At a certain point, and usually sooner than a lot of business owners would think, there’s an important decision to be made in your online marketing plan: whether to manage it all yourself or to find a reputable partner to work with.

While you might expect we would recommend that you run out and grab the closest web designer or online marketing team, let us be very clear that either approach has its pros and cons. By doing things yourself, you’re likely to slow the process down drastically, be a lot less efficient, and find yourself making numerous mistakes that could have been avoided with professional guidance. Plus, most businesses don’t have the time to execute their plans effectively, much less stay on top of new trends and developments.

At the same time, however, finding a person or team to help you keep your online marketing plan on track and profitable is incredibly easy… but finding one that’s worth the money isn’t. You have to be very careful to work with someone you can trust, and who asks enough of the right questions about your business and goals before signing any kind of agreement.

So what’s the right answer for you?

In our experience, the companies that are most successful are the ones who spend a significant amount of time on the front end of the process, finding the right partner to make their Internet plans a business reality. It’s very, very difficult to do things on your own, but you can’t just go with the first company that submits you a proposal, either. Here are a few things you want to find in a web design and marketing partner:

They ask more about your company than your budget. It’s imperative that your online marketing team understand what your business is all about, and what your online objectives are, before they ever get started. Be wary of anyone who simply submits you a proposal and talks in general terms about what they’re going to do for you.

Their plan for your business is ongoing. One of the most important parts of web business is the process of constantly testing, refining, and optimizing what you’re doing. Nothing is ever as profitable as it could be the first time around, so make sure they have regular meetings, updates, and additions built in.

They have a strategy that goes beyond just sales. While most of this report is focused on strategies you’ll use to get more customers, the reality is that you can also make your business more profitable online by thinking of recruiting, customer service, accounting, and other parts of your business. You need a web designer or marketing team understands that.

They are easy to reach and talk to. Communication is important, both for your planning and your sanity. Don’t try to save a few dollars by going with someone who’s hard to reach or talk to – you will only end up regretting it later.

CONCLUSION

Having the right online marketing team really comes down to efficiency and effectiveness. By leveraging their expertise, you can get the maximum amount of impact on your business for the minimum of time. Regardless of what people may tell you, you’re always going to have to invest some of your own schedule and budget into the process. The only question is whether you’re going to be up at night reading basic books, and slowly making progress, or having someone who is knowledgeable guide you along the way.

There’s an old story about a business owner who is meeting with his advertising account executive. “I know half of our advertising dollars are wasted,” he says, “now if I could just figure out which half it was, I’d put my money elsewhere.” Internet marketing can feel the same way when you are just starting out, but having the right team to guide you in the most profitable direction makes all the difference.

The potential profits that come with putting your business online are too big to ignore, so don’t put off the process of developing and implementing a strong Internet plan any longer. Just be sure you find the right team to help you get to where you need to go.

Even once business owners start to understand the major parts of an Internet marketing plan, it’s often tough to see how they can fit together into something that’s going to help their company earn more money and grow. The first step is making sure that what you really have is the plan, rather than just a wish list or set of activities.

Like any good business plan, yours should have not only the results you expect, but also a budget, timetable, and set of actionable activities that can move forward progressively. That’s an important point because, even though things do move faster online, you still aren’t likely to be successful in Internet marketing overnight. It takes time to put together a strong website, build up a reputation, let search engines find you, tweak your advertising plans so they are profitable, and so on.

With that in mind, we’re going to offer you two pieces of advice that are absolutely invaluable. If you can have the discipline to follow them, we promise that they will help you earn tens of thousands of dollars – and maybe a lot more – while greatly decreasing the stress and apprehension you feel about taking your company to the next level online:

Work on the parts of your online marketing plan that are most likely to be profitable first, and then build gradually from there.

To see why these are so important, just consider the most common roadblocks small and medium-sized businesses run into. First, after getting a taste of what’s possible through Internet marketing, they get in a rush to do everything at once. Their plans become little more than a list of all the tactics they have seen and read about, rather than a targeted set of activities leading them towards a certain kind of online customer. What they end up with is a lot of busywork that looks productive but doesn’t accomplish much.

That’s why you want to begin with – and concentrate on – those parts of your plan that are most likely to show a good rate of return in a reasonable amount of time. A trusted Internet marketing specialist can help you figure out what these are likely to be for your business, but pay per click campaigns for specific products, search engine optimization in your immediate area, and adding e-commerce functions to your site are all obvious ideas.

Once you get these campaigns started and moving in the right direction, branch out to the second most straightforward thing, and then the third. It takes a bit of focus and patience to do things this way, but as we mentioned, it can save you from a lot of costly and frustrating mistakes. There are simply too many tools and ideas out there in Internet for most companies to try to do everything effectively, and so lots of them end up trying lots of things in a pretty pointless way, or at least missing out on the bottom-line benefits they could be enjoying.

Your business wasn’t built in a day. Chances are, it took some time, lots of hard work, and an element of luck to get it to where it is today. Don’t try to shortcut the process on the Internet. Start with things you know are likely to be successful, and then let the project grow organically from there.