One of the best ways to stop wasting time with social media is to create an editorial calendar. Maybe you thought editorial calendars were only for large newspapers, magazines, and well, the big guy on the block but the truth is, having an editorial calendar will save you time and help you create a real plan to success using social media. With a calendar you will eliminate time sucking activities that have no return on investment (ROI) and create a situation where everything you do has a purpose. Acting with purpose is the best way to grow a successful Internet marketing business.

The good thing is that creating a social media editorial calendar is simple. You can use either excel or word to create it or if you use MS Office, you could use the Tasks option inside of Outllok to schedule your tasks and get reminded of things prior to when you need to start on them or when they are due.. First you have to have a publication calendar to flesh out the topics that you want to blog about and write about that have to do with your niche for each month of the year. You can go even deeper and come up with about 20 titles to blog about for the month along with about 10 articles to write for article marketing based on your main feature and keywords. You’ll have more keywords than the example because you will have a list of about 100 keywords from doing keyword research. Try to create blogs and articles based on these keywords for each month.

After you’ve created your content calendar, next you want to create a plan for your social media. Obviously you should automate sharing your blog posts and articles with an application that will update all your social media channels as soon as your scheduled blog posts are live on your blog. If you post regularly at the same time each day you’ll find that your readers will come to expect your blog posts and will email you if you miss a day!

Now, all you really need to schedule is the time you will spend on discussing your blog posts, or answering questions across all your social media networks. You can use a color code on a monthly calendar or a weekly calendar broken down into times during the day. Monday you could spend 1 hour in the morning while you drink your coffee answering questions on LinkedIn. Monday afternoon you could spend time answering and responding to blog post comments on all your blogs, and so on. Schedule the time in to do each task that needs to be done.

The great thing about working at home is that you can change your schedule if you need to, but if you find yourself changing your schedule every single day you might want to reconsider if you have a hobby or a business. If you want a real business as an Internet marketer working from home you will have to spend time working instead of wasting time. Time wasters include playing games or chit chatting about things outside your niche when you have scheduled something more productive.

Useful Media Tools:

The Social Network

Likeable Social Media: How to Delight Your Customers, Create an Irresistible Brand, and Be Generally Amazing on Facebook (& Other Social Networks)The secret to successful word-of-mouthmarketing on the social web is easy: BE LIKEABLE. A friend‘s recommendation is more powerful than any advertis... Read More >

Connected: The Surprising Power of Our Social Networks and How They Shape Our Lives -- How Your Friends' Friends' Friends Affect Everything You Feel, Think, and DoRenowned scientists Christakis and Fowler present compelling evidence for our profound influence on one another's tastes, health, wealth, happiness, beliefs, even weight, as they explain how social networks form and how they operate.