Are you Too Stats Happy With your Niche Websites?

Going Stats Crazy Does Not Equal Effective Niche Marketing Strategy

I know that when you’re trying to succeed with making money with a website, it’s extremely tempting to go a bit stats crazy. What do I mean by that? I mean spending way too much time of your day, every day, checking on your stats. How many visitors did your site see today? Which pages did they view exactly? How many clicks did your visitors make? How many items were purchased? All of this is valuable information and viewing it should be a piece of your niche marketing strategy. However, spending too much time doing this is only going to end up hurting your bottom line while preventing you from being more profitable and productive.

I know from experience that it’s easy to get caught up in your stats, particularly when you’re just starting out with making money with a website. It’s all too easy to log in to Google Analytics, your affiliate programs and so on to see the up to the minute stats for the day and the week. But what is this really accomplishing? It may make you pleased or unhappy, but either way that’s a fleeting feeling and it only represents a small piece of the picture.

All you end up is doing is spending way too much time tracking the minutiae of your stats. Ten minutes here and fifteen minutes there quickly piles up into an hour or more every day. That’s 5 hours a week and 20 hours a month where you’re doing nothing except looking up stats to satisfy curiousities. If you reinvested 90% of that time into further development and marketing of your websites, then when you do see your stats you’ll have something to really be happy about!

Instead of frittering your time away, plan out time to check up on your sites and look at your stats. Trends for a period of a week are much more meaningful anyway than the day-to-day fluctuations that will occur. You will still find all of that valuable information you need – where your visitors are coming from, what they are interacting with and how they are doing it and on down the line. But you’ll save yourself a ton of time and you’ll make that much more progress. 30 minutes a week or 5 hours per week… which sounds like you’re using your time more effectively?

I’ve been too stats happy before in my past, and in many ways I’m sure I can still cut down even more. I’m making it a goal of mine, and you should as well if you want to spend more time making money with a website and less time looking at how much money you may or may not have made so far… today… in the last hour… from one content page… filtered by visitors from Canada… who arrived between 3 pm and 5 pm on weekdays.

Remember, making money with a website is accomplished by producing and marketing those sites, not by checking up on them incessantly. Plan out some time at the beginning or end of a week, or twice per week, to check your stats and leave it at that. Unless your running any special promotions or expecting huge numbers for one specific day or new post, then forget about checking in. You’ll save time and effort, and you can put it all back into your sites so you end up more productive and successful.

 Grab the RSS Feed