If you are a small business there is a lot of demand on your time. One important trick is the swapping of roles as task and deadline necessitate. Marketing your business is one of those roles. It is essential, and it tasks a fair amount of time.

As a small business owner you are always looking for the most efficient way to market your business. The aim of minimum resource and maximum return on investment will lead you into unfamiliar and uncharted territory.

Internet marketing is one of those new areas that we have come to understand as being essential for the survival of a business. Internet marketing can be very daunting to a business owner unsure of the ins and outs of the web. If you spend any time listening to internet marketing advice a lot of it centres in getting online. The advice starts with create a website, get a blog, be involved in social media, create viral content and so the list continues.

The problem with all this advice is that it can suck up your time and may leave you neglecting other important tasks. Much of the expert’s advice makes sense and promises to lift business and generate great internet return on investment.

But when have you spent enough time online? When is it time to change hats and do something else?

I have attempted a very basic internet diary as a guideline. It is only a starting point but like everything, internet marketing needs a plan. This plan does not consider time spent in learning or getting the knowledge required to market online effectively.

Creating an internet diary is important and will help manage your time spent online doing internet related marketing. Along with a diary an action plan should be created for each individual element that you include in your diary. This element action plan will outline objective, knowledge acquisition, tools required and the tasks that you will be doing during the allotted time slot in your internet diary.

INTERNET DIARY

Daily Tasks

Online Sales and Customer Service		–
Email respond		–
Telephone and SMS		–
Direct Social Messages and Questions	More & more customers will contact you via different media and you may need to respond to a booking request over twitter as well as email or direct bookings. Twitter will take a daily bit of attention	– 10min

Weekly Tasks

PPC – Adwords Review	Review Click through and adjust adverts, keywords and budget (small campaign)	30 min
Google Alerts for Business Name & Branding	Set up a weekly search for your business name and any Branding that is relevant to you. Review the email that comes in and take action as appropriate	2 min
Social Media Friends Management	Add new friends Accept / Reject friend invitations	10 min
Post Content – Blog Article	Check that scheduled content has gone live	10 min
Update Social Profiles	Select the three social media sites that you believe are going to work for you	10 min
Seed Twitter Content – schedule	Paste in and schedule the tweets you have created in your content creation time.	10 min

Monthly Tasks

Keyword Research	Keyword research to identify short tail and actionable keywords that you can market to.	30 min
Write Content	Write Content Blog Posts Twitter etc	12 hr Spread out over Month
Schedule Content or new blog posts	A lot of the blog software has the ability to schedule when content will go live. This feature is very handy in cutting down on the time spent posting new material to a website.	15 min
Website Analytics		30 min
Search Engine Rankings		15 min
Industry Trends Online		15 min
Partner Distribution Effectiveness
Google Alerts for Opportunities	Set up a monthly search for opportunities that is relevant to you in your niche. Review the email that comes in and take action as appropriate	2 min
Link Building	Whatever you decided to do for link building during strategy planning now is the time	30 min

Six Monthly Tasks

Brand keyword research	Update and make sure that your brand keywords are still working.	20 min
Website Analytic Goals		2 hr
Industry Trends & Goal Alignment		15 min
Social Media Trends & Goal Alignment		30 min
Your Social Network & Plan		3 hr
Webmaster Tools	Identify Errors, crawl stats	15 min
Feeds & Sitemap submissions	Make sure feeds are working	5 min
Conversion Element Testing		1 day
Link Building strategy		4 hr
Competitor Review		1 hr
You Tube or Photograph (Flickr) additions	Not factoring in time spent in taking pictures or making video	2 hr