Part 4 of 6 In a Series 

As you may have already guessed, there’s no such thing as any one way to succeed in Internet marketing – what works for one company might be a losing strategy for another, and even the best ideas have to be amended and updated pretty frequently. In that way, what you’re looking for isn’t necessarily a map to promoting your business online so much as it is a recipe. And like any good recipe, you may have to make adjustments for your own personal style and tastes.

With that being said, most of the major elements are pretty consistent. While there are certainly dozens of other things you could add in, and more coming out all the time, here are the basic ingredients of most online marketing plans:

A good website design. Few things on this list, or Internet business in general, are possible until you have a quality website for your business. By that, we don’t just mean one that looks good (although yours should, if you want to attract customers online), but also that it does everything you and your customers need it to, displays well no matter what kind of computer or browser your visitors using, and can be updated easily to reflect changes in your company.

If you are serious about using the Internet to increase your business’s profitability, make sure to make a quality investment, in terms of time and money, into a website that can help you reach that goal.

A plan to get found by search engines. Search engine optimization, or SEO, is a favorite topic of business owners, web designers, and online marketing experts alike. There’s a good reason for this: once your site makes it to the front page of Google, Yahoo, and Bing for an important search term, your business can expect dozens, maybe hundreds, of new potential customers to show up every day. Over the long run, that kind of traffic can make an enormous difference in your long-term profitability.

Paid advertising. While many companies choose to stick almost exclusively with SEO, paid advertising (on the search engines or elsewhere) can be a fantastic way to jumpstart your business online. That’s because, unlike search engine optimization – which relies on the relatively slow methods of adding content to your site and building incoming links – paid ads work instantly. What’s more, they tend to bring more targeted, serious traffic to your site. There is the need to keep an eye on your advertising budget, of course, but few parts of online marketing work as well, or consistently, as running paid advertisements.

A blog or email newsletter. One of the interesting things that new online marketers sometimes struggle with is the fact that it’s continually ongoing. It’s never something you simply “do” and then forget about; you always have to be adding, testing, and tweaking. As part of that process, having a company blog or e-mail newsletter is a great idea. Not only does it give you a way to broadcast specials and promotions to your customers and prospects, but it gives you a tool to reach them every month or two, keeping you at the front of their minds when they eventually decide to buy.

Social media marketing. A blanket name given to sites like Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn, social media differs from other parts of the web in that it relies nearly exclusively on user input and content. In other words, these sites aren’t places for people to check in with the company, but hear from each other. While the concept is still relatively new, at least as far as online marketing goes, the potential is undeniable. Facebook alone has more than 500 million users, with that number growing quickly, and more and more of them are turning to the site to find recommendations on what products to buy, and what companies to do business with.

Social media marketing is already an important part of any organization’s business plan, and that’s a trend that’s not likely to slow down anytime soon.

Online videos. Another tool that’s recently come into vogue, online videos are a great way to promote what you sell, show your products in action, communicate directly and personally with customers, or do any number of dozens of other things. To give an idea of why you might think of integrating some short video clips into your online marketing strategy, consider that YouTube is currently showing more than 2 billion videos per day on its own. Add that to the fact that there are nearly endless uses for the medium, from advertising to customer service, and you can see why it makes sense to plan on using them from the start.

Mobile websites and apps. Not everyone has an iPhone, Droid, or other next-generation mobile device, but it’s only a matter of time before most of us do. A recent study done by an investment bank predicted that in the year 2015, more people will be going online through mobile phones and other devices than they would laptops or desktop computers. What that means to you is that now is the time to start thinking about what kind of features, functions, and possibly even software apps your customers might want a few months or years down the road.

As we mentioned, these are only some of the bigger pieces of an online marketing plan, and there are certainly other elements you might want to consider and integrate. But regardless of whether you stick to the basics or develop some new ideas, remember that each of these is only an ingredient or two the larger mix. While the methods may come and go, the most popular sites and ideas fall in or out of favor, your success online is still going to come down to your ability to answer the questions we posed when you were first considering a marketing plan. There’s no substitute for knowing what you’re offering, and who the right people to buy it are.