Award-winning Web site to get more marketing muscle

MyStrategicPlan.com, a Web site developed by Reno's M3 Planning,won national recognition.

Now the company needs to figure how to market the site and make it profitable.

MyStrategicPlan.com takes customers most of them owners of small businesses through an on-line, step-by-step process of creating a strategic plan for their businesses.

Since the site was launched in early 2004, about 250 clients have signed up for subscriptions at $549 a year or $75 a month, says Erica Olsen, vice president of marketing for the company.

Among M3 Planning's goals is fine-tuning its efforts to sell the service.

The company has been paying Google for a sponsored link, but the link isn't generating as many sales as M3 wants.

Next up: Traditional advertising in publications that reach small-business owners.

The Web site,Olsen says, is running at about break-even as M3 continues modest reinvestment in MyStrategicPlan.com.

It recently was recognized with the Standard of Excellence award of the Web Marketing Association.

The association provided the recognition to 781 Web sites worldwide.

The competition had drawn 2,100 entries from companies in 95 industries groups and 33 countries.

The site was created for M3 Planning by Primary Key Technologies of Reno in a process that began more than two years ago.

Initially, Olsen says, other information technology experts voiced skepticism about M3's plan to create on-line strategic planning services.

Instead, M3 turned to Primary Key Technologies of Reno to handle development of the Web site's architecture.

Johnathan Wagoner, the president of Primary Key Technologies, counts Web-based data management systems among his firm's specialities.

That knowledge, and Wagoner's background in business, became cornerstones of the project,Olsen says.

Mesh Creative of Reno,meanwhile, provided creative direction and graphic design.

Development of the site both its architecture and its graphics took about a year.

"As with all good things in IT, it took a long time to get the bugs out.Now it works without bugs," says Olsen.

M3 invested about $20,000 in the Web site, and Olsen says the company has kept a tight rein on costs as it undertakes improvements.

Changes in the site are undertaken, she says, only at the request of customers a important step toward controlling costs.