Helpful Thread of the Day: Do you use spreadsheets for your work?

[cluck]

Here's Cluckie's Helpful Business Thread of the Day?

As an adult webmaster you are running a business. This isn't a hobby that you can goof around, not take seriously and expect to make a living. You need to go about it as if you were running a chain of stores. You have your real estate, which is your website/traffic source combined, your inventory which are the sponsors you're trying to push and your sales staff which is your own marketing techniques. All of these are easy to come by, but without a good bookkeeper to analyze the stats and decide what's working best you're nothing. You're a whole garage full of expensive car parts but without the knowledge and the discipline to be able to put them all together you're limiting yourself to wherever you can get via bicycle.

It's REALLY easy to make money in this biz. Painfully easy. In fact there's probably a goldmine sitting within your server stats, sponsor stats, old gallery stats and whatever else you can dig up on your hard drive. What you NEED to do is log it all into a spreadsheet so you can start crunching the numbers and put the pieces of your cash puzzle together. Organize all of your ad campaigns and see which ones made the biggest return. See which sponsors did the best with certain traffic.

Say you've used 4 different sponsors with the same traffic source on several different occasions. One time you ran a page pushing sponsors A+B, and another time you used C+D. A and C both made enough money to cover the cost of the traffic and you broke even both times. B and D did nothing more than suck bandwidth. Here's the trick, MAKE A PAGE WITH A + C AND USE THE SAME TRAFFIC! If they pull the same amount of sales as they did before, you'll have doubled your money instead of broken even.

I keep everything I do in a big spreadsheet. You can even make spreadsheets for every niche. If you run a teen TGP with different niches, and alot of people click the petite galleries, refer to the spreadsheet, find the best converting petite site and run that banner on the TGP instead of whatever else you were throwing your clicks at. More people will click the banner plus the site's been proven to convert better than the shit that was there before. That's money in the bank you wouldn't have been making with a poorly targetted banner. Had you not taken some time to go over the numbers you'd have missed it.

Start thinking like a business owner, and you'll get business. Data is the most valuable part of any business. Do yourself a favor and start using it to your advantage.

This has been a public service announcement.

[slackologist]

To answer the question in the thread title, yes in all stages. ( planning, testing, day to day and auditing)

[cluck]

Originally posted by slackologist
To answer the question in the thread title, yes in all stages. ( planning, testing, day to day and auditing)

Then you've got the upper hand. I'll be honest, I always mean to but only recently did I buckle down and do it all the time. Now when I go to make money I've got a whole data file full of successful formulas.