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The last time, I wrote about the importance of organizing your emails and other digital assets. These include a list of your domains, where they are hosted, registered, expiration dates, etc. This time I’m going to delve into the issue of planning.

The benefit of planning is that it forces you to think about where you want to be. You need to have goals and execute the plan to achieve those goals. So first of all, take stock of your present situation and ask yourself where you want to be 3, 6 or 12 months from now. Having a set end time will let you evaluate yourself periodically to see how you are progressing towards those goals. This implies that the goals have to be measurable.

Once you have a goal, then you can outline the steps you need to take to achieve those goals. List down the bigs steps before worrying about the nitty-gritty details. It is best to illustrate this with an example.

Let’s say that your goal is to grow your site visitors by a factor of 3 in 6 months. We’ll assume that your site currently gets 1000 visitors per month. So the goal is to get to 3000 visitors per month in 6 months. Let’s assume that you have done your research and decided on article marketing as the technique you will use. The steps to achieve this could look like:

1. Compile a list of article submission sites.

2. Research and compile a list of article topics you will write about.

3. Write 5 articles per day.

4. Compile a list of ezine owners who might be interested in syndicating your articles.

5. Set up a tracking system to keep track of the performance of your articles.

You can break each step down some more. For example on the first day, you can compile the article submission sites and sort them by PR. The next day you could spend some time reading the terms of service for each site and checking the site out. After that you could register an account at each of those sites.

Once you have a plan, you should stick with it and periodically measure your progress. If you are writing 5 articles per day, at the end of 30 days, you should have 150 articles. Are you meeting that goal? If not, what is keeping you from reaching that goal?

Check your traffic stats at the end of each month to see if you are on track to your goal. Use a tracker or analytics program to keep track of which articles are bringing traffic to your site. Sometimes if your article is picked up and republished, there is no way for you to find out where it is published unless you track all your incoming traffic referrals.

So that’s planning in a nutshell. The hardest part is sitting down and doing it. Once you get going, you’ll often find that ideas will start popping into your head and you can incorporate them into your plan.

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