We’re all creatures of habit.

You’ve got internet marketing habits – things you do regularly in your business – but are they helping or hindering you?

There’s no quick answer as we’re all different but the first step is to work out what your internet marketing habits are.

Start by making a list of the things you do with your internet marketing on a regular basis.

If you’re not sure what those are, twice an hour just jot down what you’ve been doing for most of the last 30 minutes. So long as you’re honest with yourself, you’ll soon get a handle on what you’re spending most of your time on.

Once you’ve done that, spend some time deciding whether or not the things you’re doing are helping or hindering your internet marketing.

Your first reaction is almost certainly correct.

For instance, if you’re spending a lot of time on Facebook or a forum or whatever, that could be a good habit or it could be a bad habit.

If you’re just “lurking” – reading posts, etc. – but not contributing then it’s probably not a good habit as unless you’re learning something new and then implementing that “something”, you’re not progressing your business.

But if you’re contributing – posting useful information, helping people in your target market, that kind of thing – then it’s probably a good habit and it would almost certainly be worth doing more in that direction.

Only you will know whether your habits are useful to your business or not.

You may need to check your stats to find out whether the techniques you’re using to drive traffic are actually driving traffic and are then converting into leads or sales or whatever else it is you want people to do.

One thing you need to make sure you’re doing is track your results as best you can.

Almost every hosting package has a statistics option built in to the control panel. Awstats and Webalizer are two of the most common stats packages offered – either of them works and will show you which sites are sending you traffic.

Once your site has been established for a while that can be quite educational because you’ll start to find traffic coming from places that you haven’t done anything to get.

This happens regularly with articles and videos.

It’s worth making this kind of checking part of your internet marketing habit.

For instance, you may find that you don’t get much traffic directly from EzineArticles but that the articles you place there are of sufficiently good quality that they get picked up by other sites and those sites drive visitors to your website.

If you’re not in the habit of checking, you wouldn’t know that and might just decide that the effort wasn’t worth it.

It’s important that you check your internet marketing habits regularly.

Things change – often very fast and often without warning.

So habits that were working a while ago may no longer work.

And others that were on your “touch and go” list may have come into their own.

Adjusting your habits to take account of these changes is well worth doing.

Feel free to add your thoughts in the comments box below.