If you are really serious about starting a home business and
expect it to be successful, then you really need to get
serious about it. You have to treat it just like a job –
schedule your time to work on it just like you would have
hours where you are expected to show up and perform for a
job.

If it was a job, would you have the attitude that you will
do it if you get a chance, and if you can squeeze it in to
your social calendar? Not likely because you wouldn’t have
the job very long if that was the way you handled it. It is
the same concept with your own business – you need to take
it seriously. It has to be a priority.

You really need to make your home business work schedule
part of your business plan. Determine how many hours you
have per day or per week to work on your business. While
you may have a day job, a family and pets, etc., that demand
your attention and are definitely the priority, if you want
to add a home business to your life then you need to make
some structured time for it. Whether it is 2 hours or 10
hours you need to use the time wisely and be consistent.

One thing that is a huge energy rip-off is email. You
should learn how to only open emails that are relevant to
your business during your home business time. Even at that
if there is nothing pressing you should just glance over it
and file it. Don’t waste your time trying to read every ad
that comes into your inbox. It is hard to ignore total chaos
so just archive everything – if it is from companies you are
working with then make a folder for those and file things
away.

Some time in the future when you have spare time you can go
through them – but again you need to learn how to just
glance over them so you don’t waste your time – if there is
something critical it will be in the subject or first
paragraph. Understand that it is an avalanche and you will
never catch up or keep up with it so you just need to get it
out of the way.

You need to have a definite plan on how you will spend your
time. For example, with the email out of the way (and say
you gave that 15 minutes), if you have anything that you
need to do related to that, like pay a bill or sign up for
something before the deadline, then get that done (say 15
minutes for this). Knowing that one of the most important
(free and effective) ways to promote your online business is
to use your blog, maybe give yourself (30 minutes) to
compose a few paragraphs, or more if you have something more
to say. Original content is always best, but if you don’t
have anything unique, then maybe post an article by someone
else, and of course including their links, etc. to give them
full credit when you copy and paste it to your blog.

Some other tasks that are typical to an online marketing
business would be to manage your list in your autoresponder,
(15 minutes); do some advertising with whatever strategies
you are using – for instance solo ads, traffic exchanges,
list builders (30 minutes); Check your affiliate programs
for commissions by logging in to each one and looking for
your reports (15 minutes); Check in to your social networks,
etc., to see if you have any messages (business-related) to
respond to; add here whatever else for your business that
you may need to devote some time to.

Just remember not to get ‘lost’ on any site that you are
on. It has been determined by people who track statistics,
etc., that people are wasting time, for example when they
need an answer from a search engine and they typically would
need to click 1 or 2 links to get their information. However
one link always seems to lead to another and you have just
wasted an hour by going to 6 or 7 different sites. Maybe
you even forgot what you were doing. While this is fun and
interesting, you have just taken up time you could have used
to promote your own business.