Bad Advice is Bad Advice

May 14, 2008 by Jon
Filed under Everything Else

If you’re into affiliate or internet marketing, you know there’s a ton of bloggers out there ready to give you advice, and a lot of it is good… but a lot of it is crap. What’s the worst piece of advice I read everywhere?

“Stop wasting your time checking your stats.”

Or some variation thereof… They always tell you to stop checking your web stats, stop checking your commission balances, blah blah. Don’t you know it wastes your time…

Sorry, but I have to throw the bulls**t flag on that one.
I can think of many reasons why it’s a GREAT thing to check your stats daily, or even multiple times per day:

You’re new to affiliate marketing, and you need the encouragement of seeing your third sale! Or seeing the 200th visitor to your new web site!
You’re testing out a new niche, or a new traffic generating method, or a new SEO tactic, etc. and need to gauge it’s success.
You’re running a PPC campaign and need to keep an eagle eye on the click-through rate from your site to the merchant’s site, and an eagle eye on your commissions.
Or maybe you just want to check your stats because dang it, you just want to!

Meanwhile all the experts “advising” you to stop checking your stats every day can use all that time they’re saving to post 100’s of times on blogs and marketing forums–where they can tell you how to save time by not checking your stats every day. Whew, I’m getting dizzy…

Hopefully I’m not the only one who sees the irony in their advice, eh?
Look, once a person really ramps up their marketing business, to continue growing the business we all have to learn how to be more efficient. For some people, that means spending less time checking stats. Who cares? There are plenty of other things experience marketers can teach newbies.

Let’s put it another way… the difference between success and failure is not how often you check your stats. Sheesh, give me a break. I’m sorry folks but it’s weak, bad advice.

My advice to you: just ignore it.