Long term planning is an essential part of internet marketing.

But it’s often overlooked.

It’s easy to do something for short term gain that wrecks your business later on.

That’s especially the case with the bigger players like Google, YouTube, Facebook and Amazon.

They’re at the forefront of most things and they have to put things into place to fight that – often retrospectively.

Obviously you don’t have a working crystal ball, so precise long term planning is more an art than a science.

But commonsense should come into play – most of us have got it to some degree and most of us should be able to figure out whether or not something is “dodgy” or underhand.

Churn and burn can work – creating lots of sites, ranking them relatively fast, watching them get lots of traffic and sales and then watching them disappear forever.

But it’s hard work that’s getting harder.

And it’s expensive.

The best operators in the churn and burn area spend a small fortune on computer programs, servers, domains, content that’s good enough to get indexed for a while, and so on.

And, of course, Google and the other big sites spend a lot of time and money squashing these methods once their computer algorithms spot them.

It’s a lose-lose game for most people.

So it’s better to plan for the long term.

That means putting your thinking cap on and figuring out where you’d like your internet business to be in a year’s time.

Then creating a blueprint to get yourself there,

A year is probably plenty long enough.

And if that seems too long term for you, chunk it down into quarters or even months or weeks.

But make sure you have the longer term picture in mind when you do that.

Apply some logic to what you’re doing

Generally speaking, short cuts don’t work in internet marketing for any length of time.

Way back in the early days of the web, you could get a page ranked by stuffing it full of keywords that were either hidden in the never-displayed meta data or were shown on page in small print with white text on a white background.

No normal person would ever have seen that text unless they’d highlighted it with their mouse.

But the early search engines “read” and indexed it and assigned it importance.

Of course, that’s a spammy technique and it didn’t work for long.

Quality control, even in the early days of the web, meant that it got trapped for and quickly became a waste of time.

And any site that had employed that method had its card marked by Google, Alta Vista, and most of the other search engines.

An early form of a penalty.

It’s that kind of thing that you need to watch out for when you’re planning for your long term internet marketing goals.

Because even at the time it was being promoted as a fast ranking method it seemed unethical.

Personally, it was never something I engaged in.

But other people did and they got a short term boost at the expense of a long term negative impact.

There are things nowadays that are at best a shade of grey and that could negatively impact your long term business.

Things like:

• Buying YouTube views – the obvious methods have been squashed which leaves some people looking for less obvious methods that are still underhand but haven’t (yet) been programmed out.
• Private blog networks – the ones that were open to everyone have been near enough swatted so the new craze is creating your own network of blogs. That’s expensive to do correctly and the time and effort you put in could probably be better spent on the real sites. Some people are still reporting success but they’re getting fewer.
• Fake reviews – Amazon have recently cracked down on these. And they’re sufficiently common that sites like Wikihow have even created articles on how to spot them. You know a method isn’t long term when that happens.

It takes longer to build your internet marketing business with the longer term in mind.

And there’s still no guarantee that it will survive for the long term,

If you pick the wrong industry – fax machines for example – then it doesn’t matter how good your site is because no-one is looking for it.

But that’s an unusual example and a lot of supposedly obsolete technologies are still around. Vinyl records or even photography using real film.

Most niches are likely to be here for a long time yet.

So make sure that potential longevity is built in to the niche you select.

Then create and promote your site ethically.

Apply the simple test of whether or not you’d be embarrassed to explain what you’re doing.

If you would be, it’s probably worth avoiding doing it if you care about your future business.

Once you’ve got your plan, carry it out!

All the planning in the world doesn’t help if you don’t act on it.

Set aside some time each day (or however often you can schedule it) to work on your internet marketing plan.

Monitor yourself – I find a spreadsheet or even a simple piece of paper near my desk works well,

And keep at it.

There’s almost never an overnight success story that didn’t have a lot of preparation behind it.

Plod along and you’ll get there. And in a year’s time you’ll look back and think what a great decision you made.

Or you can race at it for a few days and then move on to the next latest-and-greatest technique for a few days and then repeat the process. Then in a year’s time you’ll be no further ahead than you are now.

Ultimately it’s your choice.

But I’d definitely suggest the less glamorous route of plodding along, doing something to nudge your internet marketing business forward as often as you can manage.

Long term, it will probably be the best decision you’ve ever made.

And if you’d like some help and direction with that, take a look here.