Finding the time to do things in your internet marketing business can be awkward.

At the time of writing, it’s coming up to Thanksgiving which means a lot of the world will be away from their screens and actually interacting with people. Or – as seems maybe more likely from recent experience – sitting round, staring at their phone. Very weird in my view but maybe I’m too old to see the appeal when there’s the opportunity for real conversation.

Either way, it seems as though modern life has more things to do than their are hours in the day.

That can be a negative because we’re subject to the same problem as marketers. Increasingly it seems to be a case of “stealing” 5 minutes here, 10 minutes there, maybe getting up a few minutes earlier, possibly burning the mindnight oil and going to bed a bit later. I find the early mornings work better for me as there are less distractions and less excuses to put things off until tomorrow.

Your customers will have the same time pressure.

That’s why headlines get shared on places like Facebook even though research has shown that few people have read the full article associated with the headline.

If you delve into that statistic, it means that in true tabloid newspaper (and National Enquirer) style, headlines are written for effect and often have little to do with the story beneath them.

That doesn’t mean you should make outright lies in your headlines but it can mean that you can exaggerate for effect. Which I guess is why so many sales letter headlines promise a lot more than they’re likely to deliver. Frustrating but getting to be a fact of life.

Coming back to finding the time to do things, I find that having something as close as possible to a routine is good.

We’re increasingly used to having catch-ups and almost immediate re-runs available on TV, on-demand showings on the web. They’re good but they also show people are too busy to fit their life around someone else’s schedule.

But for your own schedule, there needs to be some “me” time.

Otherwise everything else will conspire to get in the way of what you should be doing in your business.

My personal routine recently has been to write a near enough daily email first thing in the morning. That then gets copied and pasted into a blog post.

I edit the blog post version slightly – mainly to change any links as my autoresponder adds in some proprietary link tracking but sometimes if the wording is time sensitive.

Then I press send on my autoresponder and Tweet on my site.

Later – and I’m usually in catch-up mode for that – I’ll turn the blog post into a slide presentation, put it on SlideShare and record it for YouTube.

I’m usually between 5 and 10 days behind on doing that.

But they can be done in spare minutes in the day – it’s under 10 minutes to copy and paste a blog post into the segments needed for a slide presentation, about the same to record the video (I don’t edit or do anything else fancy) and about the same again to post on both sites.

Could I find the 30 minutes in one slot? Maybe, if I moved things around and could guarantee Skype wouldn’t flash at me at an inopportune moment.

But finding 5 or 10 minutes is easier because it uses otherwise dead time where I’d just be scrolling through emails or Facebook or whatever.

Try it for yourself.

Make those lost minutes work for you.

And make your main priority an actual priority so that you do it as part of your daily routine.

I think you’ll find quite a bit of time that’s not being used to your advantage but could easily be turned round.