Don’t fly blind
You might have already heard the 80/20 rule. It means 80% of your results come from 20% of your effort. And also, 80% of your effort usually produce only 20% of the result.
Logically, it doesn’t sound fair but that’s what the reality is. The amount of effort applied never produces similar amount of results. Sometime it produces huge results and sometime it produces only the fraction of result.
The surprising fact is that this rule applies to each and every area of our life. No matter, if it’s our business, personal or career life.
Of course the 80/20 rule get skewed to 90/10 or 95/5 or 75/35 but there is always big difference between the effort applied and the result produced.
If that’s the case then have you ever think of how you can apply this same rule to your advantage. Why spend 80% of your time in the things which produces only 20% result? Why don’t you find out which 20% effort produce the 80% result and put most of your time in those activities only?
That’s the reason it’s important to track whatever you do. Find out which of your 20% effort is bringing you 80% result and dump all those low return activities which produces only the fraction of your overall result.
Here is an example:
Suppose you visit 20 blogs everyday and comment there to bring traffic back to your blog. If you track how much visitors each of those blogs brings then you’ll be quite surprised by the result. Probably 4 of those blogs will bring the same number of visitors as 16 of other blogs combined. If you already knew those kind of datas then will you have spent time on 16 of those blogs? Of course not. Also, instead of wasting time posting on those 16 blogs you can find more high performing blogs like those 4 blogs and see your blog’s visitors grow day by day.
That is just one example. I can show you many such examples where you might be simply wasting your time because you don’t know what’s the actual result is produced by which of your effort. You might be seeing the overall results but not the exact result which is produced by your individual activities.
The habit that will help you grow faster each and every day!
Don’t make this blog post as the one you read everyday and simply forget about it. Promise yourself that after reading this blog post you’ll make a habit of tracking whatever you do and compare your results.
You’ll soon be able to determine the time eater and the result producer. Than the only thing you’ll have to do is do more of the result producer and dump the time eater. If you implement this one simple habit then I guarantee you that you’ll be much more ahead in the next 30 days than you were able to accomplish in the past couple of months.
Now, the question is how to track which of your promoting activity is actually producing the results for you?
Now, don’t get freak out by thinking that I’m going to start speaking in some technical language which a rocket engineer can only understand.
You don’t have to deal with heavy stats software for tracking your progress. You can do it simply by creating tracking link as well. This can give you all the basic stats which will be helpful for you to track exactly what’s the result producing action is.
From now on, instead of dropping your regular link in other blogs/forums/other websites start dropping your tracking link there. Tracking link will automatically track how many people visited your blog and from which websites.
If you own MaxBlogPress Ninja Affiliate, then here is how you can create tracking links:
Step 1: Click on "Add New Link"
Step 2: Fill in your link name, affiliate link/blog link and enter the final ninja link you want to produce
Step 3: Your tracking link is ready to use
Now you can use this link for tracking the clicks on it. You can use this link wherever you need to leave your link. It will automatically track from where visitors are coming from as well as how many visitors clicked that link.
You can even segregate the stats by dividing the stats into sub campaigns. Suppose, you are getting huge traffic from two websites A & B, and want to track the activity from those websites separately in detail.
What you can do is, instead of using same tracking link, you can use separate sub-campaigns for both websites.
You can easily create subcampaigns by adding "-" sign at the end of tracking link followed by the sub campaign name.
Here is an example:
Suppose, my tracking link is:
http://www.maxblogpress.com/demo2/go/maxblogpress
and I want to create separate sub campaign for Website A. I can do this easily by adding "a" at the end like this:
http://www.maxblogpress.com/demo2/go/maxblogpress-a
In the stats, the sub campaigns a and b will be tracked separately.
You are right on the money on this one. I have used this same technique on hubpages and have watched my hub score soar dramatically.
Obviously statistics are very important; but what is even more important is to understand and be able to read them correctly, this is where I believe most will go wrong. Obviously there are also great free products like phpMyVisites which is a great statistics package which supports the described procedures as well; sadly not as nicely integrated into wordpress
phpMyVisites has morphed into Piwik (dot)org, which does integrate into WordPress. It is still open source and is quite advanced.
Sadly it seems to be even worse documented as phpmyvisites, but the graphical design looks a lot more pleasant to the eyes. (but that is not something i would choose a statistic program on). Hope they will develop it further, it could be real useful.
What a great post! This is a great idea and I will surely be trying this out….Thanks
Can you tell me please if we can use “MaxBlogPress Ninja Affiliate”on more than one blog?
Thanks and thanks for the great post.
Sue
Yes, Sue. You can use it in any number of blogs you own.
Thanks Pawan, I will be giving this a go as well then for all of it’s capabilities
Cheers
Sue
Thank you for posting this and you are so right. If someone asked what one thing made the most difference in changing my business I would say it would be starting to track. I found out that some of the things I was doing that I thought was working wasn’t. It helped me learn where to concentrate my efforts. When I did that then I was able to learn how to find out if an ad was working or not.
I learned if you do not track to see which places you put your link or ad is working then you do not if it is the ad that is not working or the site you are using. I was stumbling around in the dark until someone helped me understand tracking.
Thanks good job of explaining it.
Bo Tipton
What is the different between this tool and Woopra? i think they are working in the same way.
Superb idea… I’ll be investing in Ninja Affiliates asap.
Installed MaxBlogPress the otherday to manage ads on our blogs too after a friend recommended it… it Rocks 100%!
Hey, anytime you can see where your traffic comes from, is a plus.
Thanks Pawan
Looks good but I still swear by Clicky
This is so great; I open every email you send because it’s so worth it. Thanks again!
Thanks, Mr Pawan….
Thanks for a great blog article. This is truly inspiring, and I think your advice is right on the money.
Keep up the good work.
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Warm greetings
Henrik V Blunck
Dianalund – Denmark
Overview of blogs
Pawan what a great and inspiring post you’ve made here. In my recent purchase of super affiliate blogger product from Gobala he included something similar to the software you just point out here.
Though, they are similar but there are great features that I see on the screen shot that are not in the cute link Gobala include in his product. That’s a great software if I’m not mistaking and to be precise, I’m already running your banner on my site.
Heartfelt greetings
Hi,
This is very true. I am reminded of an excecutive in the 70s who said that half of their advertising spend brought in all of their sales while the other half brought in nothing. He said that the problem was knowing which half was which.
“If you can not measure it you can not improve it” is a way of saying the same thing. Without acurate tracking information how can anyone know what they should be concentrating on to improve their peformance?
this is exactly one of my problem, and thanks for letting me know the solution.
Commenting this post is a time eater or a result producer?
Munki,
It depends upon what’s your objective.
If your objective is to get some traffic and get people recognize you then it would have been a result producer if you had commented when I announced about this post to my list. Because in those few hours hundreds of people visited this post and obviously would have noticed your comment as well.
Thanks Pawan,
Most emails I receive contain information that is of little use. As a result I tend to end up removing myself from those lists. However, every email I receive from yourself always provides “right on the money”, honest advice. Keep it coming. Thanks.
“
- Only very few people are visiting your blog.
- No one is commenting in your blog.
- You seem to be the only one who is reading your blog.
- Your number of RSS subscribers never seems to grow.
“
Criminy! Sure sounds like my blog.
Thanks for the tips, Pawan.
hmmm.. Remarkable stuff.. Not rather sure I agree though