Be honest – how many online marketing courses leave your breathless with excitement that soon turns to exhaustion and confusion? That’s a common frustration for people who are trying to get up to speed in online marketing.
There seems to be so many things to do that the time drain is huge and the profits don’t match time expended. Stop and make a priority list. What do you want most from online marketing?
Supplemental income? Potential for fulltime income in one year or less? Freedom to work from home or anywhere you find an Internet connection? Identify your top three goals – and only three. Next, create an immediate to-do list.
What’s necessary to get in business online? Get your domain name, build a website, engage an autoresponder, search for products, etc. Make sure you have at least a DSL or high speed Internet access that’s reliable.
Get a computer that’s the best quality you can afford. Follow the ideas you learned in the online marketing courses, but start at a basic level. Some courses want you to jump in at the deep end and presume you have the basics already.
With the basics in place, create a weekly to-do list. Print these as check off sheets and keep it on a clipboard at your computer desk. Here’s where you put order into the chaos of leaping around cyberspace to tag, post, comment, blog, write, research and all of those other tasks used by experienced online marketers.
Unless you have a list and a time schedule, you can spend hours posting to blogs only to get distracted with other information. Decide how often you need to do each task weekly. If you’re marketing on a part time basis, then you could do tagging on Monday, forum postings or social networking on Tuesday and Saturday, blogging on Wednesday and Friday and conducting keyword research on Thursday.
Take Sunday (or at least one other day) as an online free day to get out, take a brain break and enjoy yourself. You may need to set time limits on your to-do list items. Use a screen reminder or an old fashioned kitchen timer.
Sitting for hours fixated on the computer screen is bad for your eyes and posture, but also puts you at risk for mindless munching on junk food. Here’s another time saving tip – turn off the instant message or email notification while you’re focused on a to-do task.