I was recently sent a copy of the 26 Week Internet Marketing Plan to review, by its creators, Purple Internet Marketing. The easy thing with this would be to tell you it's the best thing since sliced bread and stick an affiliate link at the bottom and hope to get some sales. But this blog is the closest I have to a personal blog, so I want to give a completely credible review and have decided to eschew any affiliate links so that I can deliver an unbiased review.

First up, here's what it's included in the plan: 4 workbooks, 4 DVDs, 7 interview CDs, a materials CD (containing PDF reports), a plan poster and a t-shirt. The plan is broken up into 4 phases, as follows:

Phase 1: Website Structure

• Business Strategy
• Keyword Research
• Site Architecture
• Conversion Rates
• Viral Coefficient
• Visitor Tracking

Phase 2: Automation and Launch

• Blogging
• RSS
• Email Updates
• Blog Communities
• Blog & RSS Directories
• Press Releases
• Pay Per Click

Phase 3: Broaden Your Base

• Major Directories
• Industry Directories
• Local Directories
• Article Marketing
• Competitor Backlinks
• Forum Interaction
• Blog Comments

Phase 4: Broaden Your Horizon

• New Website
• Social Networking
• MyPage Marketing
• Podcasting
• Video Marketing
• Visitor Analysis

The interview CDs feature lengthy interviews with:

• Matt Trimmer
• Brad Fallon
• Yaro Starak
• Jeff Walker
• Timothy Seward
• Jonathan Farrington
• Shawn Collins

Who is the 26 week internet marketing plan really aimed at?
According to the workbook, "it is the marketing function within the business. It is people who are Marketing directors, people who are in charge of the strategy within their businesses."

I have to be honest, I didn't have 26 weeks to spare so I haven't actually followed the entire course exactly as the creators would have intended. What I have done is watch one of the DVDs (about an hour and a half long), read a couple of the workbooks and listened to a couple of the interview CDs.

I'll start by saying what I liked about it. The DVDs, which basically have footage of the presenter, David Bain, delivering the course to a group, is well presented. David comes across as a genial presenter, able to explain subjects reasonably well when he isn't getting caught up in jargon like "Viral Coefficient". He obviously has the requisite knowledge to present on the subject, and is also able to field questions from the group effectively - and sometimes the questions are the best bits.

David, whose accent leads me to believe is Scottish, doesn't make many grandiose claims and is fairly modest and realistic in what the followers of the plan should be looking to achieve; talking about optimising the homepage for visitor numbers in the hundreds, and discussing the merits of creating a page which might only attract 7 visitors a day through it's long tail keyword optimisation, but that will be 7 visitors a day for the lifetime of the site, for one page, for perhaps a couple of hours spent writing the article.

The "plan" certainly includes a great deal of useful information about various aspects of creating, optimising and promoting a website. It won't be new to experienced hands, but if you've not created a website before, I can tell you that the advice provided here is generally of a high standard.

One of the things that I guess worries people when buying hard copy materials relating to the web is whether or not the stuff will become dated soon. The 26 Week Plan plan is well up to date, with discussion of Facebook marketing included in Workbook 4.

The interview CDs are also a nice addition to the package, with some genuinely good listens in there.

Ok, so were there things about the plan that I wasn't so impressed with? There was a point in the course when I was a bit puzzled by exactly who this was aimed at. If your reader/viewer needs to have it explained to them what a page title is, is it really appropriate to casually drop in a very technical term like "mod rewrite" shortly after. And personally I don't think you can mention mod rewrite without then explaining that it is for Apache web server, so its not even suitable for Microsoft-centric setups.

There's a section in the book and DVD dedicated to Alt Tags. The eagle eyed amongst you will note that there's no such thing as Alt Tags, but there is an "alt" attribute on the "img" tag. Ok, so that's pedantry on my part because "alt tags" is a commonly, but incorrectly used term, but £399 is a lot to spend and I do think the price demands accuracy.

Discussing URL formatting, the plan says "It's generally thought that URLs don't matter massively when it comes to search engine optimization". Now, I'm sorry. I did nearly fall off my chair when I read that because I would strongly disagree with it as I tend to think the structure of the URL does actually matter. if I was advising someone who was creating a website, I would give it much more importance than it gets here.

The workbooks are basically transcripts of the DVD. To be honest, that seemed like an opportunity missed. I expected them to complement each other better - the book could have been a place to summarise, test and measure progress, and record objectives based on what had been covered. Instead, they simply mirror each other. There is a blank "Action Plan" page after each section but that's not particularly helpful. I just felt something was lacking - some kind of guide I guess to the actions suggested as a result of what had been covered.

The trouble with recommending something like this you have to bear in mind there's nothing new or revelatory in here. You could learn most, if not all, of this for free by reading around the internet but then again you have to remember, for some people, reading loads of websites with conflicting information and trying to extract the right conclusions isn't easy, so actually a resource like this which brings all the relevant conclusions together in once place can be really beneficial.

In my opinion, I have to say I don't think this works that well as an actual 26 week plan as I don't think the structure is really there for that - other than the fact each chapter is titled Week 1, Week 2 etc, I don't get how it's supposed to relate to a week's worth of information or actions. Despite the suggestion on the introductory MP3, I'd imagine most people would just read it straight through.

What it does do well, is give you some very good information which you can use to make a website which has a fair chance of succeeding. Would I recommend it? What I would say is that if you have a training budget available to you, and you want to learn what factors are required to create a traffic generating website without having to exhaustively hunt around the net for same information, this is a resource worth considering.

You can find out more by visiting the 26 Week Marketing Plan website.