Category : Productivity
I’ve been experiencing and interesting effect in my quest to build web sites and work on SEO campaigns. I have started to outsource many of the common, repetitive tasks to help scale out the projects. While this is pretty nice, I’m finding myself a little lost on direction while having so much of the work in the hands of others.
Where I used to spend hours hunting down possible links, or hours developing page copy, I now sit and monitor progress of various people that are doing the work for me.
I’m finding this to be a little boring. But that’s okay because this is also the way I need to operating at this point. I reached near-burnout by trying to do everything myself at one point, even though I felt more “in the trenches”.
I almost need to relish in this new situation and get used to it. I need to focus my time on monitoring sites, making sure I’m getting good quality content and link building help from my workers, and overall looking at the big picture.
I guess it’s not so much being bored, but it’s just getting used to not being so overly busy. Am I working smarter rather than harder? I hope so. I just have to get used to the new pace.
I recently have been using 1Password to keep all my passwords organized. For the most part, it’s helping me to be a lot more efficient during my work, due to the fact that it makes keeping track of multiple passwords a lot more easy. I use this app with Firefox and Dropbox to make my life easy.
There is one thing that I really like about 1Password, and there is one thing that I really do not like, and the rest of my opinions seem to sit somewhere in the middle.
What are these two things I’m referring to?
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I recently just wrote an entry about why it’s not a good idea to get bogged down with checking web stats every day. This new entry is going against those thoughts. But it’s for a good reason.
I do have one reason that I sometimes like to look at my web traffic stats every day.
I like to look at the keywords the people are using to find my site. They often contain phrases that are questions. Answering these questions makes for great content ideas for the sites.
Let’s say I am looking at the list of phrases that people types yesterday to find one of my sites, and I see the question “how to clean aquarium glass”, sitting there nicely as a keyword phrase.
Great, I just have a new content idea for the day. I can write a post that helps people learn how to clean aquarium glass, and it’s probably related to a lot of the other content on the site since somebody found the site using that key phrase.
Using this technique, I can usually weed out ideas that go into more depth or get more specific than some of the general topics that are already on a site. This is a good thing.
That’s about the only reason I can think of at the moment to take the time to look at web traffic stats each day, the right stats and info can make content idea generation pretty snappy.
Productivity is a big issue for busy webmasters. How can we stay focused on what is really worth working on (expanding our web presences) and not get bogged down by what I consider to be the fun stuff?
I call stat checking and analysis fun, because it is. Doing so allows you to see information that shows you how well your efforts are (or aren’t) working.
Do you log into Google Analytics every day? Do you spend a good chunk of time each day looking at various accounts and reports to see how your sites are positioned in the SERPs and how much traffic you are getting?
You might be spending too much time doing that, if that is the case.
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I’ve recently begun a new method in regards to how I approach my days. I have done this to keep myself more focused an on task for each area of business that I have to deal with daily.
What I like to do now includes printing a physical sheet of paper (oh no!). This is something that I’ve tried to avoid, printing anything on paper really, but it works out good for me in this instance.
What am I doing differently now?
I use a daily checklist.
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This is something that I have to remind myself about, quite often.
Exposure on the Web can be a race at times. It’s a race to get content online. It’s a race to get search engines to index and rank your content well. It’s a race to convert visitors into buyers. I could go on and on.
Within all these individual races that we participate in, with our Web properties, we need to think more like the Tortoise and less like the Hare.
Why?
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Gmail is something that I use every day. Why do I like to use gmail so much? Here’s a few reasons:
- It’s accessible via the web, which means I can use it on multiple devices every day, easily
- The way that Gmail integrates with other Google Apps makes it very efficient and easy to use (I like easy)
- I don’t have to use Outlook
Those are three good enough reasons to throw out there, but there are also some power user type of features that I’ve started to use more recently that have made Gmail very efficient for me, making it easier to manage the large amounts of email that I have to deal with each day.
Keep reading to learn about 3 small features that I’ve enable in Gmail to make my emailing a lot more productive.
In the course of any typical work day, I use 4 different computers/devices mainly for a lot of work related and Internet related stuff.
I have the desktop PC at the office, the desktop PC at the home studio, the laptop PC and then of course, the Droid.
I do a pretty good job of making everything accessible to myself by keeping a lot of stuff out in the cloud. But sometimes it’s just nice to be able to easily share files between all the devices. I’ve never really had a simple solution for sharing files between my computers, much less my computers and a phone all at the same time.
This is where Dropbox is proving to be helpful. I have it installed on all four devices.
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