Your plan should provide a checklist with specific “to do” items—essentially, all of the techniques used to create online publicity described in this chapter. The list should also include offline marketing and publicity placements appropriate to your target audience and your story.
Successfully getting online publicity and generating traffic is largely a matter of focus and keeping track of the details. Creating a checklist as part of your plan will help you make sure that none of these details fall through the cracks.
When you get to the steps I suggest in Chapters 3 and 4 for publicizing your site and improving its construction, you’ll see that many of these steps are essentially mechanical. For example, once you have submitted a site to a variety of search engines, there is no great difficulty in repeating the process.
Even so, you should have a plan for marketing your content sites. No brick-and-mortar business in its right mind would attempt a marketing or publicity campaign without a plan, and you shouldn’t proceed online without one either.
Having a plan will help you accomplish even the mechanical steps more effectively. When you submit your site to a search engine or a directory, you will often be asked for a description of your offering. Understanding your site in the context of a marketing plan will help you hone a site description. If you already have your elevator pitch and keyword list, you can use and reuse them—in site submissions, in meta code, in press releases, and more. As minimum steps, you should:
Understand who the ideal visitor to your site is
Discover some interesting stories to tell about your website
Make a checklist and plan for publicizing your site