There are so many possible things you can do in your internet marketing that it’s essential to set some priorities otherwise could you easily end up chasing your own tail and getting nowhere. Which is frustrating and not a productive use of your time.

Unless you’re a full time internet marketer, the chances are that it’s not the only thing you’re doing in your business. And even if you’re one of that rare breed who spends all their working hours on internet marketing you still need to work out where your priorities lie.

One thing I do regularly – typically every few months – is jot down where I’m currently spending my time.

Grab a piece of paper or open up a spreadsheet and jot down what you’ve spent the last 30 minutes doing. If you’ve done several things and that’s normal for you then you may need to choose a shorter time period but for most people half an hour seems to work quite well.

It’s important to do this at the time – you’re unlikely to remember precisely what you’ve done when if you complete the sheet at the end of the day and it’s easier to romanticise and try to fool yourself if you do that.

After two or three days, analyse what you’ve been spending your time segments on.

Go with your first reaction as to whether the time was usefully spent or not.

This isn’t a precision exercise.

And the answer will be different for different people and businesses.

For instance, my time spent on this site is usually because I’m writing content for it. So, for me, that’s productive use of my time in respect of my internet marketing and I do priortise it on a regular basis.

Likewise if I was reading the content on this site with a view to furthering my knowledge and putting the ideas into practice, that would be something to give priority to.

But if I was just reading things here to pretend that I was going to use them, that wouldn’t be productive.

You need to do the same analysis for each of the segments on your sheet.

The idea of doing this exercise is to show you quickly where you’re spending your time and whether you should spend more time on certain things and less on others.

The reason I personally do this exercise every few months is that it’s far too easy to slip into ways that I hadn’t intended. That could be checking emails or sales stats or logging back into Facebook (especially now I use it to follow various internet marketing trends).

Your habits and priorities will be different but whatever they are, they seem to leap out at you even after only two or three days.

Once you’ve worked out what you’re spending most of your time on, you need to do a quick reality check as to whether it’s getting you results.

Those could be short term results such as an immediate sale or longer term results such as potential traffic from Google.

Assign each of your main tasks a time score – roughly how much of your week you spend on them – and a “business” score – how much business (if any) they’re generating.

Then, if necessary, adjust what you’re doing so that you make the most of your time.

If you need help with working out your internet marketing priorities, it may be worth using an internet marketing coach to help you through the maze of opportunities.

And if you’d like more help prioritising, take a look at this article about productive internet marketing methods.