When it comes to devising an effective online marketing plan, the following four phases I believe to be essential:

PHASE 1: Website Structure

Having a good website structure starts off with ensuring that your keyword focus and content relevance is attuned to your overall business strategy. Unless search engines find your site to be different, relevant and offering something of value, it’s going to be very difficult to persuade search engines to rank you highly in their organic results.

Also, as well as search engines like Google being able to find you, and determine that you’re an authority in your market segment, make sure that they’re able to crawl through your site.

An additional important aspect about good website structure relates to your actual website visitors. You have to make sure that the information that you offer is relevant to them, and that you have an enticing call-to-action to maximise your visitor goal conversion rates.

PHASE 2: Automation and Launch

Once you’re happy with your website structure, it’s time to focus on blogging, and the syndication of your blog posts.

A lot of marketing managers don’t realise that the real marketing power of a blog comes from the automated syndication of your new content to lots of different content hubs through the power of RSS. So remember to submit your blog and RSS feeds to the appropriate directories to maximise this automated opportunity.

The launch part of this online marketing phase comes through pay-per-click campaigns and press releases. These two traffic-driving sources have the power to bring a significant amount of visitors to your website over a short period of time - and help you ensure that your goals and conversion rates are as good as they should be for the remainder of your campaign.

PHASE 3: Broaden Your Base

Have you heard of the Google slap? Many search engine optimisation firms shudder at the prospect of suddenly loosing ranking for keywords that bring in a lot of traffic, but that’s the sort of thing that can happen when Google decides to change its algorithm.

The truth is that nobody outside Google knows its website ranking formula and that nobody outside Google can 100 per cent control your search engine ranking position for specific keyword phrases.

Broaden Your Base means that you need to reduce your reliance on just the one traffic source. If you rely on organic Google results for a lot of your traffic then maybe now’s the time to start to feature in more directories, publish more articles on other sites with links back to your site and interact on other blogs and forums.

PHASE 4: Broaden Your Horizon

Broaden Your Horizon means that it’s now time to embrace and interact with newer, more socially interactive forms of online marketing. If you haven’t taken the time to look into Facebook and Twitter, wait not more. Your customers are probably talking about you now.

Not only should you be using sites like YouTube to publish videos and Slideshare to publish PowerPoint presentations, social media monitoring should be a given. By using a tool like Hootsuite you’ll be able to monitor who is speaking about you on different platforms - and that will give you a great opportunity to jump in and interact while the conversation is still live and relevant.

However, although it can be very tempting to jump to social media, unless you have a specific strategy, in other words an online conversion towards which to drive your potential visitors, then you’re definitely not maximising the effectiveness of your online marketing campaign. That’s why I’d highly recommend starting at the beginning of the four phases and working your way through - it will benefit your business in the long term.

David Bain is author and founder of the 26-Week Internet Marketing Plan. Subscribe to his free 26-Week internet Marketing Plan newsletter at www.26weekplan.com