Some time back I was reading an article from a guy based in Australia and he was talking about how to be effective in internet marketing. One of the things he discouraged was checking your traffic and Adsense earnings daily. You’d be surprised that some do it hourly even when their site is a day old – for real!Okay I confess, that article did not make me stop checking my stats. I mean after all they do tell me how I’m doing online. I have this tendency of not taking advise head on until I go through that experience myself. Sometimes it is a bad way of doing things but sometimes it works especially when it comes to sharing some of my experiences on this blog. I have always used Google analytics and it gives me a clear view of everything I may need to know about traffic to my site.

Now each hour I would log on to the site to see how I was doing – that was until I realized that reports are updated after about 24 hours for Google analytics. Then I moved to Adsense reports because they update them more frequently. I would click refresh on my site every hour to see if I’d made any more money.

I have just kicked off a habit of leaving the page opened and just starring at it for hours with a calculator on the side. Imagining a few more clicks and calculating how much I will make. This is all good and well, in fact some of my posts encourage it (I call it imagining the possibilities) but you need to know when to do it. If you are not careful it could take a good part of your time and hence slow down your business growth. On average it takes me 30 minutes to write an article and on average I make about $10 (calculated # of pages on all my sites, divide by the income those sites generate) which means with the time spent starring at my figures I could be engaged in article marketing or writing content for a new sites and making $10 on each one of them.

The first time I found a click worth about 5 cents on my account I was literally over the moon. Some days were very dry and could did not make a cent. I never really realized how this was affecting my effectiveness until recently. Each time I made a few cents, I would be motivated to do more and would be more effective than when I never made anything. It suddenly became a case of “show me the click and I will show you some work”. Never mind the line, am just trying to be fancy but I hope you do get my point.

Then it dawned on me that this consistent checking of my Adsense stats was killing my morale especially because my business was so small and did not make much. Essentially, It was like some slow poison was wearing my IM business bit by bit. At times I would stay close to a week without doing anything to my sites and then when I finally got a click it would take some time before I was able to pick up from where I had left off.

I have successfully stopped checking Analytics daily. I now use an effective internet marketing strategy – I check it at the middle of the month to see who is sending traffic to my site. I am specifically interested in article directories because I constantly test those that are sending me more traffic so I can post more article on them. I also check month end when I access my monthly performance and in preparation of my internet marketing strategy for the upcoming month.

As for Adsense I stopped checking hourly, I still do it randomly but ideally my system dictates that I check it in the mornings. More than anything, I do it for kicks but it is really not necessary to do it so much unless I’m running a test. Guess I should practice what I preach ha!

I have, however, quit checking my Amazon and some few affiliates earnings, sometimes I even forget I have them until I get an email about a payout – it’s like finding long forgotten money stashed in an old book shelf or jacket.

My point is, work on your business as hard as you can, set specific times to check your performance – which should never be hourly. Imagine telling an accountant to produce management accounts every hour! Doesn’t make sense or does it?

Post your comment below and tell me what you think about this habit of checking traffic statistics frequently. Is it good or bad? Why?