Work – Life Balance – How Much Time Should You Devote To IM?

Addressing the work-life balance is always going to be a tricky thing. For many people who want to get involved in Internet Marketing, knowing how much time and money to invest especially at the beginning can be extremely difficult. My advice would be to start out slow and cautious and from there you can decide if it’s really for you. So many people read those stories of people making 6 figure sums, and only working a few hours day and get suckered in. I wrote a good post about the allure of affiliate marketing a while back, but the same can be applied to a lot of schemes that promises riches with minimal effort, such as multi-level marketing or “pyramid schemes”. Whilst I’m not equating internet marketing to such schemes, it can never hurt approaching any new endeavour with some careful thought and contemplation before launching into it, and if possible its always best to start small and test the waters.

It’s not like the good old days….

It wasn’t too long ago, where you could set up a blog in a niche post some articles and find yourself raking in the dollars on adsense alone. Unfortunately, those days are long gone and starting any kind of blog or website is a big commitment in terms of time and money. Even if you manage to find a less competitive niche, you still have to spend a lot of effort marketing it and getting a good level of traffic and build upon it on a monthly basis. All this takes time and most importantly money. If you’re on a shoestring budget, then you’ll have to do most of the online marketing, if not all of it, yourself. As Google in particular takes some time in trusting new sites, you have to be very cautious and attentive in your SEO efforts. Today, it’s much harder to rank well for a variety of keyterms than it was in the past, concerted efforts must always be made to follow the SEO basics: unique and relevant content – accesibility of site and logical/efficient site architecture – links – and social media. Most people, manage to cover 3 of the 4 pretty well, but procuring one way inbound links can be particularly difficult. It’s well recommended you spend some time reading up on the best ways to get links and ethical link building to avoid any penalties.   All this is going to take a lot of time, of course there’s the other option of getting on the first page on day one through paid search, but even with that there’s no guarantees and requires careful planning and ongoing optimisation.

I’d recommend for anyone new to Internet Marketing of thinking of starting a blog or site to not get put off, despite the sceptical nature of this article, but instead ensure they do have the correct work-life balance and start of small and have some clear goals, and revaluate their strategy at the end of each month. If you have a day job, don’t give it up as it can take many months before you even make a sale on your site. Persistance is key, and any initial profit you do make, you should look to reinvest into the marketing of the website.