How to write a one page marketing plan (6 steps)

A one page marketing plan, for a solo founder, is a distribution plan that fits on one page. If it runs longer, it isn't a plan yet.

The plan has 6 steps, in order: a number and a date, where the buyers are, what you already have, one decisive point, weekly moves and a weekly review. All of them use the same split between positions and moves, so that comes first.

Positions and moves

A position is something you own that compounds. An email list, rankings on terms buyers search for, an audience, testimonials, directory and integration listings, outreach data (reply rates, the objections you hear, templates that work), relationships in a community.

A move is a one-shot: a launch post, a DM batch, a comment, a Product Hunt day.

A move with no position behind it disappears. The launch post from an account with no audience, the DM with no proof to point at. The same move made from a position converts.

So for anything I put on the plan, I ask one question: does this build a position, or use one I already have? If it does neither, it's motion, and it comes off the list.

That goes for traffic and followers too. Traffic is only a position if it's buyer-intent traffic, and followers are only a position if they look like the buyer.

Traffic on the wrong terms is not a position

Docuyond, the AI support chatbot I killed in September, built a strong SEO position. Its analytics showed 1,800+ visitors in its first 9 months, without me working on it.

It also barely sold. It ranked on informational terms, the searches people make when they want to read about a topic, and those bring readers rather than buyers. In 3 months, 787 visitors turned into exactly 1 sale, for $19.20.

The SEO part worked fine, the terms were the wrong ones.

I think it's the most expensive mistake in the whole plan, because it looks like progress the entire time. I'd have seen it much earlier by checking two things first: who searches this term, and what do they do next? If they read and leave, the traffic grows and the sales don't.

So check who the traffic is before you put months into a position. If you're not sure who the buyer is yet, score your segments first. And once you know who they are, check that they'd actually switch from what they use today before you build anything long term around them.

The one page, in 6 steps

The output has to fit on one page. Write the steps in this order, since each one needs the answer from the step before.

1. Pick a number and a date

One outcome, with a number and a date. This is your intent, and every step after this one hangs off it. Then reverse it into customers.

The playbook's example of the shape is "$2K MRR by Dec 31 = 200 customers on the $10 plan, or 50 on the $40 plan." That's an example of the format, not a target for any of my products.

What matters is that a revenue number turns into a count of people. Once the goal is 50 people, you can start asking who they are and where they hang out, which is step 2.

2. Find where the buyers already are

Where do those buyers already gather, search and buy? Which communities they're in, what they type into Google, which marketplaces and directories they browse.

An hour of research here beats a month of guessing. Docuyond is what happens when you skip it.

3. List what you have and what's missing

Write down the positions you already hold, then the ones you're missing.

The missing ones that block the intent are what the plan is actually about. If your buyers search for the problem and you rank for none of those terms, that's a gap. If they compare tools on directories and you're not listed, that's a gap too, and it's a position you can actually own, since you submit the listing yourself (here are 50 free directories).

4. Pick one decisive point

Pick the one position that, once you hold it, makes everything downstream easier. Then write down a no to everything else, on the same page.

This is the step that hurts, because the no list has good ideas on it. But a solo founder has 5 to 15 hours a week, and that doesn't stretch very far. So the no usually comes down to 3 rules:

• One channel until it works. Win one, then use it to get into the next. Cross-posting thin everywhere builds no position anywhere.
• One bottleneck at a time. Fix the constraint that's holding up the others. If your landing page doesn't convert, getting it more traffic builds the wrong thing first.
• One product in active push. Maintenance on the rest is fine, but two pushes at once doesn't work at solo founder hours.

I ran 5 products at once this year, and I've since killed or retired three of them. That's how I learned the third rule.

5. Plan the moves

Only now do you pick tactics. Reverse the intent into a 90-day objective, then the objective into weekly moves.

Every move has to build the decisive position or use one you already hold. If you can't say which, it goes on the no list from step 4.

Cold outreach is a good example. It's a move, and it works after the list and the message are a position: you know who to send to, and you have a message that's gotten replies. If you're sending and nothing comes back, debug the outreach in order before you send more.

6. Review it every week

Once a week, look at what happened and compare it against the intent. Change the moves as much as you need to, and keep the intent where it is.

The destination only changes when the evidence says it was wrong. Make that call at a checkpoint you set in advance, like the end of the 90 days, not in the middle of a week because one move flopped.

Where these plans die

Most of the ways it goes wrong are one of these:

• Collecting tactics and calling it progress. You read playbooks and threads and try new tools, and at the end of the month no position has changed.
• Running six channels at once, each one getting a sliver of the week.
• Building a position in the wrong place. The metrics grow while sales don't, because nobody checked who the traffic was. That's Docuyond.
• Writing the plan and then not using it. The page exists, but your daily work doesn't trace back to it.
• Repeating a move that stopped working because "it's the plan". The intent is the plan, and the moves are supposed to change.

The 6 steps above are one chapter of the playbook I use for my own products. See the Distribution Toolkit for the rest of it, plus the agents and skills that run it.