sure you rank each one honestly. A list of all fives is not going to help you when you go to plan out the month ahead. We all want to do everything, but most of us are limited by the time we can spend on each task.

Now you construct the plan for the next month. For most people, we can assume four weeks with five working days in each. Now take your ranked list from above and sort it so the fives are on top. Starting from the top, start putting the tasks into your calendar. I suggest you mark off Wednesday for fives as this day is less likely to be missed by long weekends and holidays. Mark the fives down as a task in every week, if you run out of time on Wednesday, put other fives on Tuesday or Thursday. The fours and threes then go more toward the edges of the week and are only done every other week. The twos and ones go on Mondays or Fridays at most once per month. When you're finished you should be spending the most time on the five ranked tasks and the least on the one ranked tasks.

Now that we have a bright new shiny plan, act on it. It's not going to do very much good if it's sitting around gathering dust! Each day look at your plan and do the tasks on it and what is on it until it is done. Do not check emails, answer support calls or other tasks. You need to get your marketing done as quickly and efficiently as possible. No distractions.

Once you've gone through one month of your plan, take a few hours and determine which tasks moved you closer to your goals and which ones did not. Did you get more traffic, sales or leads from some tasks and none from others. Switch around the rankings for each of the tasks and based on those rankings come up with another plan. Other things may factor into your plan, can't seem to get up the willpower to write blog posts on Monday's, but the will is there on Tuesdays? Switch it around then! Keep refining your plan until it's working the best for you. Then start outsourcing the tasks making you the most money.

Making a marketing plan isn't very difficult if you take it step by step. And having a plan is very often the difference between success and failure. So start planning for your success today!