Without a plan (and ideally a goal) for your internet marketing, you won’t know how well you’re doing.

You could be doing fantastically well, fantastically badly or anywhere between those extremes.

A plan helps you keep on track, even on those days where nothing seems to go to plan.

Here’s how to create an internet marketing plan without analysis paralysis.

Plans often work best when they’re carried out alongside goals.

Goals – or targets – tend to work best when there’s a plan on how to carry them out.

It’s up to you which you do first and which you do second but I’d strongly suggest that you do both.

Personally, I think that a goal is a good place to start. Although some of my mentors would tell me that a monetary goal is actually a target.

They’re probably right.

But I’m happy enough with monetary goals for a lot of things, so I don’t worry about the semantics too much.

You need to make the same choice.

But having a goal (or target) in place makes it easier to figure out what you need to do in order to reach it.

Don’t make your goals too far away

There’s nothing wrong with a 10-year goal.

But you need some shorter-term goals as well, otherwise it will seem that you’re never getting any closer.

Because in reality if your goal is likely to materialise in 10 years or 9 years time, it’s still a long way away.

So figure out some stepping stone goals that will help you get nearer your long term goal and put those on your plan as well.

Depending on how good you are at procrastinating, it could be that some of your goals need to be “by the end of today” or “by the end of the week”.

Something short term that you can ask yourself tomorrow morning (or this time next week) whether or not you’ve attained the goal.

That way there’s a lot less room for excuses to creep in.

Chances are you can remember what you did yesterday in quite some detail.

So you can go over what you did – and didn’t – do and work out whether it got you closer to your stated goal.

With the exception of a few memorable moments, try doing that 9 years into your 10 year plan. Unless you’ve got a photographic memory, I’d be shocked if you came anywhere close to a description.

Go public with your goals

That puts extra accountability on you.

People will come up to you – in person or on Facebook or Twitter – to find out how you’re doing.

And it helps force the issue of actually doing something concrete towards your goals.

Now work out how you’re going to reach your goal

This is the planning stage.

One relatively easy way is a bit like the way I suggest writing an article or creating a product:

Split your goal into several smaller sections.

Then sub-divide each section again.

Your objective here is to get rid of all the negative inner talk that your mind keeps creating. Or at least to quieten it enough to allow you to do something.

If it’s the first time you’ve done this kind of exercise, your aim should be to get the steps into bite sized chunks.

Depending on how much free time you’ve got, that could be items that should be able to be finished in an hour or maybe less.

That might seem daunting.

After all, if it takes you 2 hours to create a 2,000 word blog post (the length I’m aiming for in this post, always assuming there’s enough information to impart to fill that size of word count) and you only have 30 minutes available each day, how can you possibly do it?

The answer is quite simple: split that post into 4 parts.

Write part 1 today, part 2 tomorrow, and so on.

With day 5 set aside to promote your newly created post.

Tweet it, put it on Facebook and Google+ and LinkedIn.

Refer to it in a forum post.

Maybe create a short video related to it.

Maybe turn it into a document share.

Lots of things.

But without stopping to think about them, you probably wouldn’t have done them.

Beware the ever-increasing to-do list

It’s all too easy to spend all your time planning and no time doing whatever it was you’d planned to do.

If your to-do list today is longer than your to-do list yesterday, you need to take stock.

There could be all sorts of reasons for this happening.

They might be good reasons or they might not.

Things could be cropping up at the last minute that you simply have to deal with.

Firefighting can work but if it’s all you’re doing in your business, you need to ask yourself whether everything is working as well as it could be.

You might thrive on the adrenalin rush of doing everything at the last minute. Some people do.

But you also need to work out whether that’s the best way forward.

Are you putting yourself under too much stress by working that way?

Are you putting too much pressure on the people working with you?

There’s no single system that works for everyone.

And if you enjoy the pressure created by constant imminent deadlines then maybe that’s good for you.

But get an honest and trusted second opinion if you’re forever chasing your tail.

Choose someone who isn’t just a “yes” person.

Ask someone who will tell you the truth or ask all the right questions to get you to the point where you come to the answer yourself.

Monitor your time

You don’t have to do this all the time – I find a few days every few months keeps me on track.

Every 30 minutes while you’re working on your business, make a note of what you’ve been doing.

Set an alarm in your phone to remind you if necessary.

If you’re doing too many different things in a 30 minute section, drop the time accordingly.

But as a general rule if you spent over about three quarters of your time in that slot doing something, that’s what you should write down.

Then at the end of each day work out how productive each section was.

If you’re using a spreadsheet, colour code the cells.

If you’re using pen and paper, use a highlighter to do the same thing.

What tends to happen is that where you’re spending your time leaps out at you from the screen or paper.

Even if you’d not really noticed before.

And because you’re being monitored you’ll probably find that you automatically shift to being more productive.

Try it.

It’s simple.

And it works.

Work out what’s useful and what isn’t useful

With the long timescales in a lot of internet marketing, this can be easier said than done.

But it’s worth at least having a best guess at.

Some things you already know aren’t useful – watching those cats on YouTube, finding out what your friends ate for breakfast or where they’re planning to go tonight, those kind of time fillers.

Other things are more difficult to pin down.

• Will that video get any views?
• Will that article get read?
• Will anyone read your Tweet?

Individually, the answer is probably “anyone’s guess”.

But over time you’ll find a pattern builds up.

Those video views mount up.

Individually, a video may not get many views at all.

But collectively you might be in for a shock – one of my channels (where none of the videos have set any records) got almost 3,000 views in total last month.

I was pleasantly surprised by that – I’d been looking at the views for individual videos before then and if they stretched into 3 figures they were doing well.

This is long tail again.

Not many searches multiplied by lots of potential places each of those searches could show up multiplied by quite a few videos.

It mounts up.

Very nicely.

Because those videos are long tail keyword related and the people searching for them are more likely to be in buying mode than browsing mode.

Which is an extra bonus.

Because it’s not a linear relationship between views and money.

Ok, it might be for those cats if they’re monetised by ads on YouTube.

But for the rest of us it’s down to actual clicks on links below the video turning into a purchase.

After all, even though I was very happy to see nearly 3,000 views that wouldn’t translate to much income on a revenue share with YouTube.

The same goes for articles, document shares, forum posts, Tweets, Facebook posts, Google+ shares and so on.

Monitor them.

And do more of the things that bring you in traffic or subscribers or sales.

Add them to your plan.

Move them further up the never ending to-do list.

Whatever it takes to get you to do more of them and move your plan closer to being completed.

Scrub the useless stuff from your plan

We all have things that seemed a good idea at the time.

Often we have time and probably money sunk into them.

Which means we’re inclined to keep at them, even though deep down we know they’re a waste of time.

Have a purge every now and then.

If you’ve not done something that’s been on your list of things for the last few months, work out whether it really is important.

If it is, set aside some time to do it.

If it isn’t, consign it to the scrap heap.

The same logic goes for things you’re doing a lot of.

Are they helping?

Or are you just doing them because you’ve always done them.

I did that with EzineArticles for longer than I should have done.

I cut the frequency, sure.

But I was still creating content for a site that Google had long since decided wasn’t worth the effort of showing in the search results very often.

So ask yourself whether what you’ve been doing for as long as you can remember is still worth doing.

Then act on the answer.

Even if it’s not the one you were hoping for!

Revisit your goals and plans

Goals and plans change over time.

That’s the nature of things.

But if you’re still aiming for a goal that was relevant to you a few years ago but now doesn’t hold any interest, take the time to bin it or revise it.

There’s no point in doing something just because you’ve always done it!

So every few months, just run a quick reality check over your goals and plans to make sure they’re still in alignment with where you want to be.

If they are, great.

If they’re not, do something about it.