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How Bloggers Can Better Organize Activities & Targets by Using a Dashboard Tool

How Bloggers Can Better Organize Activities & Targets by Using a Dashboard Tool

A blogger’s ability  to visualize targets, plot action plans and execute on tasks that matter most will lay the foundation for success in all ventures. Many are oftentimes distracted by an abundance of tools, tactics and ideas that promise whether it’s high traffic, more signups or better conversions. Beginners especially, fall into the trap of trying everything under the sun that seems to offer some value for blog growth. The reality is, however, that it’s part of the growth process and without experimentation we won’t discover what works and is most suitable for our niche and ventures. Therefore, organization is key and spending time digesting and acting only on the most relevant data while investing time and effort on proven tactics are what will guarantee fruitful success.

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With the torrent of data, tools and blog growth formulas out there it’s very easy for the average blogger to get bogged down and experience burnout as plans at the end of the day amount to zero. There needs to be a way to spend more time doing meaningful work and less time trying to figure things out. The starting point for achieving this will be learning how to use the data we acquire about our audience and niches efficiently; organizing and maximizing our days for best results. Dashboard tools are excellent for helping practically any practitioner make sense of their world. Here’s how:

Identify & Focus Only on What Matters

Referring to the Pareto principle or the 80-20 rule, for many activities, roughly 80% of the effects come from 20% of the causes. For example, 80% of your sales come from 20% of your clients or 20% of your time produces 80% of your results. Therefore, it’s up to you to figure out what tasks fall within the 20% and pour your energy there. The rule applies to blogging as well and you need to determine, for example, whether sharing and outreach activities on Facebook in fact produce more meaningful results and referrals to your site than Twitter does. Or whether spending more time doing outreach and engaging your community is more powerful than trying to write 20 articles for the month instead of 5. You’d be surprised what you discover and as you find your answers this will be the starting point for organizing and investing in your daily activities.

As you make sense and reveal more of what will actually make your blog grow and strip away the unnecessary or less important tasks you’ll be closer to victory.

Making Sense of Data from Multiple Sources

As you narrow down your focus and discover clues to what works, it’s time to start collecting richer data, making better use of tools and develop a simplified method of tracking everything. There’s an unlimited supply of tools online like Moz, Google Analytics, GetResponse and Google Trends that provide powerful feature sets and rich data to power any marketing campaign. The problem typically lies in connecting all the data points together to form a useful and cohesive image of how all the pieces fit together to grow your blog. The human mind cannot visualize, summarize and make these connections entirely on its own and that’s where a service like Cyfe is great for piecing things together. Cyfe is an online dashboard and data visualization tool that allows its users to pull data from over 60 data sources to create custom useful and insightful graphs, tables, lists and other data presentation formats. One of the great features here is that through customizing your dashboard you can specifically pull exact pieces of information with the most meaning for your daily campaigns. For instance, you may want to only see data relating to time spent on site and exact pages being visited via Google Analytics in relation to the delivery of an email marketing campaign in real-time. The dashboard makes combining varied pieces of info to make a complete picture a possibility.

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Example dashboard

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Since we’re such visual consumers our brain absorbs visual data at a much better rate than simply plain text or a flood of raw data. Custom visualizations will help you make more sense of everything.

Monitor Campaigns in Real-time

Another powerful ability that dashboard tools will afford bloggers is real-time monitoring. While too much time shouldn’t be spent on monitoring but instead on action, custom dashboards will significantly cut the time it takes to login to multiple services and accounts to review campaign progress and performance metrics. Monitoring becomes much more meaningful as the relationship between all activities can be viewed in action with a great view of how everything works together to drive the blog forward.

Having a comprehensive view of all elements of your blog and marketing activities will in the end help you focus more on work that matters while understanding your niche. Goals and targets will prove so much more realistic and with greater impact as you witness all pieces of your online business work together as one.

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