Or possibly you fell into the very common trap of starting with tactics and not paying deep attention to strategy first If any of the above describes you then you need to know that it's probably not your fault: there are simply too many confident-sounding, smooth-talking crooks and simpletons out there who are selling half-baked email list theories that don't actually work.
And on the subject of putting strategy before tactics, the latter are the important details of a Marketing Plan and include the creation of testimonials, guarantees, websites, advertisements, email or direct mail campaigns and so on but whilst that's all very important you'll soon see that it's a big mistake to start with tactics before you've got yourself an effective marketing strategy. This article in an introduction to seven strategic questions you need to answer when putting together an effective Marketing Plan. Strategic Question.
What's your PEG? PEG stands for Personal End Game and while it's technically an objective and not a strategy as such, I include it here because it's critically important as a source of motivation for when you hit the inevitable obstacles along the road to growing your business: "reasons are the fuel in the furnace of motivation". The PEG question is normally the easiest of the strategic questions to answer. All you need to do is identify two numbers and three things.