Online marketing is becoming quite complex with the kind of online marketing avenues & marketing opportunities getting inducted every day. The scenario has come in such a way that online marketing is becoming a must for every business houses, as their target audience is more inclined to online sourcing patterns. Every business house plans their expenses & allocates their funds for a year or quarter. The review & revision of budgets happens quarterly or even certain organization follows monthly analysis plan. But if you really analyses the online marketing budgeting – it’s a long term investment & can’t provide you measuring methods by which you can substantiate your outflows.Why Online Marketing Budget becomes uncontrollable?1. Search Engine Marketing – the approach is bidding model – you can’t be sure about then prevailing rates as the nature of avenues is dynamic2. Business Catalogs & Portal Membership – majority of the b2b marketing plans or packages offered are annual package & mostly onetime payment.3. Organic SEO – the results & visibility is directly in relation with search engine parameters which get updated as on when a new release happens from search engine provider’s end. The change in parameters or weightage of factors can cost you badly & may require additional spicing up.4. Social Media Marketing – Aggressive social media marketing involves brand endorsing, community management & contest management. The budgeting becomes more or less situational due to the dependability factors & cost or marketing mix.5. Link Building – Quality links are sold at quality prices & there is no standard pricing norms. Today being the portal owner, I can decide on my pricing norms & when you want to do business with me, you need to abide to my pricing plans.6. Other Avenues – like the leading platforms the other avenues like article submission portals, Press Release Submission portals all carry variable cost and the cost fluctuates as per the demand & portal business models.If so how to prepare the best online marketing budget?1. Analyze your audience – Lean about the buying behavior, sourcing pattern & venues of your target audience, the nukes and corners wherein you can generate a prospective budget.2. Read your competitors budget – Do an effective research on who are your competitors on online media, how are they spending on the online media, which are avenues they are spending & how you can rate their effort or results dice to avenue3. Plan your marketing – success of any implementation lies in its planning, segment your audience, select the apt online marketing venues, organize the timeframe, prioritize the timeslots, do a commercial feasibility study, conduct a expect ROI analysis, shortlist the mix, compute the objectives for each timeslot.4. Segment the priority list & secondary list – every plan should have a priority list of activities, avenues or action items. But it’s equally important to plan for a secondary list, so that at a given instance where your priority list is not delivered to expectation you won’t clutter for options or alternates.5. Derive your actions – Once the plan is ready you need set you action plan or implementation plan. The usual & successful pattern is to make multiple campaigns for specific objectives with specified time bounds. Compute the campaign dependability on direct & indirect factors to determine the variance percentage.6. Make it Monthly – Plan your overall marketing avenues, make the cost estimate for long term objectives, short-term objectives & then slice the campaign timeslot share into monthly quota keeping the variance percentage as buffer.7. Review at Pit stops – evaluate your campaign success, ROI & budget on the campaign closing date, if you find a failure threat don’t hesitate to revise the strategies. Avoid the non-performers & use the budget for alternates.8. Record, Analyze & Summarize – the golden principle record each any every activities right from the planning phase, analyze the campaigns at the defined time intervals & end dates, summarize your campaign performance with positives and negativesThe above method is clinically proven success mantra for online marketing. You can read this strategically approach when you evaluate any successful online marketing stories, the time slot may differ as per the product, industry & target audience – but the core aspects & method remains the same. All the best for a successful online marketing campaign which won’t eat your profits & reduce your average cost per acquiring customer.