I’ve found that the best marketing plans are pretty simple.  Especially if you’re busy, you don’t want to overplan your marketing because you’ll  get overwhelmed by too many marketing activities and end up being less productive.

Over the years, I’ve gained a good amount of marketing experience and knowledge.  I’ve done these types of marketing: social media, SEO, blogging, video, and email.  I could apply every single thing I’ve learned to each of my projects, but if I did that, I would have too much going on.  I would be much more effective if I just picked a few appropriate tools for each project.

The execution of marketing plans is actually harder than it looks at first glance.  It takes focus to carry out a plan competently and it’s easier to focus with simple plans.

Also, productivity is all about getting things done – not having the best plans.  Therefore, you don’t want to spend too much planning.  Plus, most plans inevitably get changed anyways as you spend time on a project and find out what works and what doesn’t.

Right now I’m doing SEO for a client and I’m focusing 70% of my work on just guest posting.  Guest posting is not the flashiest SEO activity but I feel in this case, it’s a good plan.  I did some research in my client’s niche and found that many of the popular bloggers in the niche link out liberally, so guest posting should provide good returns.

Here’s another example.  I recently met a door to door salesman at gaming tournament.  He told me about his work and surprisingly it seemed like lucrative business.  The entrepreneur in me thought that his business could work well online, so I looked at some relevant keywords to check their competitiveness on Google.

They keywords were not competitive at all so I sent him a proposal to partner with him by creating a site that offered his products.  My plans are very simple.  I’ll just optimize his site for local search since he only sells in the city we live in and I’ll ask a couple of my friends to link to the site.

Because his keywords are not competitive, I think these two simple activities will be enough to get him a front page ranking.

Here’s the takeaway.  Each project is unique and requires its own set of marketing plans.  And the simpler the plans, the better.

How can you apply this?  One place you can start is your skills.  If you have some writing chops, then create a blog since blogs are great marketing tools.  Then, be consistent and write 2-3 posts a week and also create a guest post once every two weeks.  If you execute this simple plan for the next couple of months, you’ll attract a lot of traffic to your site.

If you’re interested in video, try creating videos and then uploading them to YouTube.

How simple are your current marketing plans?