When you market your website and spend hours working online you really need some kind of guarantee that what you are doing is going to work. After all the entire equation of online success is based upon the cost (as in time, effort and money) versus the returns, which is used to calculate the return on your investment (ROI) this gives you.

The post which follows will cover the principles of what you need in order to have a decent success as an internet marketer.

This is more important than you think. Starbucks, Diesel Jeans, the Coca Cola Company and McDonalds all engage in internet marketing. They are in different fields with a different target customer profile and totally different products (though at some point Starbucks may start to offer jeans), yet they all work online in terms of how they pull in a sizeable proportion of their clients and they all seek to use the internet to market to the masses.

The way they do it successfully is that each has a clearly worked out definition of what internet marketing really means for them and this then gets broken down into distinct types of online marketing techniques. For instance, the Coca Cola Company is all about linking its brand to a lifestyle. It has a strong presence on social networks and, last year, created a number of ‘Coca Cola Ambassadors’ who went round the world chronicling their experiences, talking about Coca Cola and blogging and tweeting all the while, often in real-time streams.

The moment you understand what internet marketing really means for you (it could, for example mean little more than a well-targeted email campaign) you can then begin to put all the online marketing tools you need in place so that your online business will really work for you.

To do this you need to sit down and analyse not the product you are offering but the emotional response you are looking to elicit. The prime example of this is Coca Cola which tries to associate its brand with fun, excitement and adventure which, in turn, become synonymous with the soft drink itself.

Once you have worked out the tools you need to make your internet marketing, as a whole, happen, you need to break it down further into activities which will come under the labels of optimization (SEO) and online marketing (which will include elements of the real-time web, social marketing, social bookmarking and so on).

At this point you will need to create a decent SEO strategy which will help you focus on those activities in both SEO and internet marketing which really work for you and will help you save time (and money) by converging on some of the online marketing and SEO aspects.

Because I wrote two books on the subject which are field-tested, practical and have been helping webmasters achieve this I will take this brief opportunity to plug them here. SEO Help: 20 steps to get your website to Google’s #1 page is a no-nonsense guide to getting your website ranking in Google fast. Online Marketing Help: How to promote your online business using Twitter, Facebook, MySpace and other social networks is the vital link converging SEO and internet marketing using real-time web tools. If you do get them they will give you a pretty comprehensive start on your internet marketing. Even if you don’t however, to succeed you need to have in black-and-white, a comprehensive plan of action which will be broken down into implementable, daily, weekly and monthly tasks.

Finally this is the secret ingredient which makes most successful internet marketing plans work. The more time and energy you are prepared to put in them the more you will increase your chances of success. Working online is much easier than most other type of business but it is still first and foremost a business. This means you really do need to be disciplined, organized and prepared to put in some sweat.

Good luck!