Want a highly profitable, effective marketing plan? I’m going to hit you hard and fast with this. Your marketing plan HAS to include all 5 of these elements, or you’re throwing away money…lots of it. Here are the five stages:

• Attention – get their attention
• Cultivation – build relationships
• Conversion – make offers; sell stuff
• Contribution – generate repeat and referral business
• Advocacy – identify your greatest “fans” and aid them in the work of spreading your message

These five stages are all essential when it comes to making a huge living from a small blog or website. Interestingly, before internet marketing came to power, most businesses lived solely in the “attention” and “conversion” stages. Sell a product. Find a new customer, sell them a product. Find yet another new customer, sell them a product. And on and on it goes. Madness.

Most internet marketers these days spend all their time in the “cultivation” category. The focus now is all on relationships. I’m a fan of relationships. Where would I be without my friends and clients? Nowhere. That said, relationships are not the end of the story. They’re not even the BEGINNING of the story. Yet most marketers these days are convinced they’re the WHOLE story! Bullocks.

Read Jeffrey Fox’s great book The Secrets of Great Rainmakers, if you want the TRUTH about relationships. Read the chapter called “Relationships are Bunk”. Succinct. Beautiful.

Successful marketers make a killing all day long by taking each one of these essential phases to task. It can be done intentionally or unintentionally, but it’s a lot easier to take a deliberate approach and make sure you’re covering all your bases. Like all of the tactics we discuss here, if you do it, you’ll get the result. It’s just how it works.

Let’s discuss each of these 5 stages in depth. Please fire any of your questions to me by email or Twitter. I’ll answer them. Articles covering each of these individually are coming soon…