It’s probably fair to say that most people involved in internet marketing are self employed. Which is a good place to be – you’re your own boss – but can mean that you don’t have as many reasons to keep on track as you would if you had a “real” job.

Some people make good bosses. Others make lousy ones. And often we find it difficult to manage ourselves – a lot of people go to one extreme or the other. Either beating themselves up if they get even the smallest detail wrong or adopting a laissez faire attitude where it’s OK to always procrastinate and put things off until a permanently future tomorrow.

If you’re not as productive with your internet marketing as you’d like to be, the first thing to do is to work out where your time is being spent.

I find the easiest way to do this is to use a simple spreadsheet (but a piece of paper would work just as well):

Put a series of boxes in – one for every half hour of the day works nicely – and write down what you did for the majority of that time.

That means if you spent 20 minutes checking emails and replying to them and 10 minutes on Facebook, you’d probably write down emails. And mark it as red or amber as it’s basically not very productive.

On the other hand, if most of the half hour was spent creating and posting content for your site. Or if the emails you wrote were in your autoresponder series then you’d write that down and colour the box green to show it was productive.

That traffic light colouring system works well. It’s easy to understand and after a day or two, you can see at a glance what you’ve been doing and whether or not it’s helped towards your internet marketing goal.

I find that doing this exercise every few months keeps me on track – it’s certainly something I’d recommend.

There are a couple of things to remember here:

• You need to fill in the chart as close as possible to real time as you can. Our memories play tricks on us and it’s just not easy to fill it in accurately
• You need to be honest with yourself. Because the only person you’d be cheating if you weren’t honest would be yourself and that’s just dumb

Once you’ve kept a note of what you’ve been doing for a day or two, you can fine tune things.

So if you find that your preferred procrastination technique is watching YouTube videos then you need to save these as a treat. We always crave what we can’t have (which is diets fail so often) so it’s better to have an allowance that you give yourself as a reward – with a strict time limit, probably enforced by a loud alarm on your phone – rather than decide you can’t ever do an online activity that you enjoy.

The other trick I’ve used a lot is to take a break.

This may sound odd when I’m talking about being productive.

But allowing yourself some time off is good and not just the time you go to sleep!

The Pomodoro Technique is a good way and one that I use quite a bit:

• Work productively for 25 minutes
• Have a 5 minute break
• Repeat that another three times (so 4 in all), making a roughly 2 hour block of time
• Have a longer break – around 25 to 30 minutes
• Start the cycle over again

Give that a try – I think you’ll be pleasantly surprised at just how productive you’ll be, just by giving yourself a routine to follow.

And check out this post if you’d like to know more about being productive and getting a lot of internet marketing done in just an hour a day.

And don’t rule out hypnosis as a way to get your mind on the productivity track – I use alternative methods like that to help get my mind “on side”.

Feel free to add your comments and tips to being productive with your internet marketing below.