Knowing when you’re ready in your internet marketing is a perennial problem.

After all, with what’s essentially a moving target, how do you know when you’re ready?

The quick answer is that you don’t know until you actually launch or maybe even later than that.

To a fair extent, “ready” on the internet means “ready enough not to get too many people complaining”

That means relevant web pages should exist, downloadable files should be available for download, videos & audios should play, that kind of thing.

It’s acceptable if there are some things that are coming soon – you could possibly mention that in your sales letter or email so long as you remember to change things, unlike my doctor’s surgery which is still telling me that they were closed for staff training a month ago. Or my local pub which is displaying times for football games that are all a month ago. Even a local branch of a big supermarket had shelf edge labels referring to Christmas well into the following year.

Which goes to show that it’s not just internet marketers who forget to change things or keep them up to date.

That’s a different form of being ready but is equally relevant. That kind of glaringly obvious to everyone else detail (to everyone else) is often overlooked.

Being ready is often just a matter of going through a checklist and making sure that things have happened.

If you’re launching a new product then the checklist will be longer than if you’re simply testing a new squeeze page or just creating a new piece of content for your website.

For instance, when I create a new piece of content, the checklist is along these lines:

• Create a title – that may be keyword researched or it could just be one that I think is relevant enough. Interestingly (or frustratingly) Google will change the title it displays if it thinks it knows better than you do.
• Create the content – preferably on topic! But if I drift too far as things crop up while I’m writing, I’ll change the title accordingly. That happens about once in every 4 or 5 pieces of content on a “just because” basis.
• Add in any relevant links – I normally do this as I’m typing away in WordPress otherwise there’s an excellent chance I won’t remember to do it later.
• Press the publish button, view the post and read it through in case I’ve got any glaringly bad typos or errors. Early on, I’d copy and paste it into my word processor and run a spell check but nowadays it’s rare for me to do that and the occasional typo does creep in. That gets found if I copy the content into a slideshow and start reading it for a video. And it doesn’t get found if I don’t do that part of the process.
• Tweet and notify one or two of my social media accounts that there’s a new piece of content.

For me, all that happens without a physical checklist because I’ve done it so often. With almost 400 posts on my main site, numerous articles on Ezine Articles and countless posts on other sites I own, it’s habit.

But when I was starting out, I had a written checklist and followed it.

When everything was ticked as completed, it was ready.

If you’re starting something new, it’s good to do the same kind of checklist and to include as many relevant points as you can think of.

Some things may still slip through the net but hopefully they’ll be relatively minor things and you can always adjust your checklist for next time.

But you can only do that if you’ve finished the whole process and actually got something live.

Otherwise you won’t know what you don’t know.

The thing is not to use being ready (or not ready) as an excuse to procrastinate and not actually finish a project.

There are way too many things that get started but not finished.

Some for good reason – they weren’t such a good idea as they initially seemed or you’ve moved away from them.

Others for no good reason – you just didn’t get round to completing them.

Over the next few days (or at most a week), pick something that you’d like to finish in your internet marketing.

Since that’s a relatively short timescale, don’t pick anything too large. But, equally, don’t pick something too trivial.

Then set aside maybe 20 or 30 minutes to decide on a checklist that, once everything is ticked off, means the project will be ready.

Then, over the next few days, work away at the items on the checklist and get them ticked off.

Once they’re all ticked off, you’re ready!

It really is that simple – even though it may appear incredibly complicated at the moment, especially if you haven’t chunked down the big picture into small steps.