Many people think that internet marketing is the holy grail.  Make money in your underwear.  Work from the beach.  Set up a website and forget it.

Let me tell you that nothing can be farther from the truth.

Sure, you do have the luxury of working from where ever you want - at least anywhere you have a high speed internet connection.

And you can be very flexible with your time - for instance, I want to get this post done so I can run down and pick up my boys from school.  If I was at an office I could not leave to do that.

But it is a fair amount of work.

Rather than go on and on, I will just give you a little run down of the kind of things I usually do on a normal day.  Of course not all of these are essential, but a certain amount of some kind of promotion is necessary.

- I moderate two forums - so I typically check in on these forums 2-3 times per day to see that things are ok.  This can take anywhere form 5 minutes to 45 minutes depending on the amount of posts there.

- Blogging - I have this main blog and a few extra blogs, so I usually spend 30 minutes a day making blog posts.

- Article writing - Writing and promoting your websites, affiliate links, etc are part of the game in internet marketing.  I usually spend at least an hour a day writing articles, reviews, etc and posting to article directories.

- Social Networkig - I am active at 2-3 social networks - so I spend 10-15 minutes a day answering comments, posting, and building relationships at these sites.

Email - At least an hour a day wasted on email that comes in and goes out.

Now it is time to actually get some work done.

My main site - ZedBiz.com - I try to ad something 2-3 times per week - so that would be 1-2 hours each time.

My main new project - WCB Network - which involves a social network site, a paid classified site and a business directory - I try to work on these daily - putting 1-2 hours in on improvements, promotion, error checking, etc.

My side projects - niche sites - I try to get at these 2-3 times a week for 1-2 hours each.

Then there is all the tools, latest strategies, etc that need to be learned and incorporated into my business.  This probably takes about 3-4 hours per week.

So I never really added it all up, but internet marketing definitely is not an easy task.  Maybe as I get better it will become easier.

Thanks, Jack