Internet Marketing Business

Is internet marketing a business to you or is it simply a hobby?

Even if you are not making any money at present online, if you are learning about internet marketing so that you can one day be a successful internet entrepreneur then you need to treat internet marketing like a business and that means systemization.

Working on your internet marketing  business in your spare time when you still have all of the other things in your life to worry about (work that pays, family responsibilites etc) can be extremely challenging and at times even frustrating.

Sometimes you just wish you had hours alone to figure out some internet challenge (there always is one isn’t there?) but the reality is that if you are trying to squeeze in a few hours of internet marketing in an already full day this won’t be the case. You will have to do things in bits and pieces whenever you can grab a small chunk of time.

So how do you keep moving forward using only the small amounts of time allotted to you?

I guess one option is no sleep – but this one doesn’t work long term (Luckily I’m a bit of a night owl and can survive on less sleep than most)

Organization is the Key

I suggest that the first thing to do is sit down and really think about how much time you want to spend on your internet marketing business per day or per week. Then work out how much time you can actually find in your day.

For me, I’m aiming for about 20 hours a week. I’m actually hoping that I’ll never really have to work more than 20 hours a week!

Next you need to look at what tasks need to be done to move forward with internet marketing and finally you need to decide what proportion of your allotted time you want to spend on each set of tasks.

Task No.1 – Content Creation

I think that for me, at this point in time, I need to spend about 5 hours a week on content creation.

Content creation includes:

• writing blog posts
• writing articles
• making videos, audios
• free reports

Task No. 2 – Website Creation

This also gets 5 hours per week

Website creation involves

• finding new niche markets and affiliate programs
• keyword research
• setting up websites
• setting up autoresponders

Task No.3 – Traffic Generation

Once the websites are up the job is just beginning- traffic is the key to sales. No traffic, no sales. No sales, no income

I think that I need about 5 hours a week for traffic generating strategies to the websites that I create.

Task No. 4 – Ongoing Education

I certainly don’t know all that I need to know as yet about internet marketing so education is the answer. About 5 hours per week spent watching webinars, dvd’s and reading books and ebooks should help my business.

There’s my 20 hours filled. You will see that NOT included in this schedule is time for checking emails and any of the other tasks that can fill an hour, yet be completely unproductive. You can also waste a bit of time checking up on Google analytics and where your sites are ranked on Google. Even when you think you are doing productive work like researching potential markets or finding blogs or forums to comment on, it’s extremely easy to get distracted.

I set a timer for an hour and I try to keep on task for that entire hour. Some people find it easier to concentrate in shorter bursts of time. Studies show that  your productivity and efficiency increases with regular breaks. It’s easy to fritter away the hours searching around in forums and blogs especially, but if you use a system of accountability you will find it easier to keep on task. There are even software applications available that track your computer usage.

Tracking

I use an excel spreadsheet  to track the hours that I spend each week on my business and monitor my productivity.

Here is sample of what my excel spreadsheet looks like:

You can design your spreadsheet in any way you choose and if you find a really good way let me know – I’m always willing to improve my systems.

I find that if I break my time down each week into the categories above, then I don’t neglect any important area of my business development.

There are definitely other ways to organize yourself. If you have a regular block of time each and every day then you might want to break it down even further and say I will do one hour of content creation and one hour of traffic generation on one day and the other tasks on other days.

I prefer to work in bursts. If I am in a writing flow then I will keep going with content creation till I am disturbed (for example like right now, when the kids are about to walk in the door from school). Things like traffic generation strategies don’t need as much concentration so those tasks can be done late at night when I am too tired to write!

Organizing yourself and having systems will enable you to use your time more efficiently and build your internet business faster.

Related posts:

1. Internet Marketing Advice – Focus or Multi-tasking?

2 Responses to “Internet Marketing Tip – Systemization”

1. Cris Santeiro says:

   July 27, 2009 at 8:16 am

   I loved your blog post. You are so organized. I basically do everything you do but could use a little more organization to keep me focused.

   Thanks again for the great post.
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