Marching orders keep your plan on track

Great marketing plans are useless without the discipline to execute them. Every day, you should take specific steps to implement and maintain your marketing attack. The easiest way to make sure this happens is to make sets of do lists or marching orders.

* Daily orders remind you to check and respond to e-mail, monitor discussion groups, update classified ads, and follow up on leads.

* Weekly orders remind you to add new information to your web site, evaluate responses to classified ads, and scout new sources of information, or new directories where your web site should be listed.

* Monthly orders might include expanding your attack to a new discussion group, adding a department to your web site, seeking offline publicity with a press release, or searching for forums where you might pitch yourself as an online conference speaker.

* Quarterly orders include seasonal promotions or contests, evaluating your online advertising or discussion group activities and making changes if needed, or creating a new online brochure.

By listing specific tasks for yourself, you'll keep your marketing plan humming.