We all know what a gold mine the Internet can be and it’s likely why we got into this business in the first place. But unfortunately, we also know what a huge playground the web is, full of distractions that can turn looking up the meaning of a word real quick into an apartment hunt in Italy. The bottom line is that facing the challenges of the Internet and trying to properly manage our time is a big struggle for many online marketers.

From Facebook to Pinterest to our emails to Skype; even with our best intentions at heart and deadlines looming, the allure of the Internet is just too great for most of us to handle. Our minds start to wander, we tell ourselves, “Okay, I’ll start at 2:30″ but then when you see it’s 2:05, you bargain with yourself to start at 3pm because it seems more “right.” But time management tips for online marketers can help you stay in-touch with your assignments and monetize your time as you use it more and more efficiently.

Get Your Priorities Straight

For starters, you need to organize your tasks from most important to least. We’ve all been there before, doing a menial task and we click over to another screen for one second and BOOM! We’re lost in social media land. But it’s these unimportant tasks that ultimately kill your time and eventually, your money.

Instead, prioritize your tasks into important ones and unimportant ones. What is really urgent should take precedence, but not all the time. Create a flowchart and stick to it. Stack your easy work and your hard work back to back so you don’t get burned out, but most of all, so you don’t waste time.

Get a Head Start on Your Completion and Yourself

Get up early to be productive. Studies show that waking at 6:30 am or before will help you get more work done. This might be hard for you to grasp at first, but since the Internet never sleeps, why should you? Okay, okay, get some sleep, but the main thing is that if you’re up getting the worm before the other birds, you’re managing your time before others are even awake. That’s hours more of effective time management for online marketing than your competitors.

During this time period, set some of it aside for creative work so that you can get quality work in this extra time. Don’t try to be over-productive, just jot ideas down on paper and then throughout the workday, look over them when you get stuck. You can tap into these ideas later instead of sitting there wasting time problem solving; you’ve already set your problem solving down on paper! Try this for a week and see how much of a difference it makes.

Make Smaller Lists

Having a to-do list is a great idea but it can also get so overwhelming the longer it gets. Write a shorter list so that as you check off your accomplishments, you’ll feel like you’re getting more and more done. This goes hand in hand with prioritizing tasks because by the time you add menial tasks to the end of the list, you’ll be breezing through your work and building more and more confidence. Never be afraid to revise your list as necessary and if you are having trouble with one item, skip it!

For an more in depth course on doubling your productivity forever in the next 24 hours check out Instant Lifetime Productivity Formula.

If you sell products online, you need traffic to your website. You can buy it with advertisements, or you can get it for free from search engine traffic. In this article, I’ll show you how to do exactly that.

Search engine traffic is ideal. Think about it — they put in a search term, and then they actively click on your website. This is highly targeted traffic. If you get high rankings for the right search terms, that you know convert searchers into customers, you can make a killing.

What if you got a high ranking for 100′s of these keywords? Can anyone say market place dominance?

Okay, so here’s how you get search engine traffic. It really boils down to two things – on site optimization and off site optimization.

You have to understand what the search engine “sees” when the visit your website. It’s just a bunch of code to them. So you have to make what they read in the code match what they are looking for. And what search engines want is to the deliver the most relevant results.

So you have to demonstrate that your site is extremely relevant. This means your header tags should have those keywords in it that you want to rank high for it. This means that the majority of your content on your page must be related to the keyword you’re seeking high ranking for.

Not just the keyword itself, but also phrases that are semantically similar to it. For example, Pasta is semantically similar to spaghetti. So you have to optimize your pages so that the search engines say – hey this would make sense to rank this page high for a certain term.

But that’s only half the story. Probably more important than what you say about yourself on your own website is what others are saying about you on their website. The search engines keep track of this through links.

Who’s linking to your site? In general, the more links the better. And even better still, a link from a powerful site like CNN or MSN is going to carry more weight than a link from my grandma’s blog.

So if you want to get search engine traffic, you need to figure out what the major things are the search engines would like to find when they come to your site. Then, you also need to do a link building campaign to get links coming in from other relevant and authoritative sites.

If your websites are WordPress blogs, you’ll probably want to pick up the “SEO Pressor” WordPress plugin that helps with Google rankings for your blog (even after the Farmer update).

As with every other marketing strategy throughout the years, there comes a point and time when someone has the bright idea to automate the process. It happened in email marketing with auto-responders; it happened in telemarketing with automated voice dialers—and now it’s social media’s turn to get automated.

But unfortunately, we can say pointedly without a doubt that automation will not work in social media marketing. Why? Because the only thing that actually makes social media work is the social part itself. Humans want to interact with other humans, just not in person; yeah, we know it’s a huge oxymoron, but try putting an automated responder on your Facebook for just one day and watch the trolls come out of the woodworks as your EdgeRank drops like a rock in a pond.

Don’t Over-Automate your Updates

Still, for some reason people still think this is going to work. The amount of automated updates out there just proves that marketers are willing to do anything to cut down on their man hours. And it’s not like we’re saying a few automated updates now and then are forbidden; quite the opposite.

Social media is a 24/7/365 operation and as such, it’d be ridiculous to expect your marketing department or marketing firm (or you, if you’re an entrepreneur) to sit in front of the computer day in and day out. Even with the popularity of tablets and Androids, updating on the go is still not a viable everyday option when it comes to interaction.

In some situations, it’s fine to use an automated update once a week or so. But because of the social nature of the beast, if you do it more than this, someone is bound to catch on and call you out (creating a social nightmare). To avoid this, simply make posts when you have time; nothing beats the actual social interaction that takes place on social media sites when it comes to positive marketing and branding.

Avoid Automated Direct Messages

But even more of a cardinal social media marketing sin is the automated direct message. This is complete social marketing suicide as gives a first impression that they are not dealing with a social entity (i.e. a person), but instead a slick corporate marketing machine. Contrary to what you might have heard, this does not give the impression your page is on top of the ball; quite the opposite. It gives the same welcoming impression an automated tele-dialer would give you if they were to call you up and thank you for waking up this morning.

Be Personal and Responsive

The real secret to any social media marketing campaign is to be responsive. Social media thrives because people seek interaction with others. The farther apart we get from others, modern technology provides the means to bring us all closer together, a familial aspect of social media that can’t be ignored.

You wouldn’t set up an automated birthday email to your mother; treat your customers with the same respect and your social media marketing efforts will never fail.

If you’re at all interested in getting paid to manage social media for others (normally local businesses), you’ll want to check out “Let’s Get Social“.

One of the simplest ways to make money online quickly is with affiliate marketing. That is because you don’t have to create the product yourself, nor do you have to create the advertisements for it. You just simply have to get people to go through that site, and if you’re the cause of them getting to the site, and they buy, you make a portion of the sales.

So I’m going to share with you some simple affiliate marketing tricks to help you meet with success and start earning some real money online.

The first thing you need to understand is the typical affiliate marketing mindset. Most people who do affiliate marketing are lazy. So therefore, they take a lot of shortcuts. This is good for us. By doing just a little bit more than what everybody else is doing, we’ll stand out a lot more.

What am I talking about? Well, instead of just pasting a link to the affiliate product, why don’t you write a little review? Instead of just blindly promoting a product, why don’t you actually buy it. Then, here’s what you do. Make a video of you just opening the product up and quickly going through it and reviewing it.

At the very least, it’s proof that you have the product, and that’s a big deal.

The second thing you can do is sweeten the offer. This means that you create your own special bonuses for the affiliate product you are promoting. If they buy from you they get a little something extra.

If you have no idea what to give them, then sometimes the best thing to do is just give them a bit of additional support. Maybe create some training videos to go more in depth on how to use the product. This is especially useful if you’re using software.

Finally, one of my favorite affiliate marketing tricks is to try to find the “flaw” in the product. Let’s say that the flaw in the product is that, even though the information is good, there is no action plan. So you point this out. First, this makes people believe everything else you’re saying, because most people try to hide flaws.

Second, it’s the perfect excuse to offer you bonus – the action plan you created for the product that solves that flaw.

Use these affiliate marketing tricks to come up with your own ideas, so you can profit online.

If you’d like more hands-on affiliate marketing training you may want to check out “Affiliate Marketing Coach“.

For the most part, it’s an accepted fact that it generally takes seven touches to convert a cold lead into a customer. Unfortunately, the manner in which the average marketer converts these leads makes these seven steps necessary. Typically that involves firing off emails to vast customer lists and hoping for the best. Instead, communications with your customers based on their segment, where they’re at in the sales cycle (also called lead score) and what type of interactions they partake in on your website is a smarter move.

For this, you’ll need marketing automation which will allow you to score leads and attack them with extreme targeting drip campaigns and email lists. Of course, this is a large task that involves integration, scoring the leads, developing new strategies, but solution systems such as Pardot, Marketo and others help you get the ROI back tenfold when compared to the time you spend setting it up. In fact, studies done by the Annuitas Group show a 451% increase in qualified leads by companies that implement marketing automation to nurture their prospects.

Kicking Off Your First Drip Campaign

Once everything is in place, you’ll want to start off with your hottest leads. These are the ones that are most likely to close and you’re already probably sending them content focused on practice each week. What you want to do now is make them even hotter and boost your revenue from them.

Do this by going over your CRM or marketing automation and check up on your recently qualified customers and prospects. See how often they visit your site, open emails, where they go once they’re there, etc. This will help you score your leads and figure out who is worth pursuing and who is not. Work closely with your sales team on this as wasting money following cold leads is just not worth the time.

Put your warm leads into a file for nurturing and begin the cycle. This is very easy to do and mostly involves setting up a rule that states “once lead score of ABC reaches 25, add them to the 123 marketing campaign. Then, start sending emails once a week. Keep an eye on the rates at which the emails are opened and how they respond via CTRs. Then, adjust as necessary, getting more sophisticated later on with frequency options that are automatically adjusted based on response rates or responses to CTAs. For example, if someone clicks on a link for info but takes no more action, your automation tool can send them an email with a free demo within a day or two based on their actions.

The Automated Feel of Humanity

Essentially, what you’re creating here is a more efficient human response by means of an automated system. Gone are the monotone days of automated dialers and emailers; now it is possible to create deeper connections with your prospects by tailoring the marketing campaign to them based on your automated set up. They won’t know it’s automated and that helps you as a business.