Internet marketing isn’t complicated but it does require time and persistence. And, truth be told, it probably requires more persistence than time.

Studies vary but it’s generally thought that even the most productive people don’t spend more than a handful of hours a day working productively. The rest is taken up with meetings, phone calls, emails, texts and all sorts of other distractions.

So what can you do in internet marketing in an hour a day?

Most of that time should be spent creating content.

It doesn’t take long to come up with ideas for content. A few minutes a day doing some very basic keyword research will get you more than enough content ideas for this lifetime.

So set the clock ticking when you do keyword research. Your mission here is to spend no more than 5 minutes finding a keyword phrase or two that you’ll be able to create content on for the remainder of your hour.

Incidentally, it doesn’t have to be a contiguous hour. It could just as easily be two 30 minute sessions, three 20 minute ones or whatever.

The rest of your allotted time should be creating content.

That could be videos – in which case the time they spend rendering doesn’t count towards your overall time allocation (sorry but staring at a progress bar crawling across your screen isn’t productive).

Or it could be audios – less processing time but still a bit of an overhead where you can be doing something else.

Or written posts like this one. They work fine and your typing will get faster the more you practice. I use two fingers to type plus my thumb to hit the spacebar and my written output is quite prolific. Probably in the region of 1,000 words an hour, maybe a bit more.

The content delivery method doesn’t matter as much as the actual content.

If you create mainly video content, you’ll attract people who like that delivery method. The same goes for audios or written content.

Or you could mix and match like I do.

Typically I’ll create written content for my sites and places like Ezine Articles.

And I’ll create video (or sometimes audio) content for the products I create.

Why do I do that?

It fits with me.

And it fits with my audience – they seem to prefer video for products, which suits me fine as videos are quicker to produce than written material for a main product.

Written content to drive traffic also fits with me. I can write an article like this one in about 30 minutes or so depending on the final length of the article. This one may take a bit longer as it will be more than the 400 – 500 words I’d write for a site like EzineArticles.

But it will still take me a lot less than an hour to write and proof read.

And then Google will have lots more nicely written words to index – which is the stuff search engine algorithms would dream about if they were capable of dreaming.

Win-win.

And perfectly possible in an hour a day.

Let’s say that for the first month you’re a slow typist and your creative juices aren’t flowing as well as they will later in your internet marketing career…

So for the first month you’re writing around an article a day for your site.

Depending on whether you work weekends or not, that will mean between 20 and 30 posts on your website.

Which I’m guessing would put you at the higher end of the competition in your niche.

Do the same for the second month – and allowing for you getting faster (because you will) – then let’s say that you average 1.5 articles a day for your site. That means another 30 – 45 posts on your site. So we’re up to between 50 and 75 posts and the search engines are crawling round your site more often as they sense more fresh content to index.

Month three, you’re up to 2 articles a day. About the same as I write (although I spread my content writing between my own site, EzineArticles and some other sites I own) so you’ll be adding 40 to 60 posts. Which means you’ll be up to between 90 and 135 posts on your site. Probably in the top 10% in your niche – there’ll be one with a stupendouse number of pages that seems out of reach and then it will drop fast, so you’re maybe in the top 5%.

Traffic to your site should start showing a few signs of life. Not much but a glimmer.

And you’ve probably weaved in some Amazon and other affiliate links in those pages for good measure.

Once you’ve reached the 100 posts level, it’s time to split your energy.

Keep posting on your site but maybe slow the pace to 1 post per day.

The rest of your time can now be spent creating content to drive traffic. Articles, videos, whatever you’re most comfortable with.

This is actually easy!

You’ve already done the keyword research.

And it’s long enough ago that you’ll be approaching the topic fresh. So you won’t be replicating what you’ve previously written.

Then these pieces of content pointing to your site will help build up your site’s traffic.

You can then spend a bit of time tweaking the look and feel of your site if you want to – there’s not much point in doing it before now as you’re near enough the only visitor apart from Google’s robots (and a very brief nose around by Bing if you’re lucky).

But don’t let that distract you from creating more content.

You’ll maybe have a few people on your email list by this time.

And you’ll hopefully have some stats about which pages people are looking at most.

Which means you can now split your time further…

I’d suggest 30 minutes a day on content – alternating between your site and external sites.

And the other 30 minutes on creating a product. Which means you’ll have your own product in a week or so – nothing big but definitely something you can call your own and be proud to sell.

You could comfortanly create a couple of hours of videos in half an hour a day for a week.

And a sales letter the following week.

So in two weeks or so, you’re adding content to your website and creating a product that you can sell.

How cool is that?!

All in just an hour a day, so long as that hour is productive rather than spent checking emails and Facebook and Tweets and answering Skype chat messages.

Your choice.

I can’t force you to do it (although I can nag you a bit if you want).

But I think if you make a commitment to yourself to follow this plan for spending just an hour a day on your internet marketing for the next 3 months, you’ll notice a big change.

Probably not life changing money (yet) but definitely a lot of steps in the right direction.

All for swapping an hour a day where your productivity is negligible for an hour where you’re doing something positive towards your internet marketing goal.

That’s your challenge, should you choose to accept it!

And feel free to post a comment below this post to let everyone know how you’re doing on that challenge. Or drop me a message if you’d prefer to keep your comments more private.

Or you can click this link for a set of videos expanding on these ideas.