One thing that I have learned over the past month is how to effectively use my time. As a result of pledging a fraternity combined with midterms and various projects I have had no spare time to post on this blog or to keep up with my other affiliate marketing projects I was working on. Thankfully I have survived pledging and now I am in the process of recouping my time, and I noticed that despite today being by far my busiest day, I have gotten a massive amount of work done.
A problem that is very prevalent in in the internet marketing community is dead weight loss, the time that you spend on YouTube rather than pumping out websites or blog comments, etc. The more you focus on the prize, the better your profits will be and the better your marketing will work. Once you get into a rhythm it is amazing how productive you can be online and how many long term subscribers you can gain per hour of networking efforts.
If you intend to do internet marketing as a full time or part time job is becomes even more important to utilize your time efficiently. One thing that I am about to start doing myself is setting up a weekly schedule for the various things I do, one of which will be a concerted effort to at least post every other day on this blog if not daily. I am also about to step into the travel niche for the first time so I am going to have to spend quite a few hours doing market research to see what others do to set themselves up for success.
In hindsight when I started my marketing journey a year ago today, I could’ve done so many things differently but the various failures allowed me to quickly learn how to actually spend my time. One lesson that only took a week or so to realize was that simply going around on forums talking about how awesome my site was wouldn’t actually generate traffic.
The best way to utilize your time is to put in initial effort upfront to come up with a logical and possible plan. For instance, it would not be a logical plan to do absolutely nothing but directory submissions every time you decide to build backlinks, distribution is key to a successful search engine optimization campaign. My current priorities are as follows:
- Posting on this blog more often to compensate for my 2 week vacation
- Researching the travel niche both with major brands such as Hotels.com and smaller websites
- Building social networking ties for this website and a handful of my other sites
- Forum posting and blog commenting within the internet marketing niche so I can see how the world has changed in the past 2 weeks.
- Re-monetizing 3 of my sites which I haven’t touched in months yet still have traffic
- Finishing a free e-book/automated newsletter for this blog
- Various link building tactics in general for this blog
- Creating that travel site I talked about.
While I have many more things I would like to do, I will allocate my time accordingly as I go through this list. My goal is to have another 50 RSS subscribers within a month so I’ll have to get back to posting and promoting my blog. When you make your own list, ask yourself first if you want to work on increasing traffic or increasing backlinks, and then move down the list from there.
Thanks to all of you that are still subscribed and I apologize for my extended leave of absence. Now go find something productive to do 
James, hi,
It is so easy to waste time on YouTube, forums and the likes, isn’t it..!? I use forums to make posts and get my sig link in front of people, and also to find subjects for blog posts – and I’ve often looked up and found that I’d spent 2 hours there when I should (and could) have done what I needed to do in an hour or less.
The time management things that work for me are 1) identify my priorities, write them down and read them each day, 2) distinguish between the urgent and important things I need to do (my priorities) and then do the important things before they become urgent.
Cheers,
Martin.