Reaching a State of Acceptance

As you get into the habit and practice of studying data, you’ll begin to not only reach a state of acceptance, but one of happiness. You’ll finally feel that your efforts online for yourself and your brand aren’t being wasted. That feeling of spinning your wheels or losing control of your time will disappear. Your fear of numbers and spreadsheets will go away as you see how useful the information you’re tracking is to your bottom line.

One thing you can do to reach that state of acceptance faster is solidify metrics as part of your daily, weekly, and monthly routine. Spend time each week, especially, studying the data you have gathered and thinking of new ways to put it to work for you (see Figure 5-5).

Play around with spreadsheets, even if you don’t think you’re good at them yet. Practice moving your data around and study how using different sets of criteria and different ways of seeing the information can give you a fully different picture. You may walk away with two solutions to a tricky problem instead of one just by learning how to adjust the data inside your spreadsheet to answer different questions.

Use your spreadsheet program’s tools, such as pivot tables and graphs or charts, to change the way you see the information. Make basic infographics or slideshow visualization of your data by answering different questions. Pretend you have to present the answer to a visual thinker and work to clarify what it would mean to them. That approach, in turn, will clarify the information to you.

While manipulating the data and massaging it to wring every ounce of data juice out of it, don’t modify it! Remember, manipulating data refers only to sorting it or studying it by different criteria, not to altering the data itself. Altered data doesn’t help you achieve your goals — only true data can do that.