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