Now this should be a no brainer, but I am still running into businesses that are not taking their website/web strategy serious and factoring it into their Marketing Strategy in 2008. I may be biased, but online marketing should consist of at least 50% of your marketing mix in 2009.

I’ve mentioned in the past Social Networking, Email Marketing, Blogging for Business are all possible strategies to growing your business online. Below I will give you a few ideas to get things rolling as 2009 is just around the corner…and I hope (please?) you have a marketing plan for your business.

#1 Figure out who is going to execute your plan? If you are a one person show with a substantial business, than you will more than likely need to hire a consultant to do some or most of your online marketing. If you have staff available for email marketing, blogging and social networking, tap that resource.

#2 What is your goal? You should be setting milestones for your online marketing efforts. It could be as simple as growing your Twitter followers to 100, or increasing your pageviews from 500/month to 3000/month.

#3 What is your plan? I like using a combination of Blogging, Email Marketing and Social Networking to build a brand online. What will your mix be?

#4 Break it out month to month. Marketing efforts tend to be a little more manageable when broken down into smaller bits.

#5 Commit, Commit, Commit. You have to commit yourself or your staff to posting frequently to your blogs, social networks or sending emails out. People will quickly forget about you if you let a few months go by without a blog post.

This is the future of business…are you in or are you out? Start this month by putting together your monthly calendar for next year with blog posts, social networking and email marketing in the mix. Next week I will be talking about the advantages of Designing your Website from Scratch vs Buying a Template for your business. As always - If you ever have any questions on the article, feel free to contact me or post comments below.