Here's an effective and simple way to figure out what you should be spending time on to market and promote your site.

1- Write down all the activities you do to draw visitors. Include any active marketing and promotion - this exercise is not for passive items.

2- For the next week, every time you do something to market or promote your site, write it down. At the end of the week, star each action that in some way contributed to generating a profit. Sort them by how much money they made you, then in reverse order of how long each activity took.

Remember that if a combination of four actions makes you $100, group them together as one item and add their time expenditure together.

3- Anything you did that doesn't make the list of contributions to a sale, de-prioritize them. Don't completely stop though. Sometimes cumulative actions take more time to bear fruit, as in the case of directory submissions.

4- For the next three weeks, do the action items that made the list in their new order. Then, and only then, do new things you hear about or things you were already doing that we're on that list.

5- Set a reasonable time limit per day for getting all these things done. Make adjustments to reduce as much time as possible.
For example, instead of doing all your article submissions by hand, sign up to an article distribution site, and only submit manually to the important ones they miss. Better yet, assign that part of the task to someone else in your company or outsource.

6- At the end of the month, write down all the events that brought in extra income, visitors, or subscribers, and tie them to an activity. If it's not on the list add it.

Example: Social media. It may feel like you aren't being as productive in Facebook as you like, but if a friend of yours who knows you from Facebook introduces you to a client via their messaging system that results in a monthly re-occuring fee of $3000, that counts.

If, after 300 Stumbles, a power-user reciprocates in a way that brings you 5000 visitors in a day, which increases subscribers, and later sales, that counts. Of course if you're set up to generate traffic from either of these, you're probably not in danger of dropping it from your list anyway.

7- Also at the end of the month, do another review of your list. Drop any activity that doesn't seem to be producing results.

Caution: Some things you're doing are hard to track, as in the case of social media. The great thing about logging everything is that next month, if sales are lower but traffic is higher, you now have a record of what you did so you can test to see if adding in something you dropped makes it better.

Once you've taken these steps, at the end of the month you have a list of everything you do to generate leads, visitors and clients, and you know which items to do first if you're pressed for time (the subset of things that are fast and make the most money).

Now you have time to learn new promotion methods, and of course, do the rest of your work.