Ten Ways to Improve your Internet Marketing Productivity

I have noticed that effort gets results. But the key is to do more in less time and to make the effort count. In this article, I will give you ten ways in which you can do more in less time.

Is this a shocking revelation? Not really. However, I find (as you will see in my Affiliate Judgement Day ebook) that this is often a missing piece of my puzzle.

I suspect that many people are similar in this regard to me. They may sit at their computer and ‘work’ for a period of time, say two hours, but how much money making effort is actually done?

People often fool themselves that if they are sitting at their computer, they are doing something. But the reality is often we waste a good deal of time. We take phone calls, we answer emails, we check out other sales pages, we read the Warrior Forum –oops, there’s an hour and a half gone. Mm. That WSO looks interesting, I’ll check that out. . . interesting feedback, led me read on a bit, mm, interesting, only $7, I’ll check that out. . . while it’s downloading, I’ll make a cup of tea. . . mm. . . two and a half hours gone.

Does this sound familiar?

So what actual income producing effort have we done?

None.

Now, don’t get me wrong- there is very much a time and a place for forum browsing and education. In fact, education is key. But it mustn’t detract from the day to day stuff we must do to see consistent results at Internet Marketing.

So here are my ten top tips for increasing productivity when we sit down to do internet marketing.

1. Work out income product efforts. So work out that you want to sell something on eBay, or create a PPC campaign, or write a Squidoo lens to promote a product. Always have in mind concrete things to do that will lead to the potential of making money.
2. Have a plan. In fact, this is so important, I’ll talk about it in another article. The reason why most of us waste time is that in reality we don’t know what to do. If we had a step by step plan of six or seven things to do a day, wouldn’t that help? We just open the list, and work through.
3. Make this plan step by step and easy to follow and have one for each day you propose to work. Either set up the plans for the week on a Sunday or do them first things before starting your efforts.
4. Give yourself a time slot each day to work on these steps. Put it in your diary as an appointment. If this needs to be half an hour before work, your lunch hour and an hour when you get home, or less, split it up.
5. Follow the plan consistently. It doesn’t matter if you have a plan if you don’t follow it. Follow it!
6. Make your plan measurable so that when you have worked through it, you can actually see what things you have done to advance your internet marketing business. So, you have written three blog posts in Niche 1, written a sales page or a landing page for affiliate product 2, etc.
7. Have a full tracking system in place and make sure you build into your income efforts tracking. That way, when you collate your sales data and relate it to your individual sites and efforts, you can see which days’ efforts made money. This is very motivating!
8. When working on this plan, don’t do anything else. Don’t check your emails or check your answerphone. Work on these steps for the time you allocate for yourself and do nothing else until you have finished those steps.
9. If you are prone to wonder and surf, turn off your internet connection for the time you are working (unless you need it, of course). Be disciplined during this time and you will not regret the time you spend surfing or doing educational stuff as you have already done your stuff for the day.
10. Monitor your productivity, either during the time slot you give yourself or after, when surfing and relaxing. If you are just wasting time and not achieving anything positive, stop and turn the computer off and go and do something else. Make your computer time important and not associate it with time wasting!

If you follow these steps, I believe you will find your productivity increases a lot.

If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!