Working from Home: Set Daily and Weekly Goals for Productivity

Working at home can be changing in terms of productivity due to distractions that exist however working at home has one challenge that is worse for many. You are not supervised.  If you require supervision to get work done, you won't be successful working at home because you have to be a self-starter.  If you don't regularly add content (sales and informative) to your website, blog, or print on demand (POD) site(s), you won't make any money and will have to get a job where you will have a set schedule and someone looking over your shoulder.

One way to deal with this problem is of course to set regular days and hours for work so you get into a routine. I wrote about this in earlier articles.  Today, I want to emphasize the importance of setting (and writing down) your daily and/or weekly goals for your online business.

The importance of setting goals

Since you don't have a boss while working at your home or online business, you need more than just the need to eat to keep yourself working and keep your online business growing.  Your list of goals (or as I like to call it my to-do list) replaces the boss.  Instead of going to the boss to find out what to do today or this week, you check your list. You know that you have to do whatever is on the list or do what it takes to reach a certain statistic.

You could set a goal of writing 7 quality blog posts or articles each week. You could also say that you want to have the goal of an average of 10 more readers per day in your blog statistics (compared to the previous week or previous month. It is easy to compare by installing an Analytics like Google Analytics and then just comparing the statistics from one week or month to the next such as the number of visitors or repeat visitors.

Another good statistic to compare would be RSS or Newsletter subscribers.  Perhaps set a goal of 5 new subscribers for the week.
What do you have to do to earn the new subscribers?  You will of course be judged by the quality of your content. If they see value they'll eventually start to comment and subscribe.
By setting goals and checking your list, you'll never have the excuse of having nothing to do nor will you be playing video games during work hours until you have reached your goal.

Why you should write down your goals

It is important to write down your goals for working in your home office because we often forget what is important especially in the long term. Seeing that sale for a book you wrote about at Amazon might make you forget your plan.

Don't just write sales content! People are not going to come back to a website that just has advertisements. People want to learn and be entertained.  You have to add value to the products and services that you promote (even if they are your own products).

What kind of goals you should set

Any goals you set for your online business should be productivity related. Your focus should be on creating new content, new products, new services, improving existing products, improving existing services and promoting all of those.

Checking your blog statistics is not a goal and as a task, it is only beneficial at most once a day.  E-mail is not productive either. Checking e-mail is only important for replying to clients. Otherwise twice a day is more than adequate. Don't put statistics or e-mail on your to-do or goal list.

A goal of 5 new subscribers, 10 new articles, 20 new enriching blog comments, improved ranking for your most important keywords, 2 new finished artworks, etc are all great. Your goals should be to move you forward!


Weekly or daily goals

If you have trouble getting going, daily goals are probably the best. At or near the end of one day, make a short list of 3-5 things to do to meet your objectives and put it in your work area where you will see it right away.

Weekly goals are more objectives than tasks although they go together.  If you don't add new content and you don't promote your website or blog, or POD profile, how do you expect growth?  Weekly goals are best for self-starters who just need a push to do what is productive instead of what is unproductive.

After a few months of this routine, you might discover that you automatically start on productive tasks and checking your goals for continual improvement! Once you start seeing success the success will also start to motivate you to work smarter.

Google Adsense Google Analytics Integration FINALLY available

Integrate Google Adsense with Google Analytics

Way back in October Google Adsense's blog officially launched integration for Adsense with Analytics so you'd actually know when your blog posts or pages are getting clicks and be able to optimize even more.  I don't know about you, but I found the Adsense channels not very interesting and sometimes more confusing.

The Problem with Adsense channels

Yes, if you set up a channel for a site you'd know that a site was getting clicks, but without knowing which URLs or URIs were getting the clicks, there wasn't much you could do.

One big question I have is if people are clicking just on product info pages, category pages, coupon pages, blog post pages, etc.?  If people are only clicking on ads on certain pages then I could perhaps use a larger format on them and remove ads from the pages that don't get clicks.

I'd also be able to compare the content and see if a certain writing style or a specific topic or category were getting clicks IF I could see those statistics.

From October my excitement turned to worries of vaporware. It is hard to stay focused and excited after seeing almost half a year go by without an update on the Google Adsense blog. In fact, I had forgotten about it until yesterday I saw the  link in my Adsense statistics telling me I can integrate... It took me a while to remember what that was about and I spent this morning adding Analytics code to my header and footer only loading when no Wordpress cookie is set since normally the logged in user is me 99% of the time.

The Google Adsense Analytics integration solution

Google Adsense integration with Google Analytics adds a new "Adsense" menu item under "content" in Google Analytics's sidebar menu.  If you click on that you'll see statistics on how much money was earned for that website profile and you CAN see which page was clicked on!

You can also see information about the people who clicked on an advertisement like the city they live in.  Perhaps you'll want to make a post just for that visitor next time.  Another great feature to the integreation is the ability to see clicks by referrer (website that linked to you!), so if you got a link from another blog or a forum and someone clicked through and then clicked on a Google Adsense advertisement on your website, there'd be a reference there. This can be useful because you could work more with those sites to get more traffic and hopefully make more money to pay those hosting & domain registration bills!

The Adsense report page is now very detailed with the common statistics to help you understand your CPC earnings. You get statistics per impression, per visit, per Adsense unit,  and Click Through Rate. The pages with the most earnings and the top referrers are listed right below.

I think the pages with the most earnings will be great. The usual pages with the most visits will not necessarily be the pages with the most earnings. I'm excited again! Thank you Google for finally making statistics available. I'll be checking it often.