From Confused to Expert Tracker: How to Use Metrics to Grow Your Business written by Guest Post read more at Duct Tape Marketing

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New coaches and entrepreneurs are often freaked out by tracking and metrics, but it’s the best way to grow quickly. Here’s how to easily track your success.

When you start your business, you need to be super focused on engaging new, potential clients and generating revenue; so that you actually put money in the bank. Otherwise, you don’t have a business – just an expensive hobby.

If you’ve been putting off tracking your success, now is the to get started. If you don’t get a handle on this, it will only become more overwhelming as you take on more clients, grow your email list and sell more products and services. More importantly, that growth will not come as quickly if you aren’t tracking what works and what doesn’t.

So these are the three steps to go from total confusion about metrics to an expert tracker — and grow your business in the process.

Get Over the Intimidation Factor

Maybe you thought of yourself as bad at math in school, so you avoid numbers whenever you can. Well that won’t work any longer as an entrepreneur! Fortunately, it doesn’t have to.

Tracking your growth is a far cry from calculus. It’s time to reframe it in your mind, and for me, the best way to do that is to think about all the people I’m reaching and all the money I’m making. Focusing on the end results will help you accomplish the steps to get there.

Action step: Break apart what needs to be done into small pieces that you can tackle easily, perhaps one each day. They can be as simple as…

• Set up your Google Analytics account for your website.
• Check your email list sign ups this week, this month, and for the past three months.
• Take a closer look at one thing that does not seem to be working and come up with a few possible causes as to why that might be the case.

Focus on Engagement

There are so many different factors to consider testing and measuring, and that’s often where new coaches and entrepreneurs get stuck.

So if you’re wondering if your time spent on Facebook or Instagram is worthwhile, track the level of engagement of fans and followers over time, rather than whether your latest post got as many Likes as you wanted.

The same goes for the launch of a new product. In this case, engagement means purchases, so focus on what’s making the most sales, even if that’s not what the experts say is supposed to work. Once you’re looking at your sales figures regularly, you’ll see the patterns in what’s working and what’s not.

Action Step: Start tracking your income daily or weekly. I track my income daily on a spreadsheet and it really makes you aware of all the money coming into your life. If I don’t do it I notice how quickly I fall back into a mindset of lack and I start to get stressed.

Track Your Content Too

Many coaches and entrepreneurs see blogging and content creation as totally separate from tracking results and income. This could not be further from the case. Writing for writing’s sake is great, but it’s not a business.

No more fly by the pants blogging. Focus on what your potential clients (notice that I did not say readers) would LOVE to read, and what helps them solve a problem. Your blog posts need to be super helpful or inspirational and share-worthy.

I try to really over-deliver valuable content with my blog posts. Each post is focused on a topic that helps new coaches grow their businesses, from how to choose your niche to how to make 10K per month.

Then I spend as much time and effort on promoting the content as I do writing it, so blog posts get plenty of shares on social media because they are helpful, and that means new subscribers joining my list all the time. As I track performance, I can see clearly which types of posts perform the best.

Action Step: Create an editorial calendar filled with blog posts that are so valuable to your potential clients that they just must work with you, and then spend half of your time promoting the content, tracking what promotion tools render the best results.

Jessica Nazarali is a former Business Development Manager, who knew there had to be more to life than working in a job she didn’t love. Through starting a blog in 2011, Jessica began coaching women who were eager for their online businesses to succeed. Jessica is now an Online Business Expert for new entrepreneurs and specialises in helping them standout in their industries and find clients. Her advice has been featured in Cleo, Marie Claire, Sunday Style, Content Magazine and Madison and her book, Leaping from the Ladder. When she’s not coaching clients, you can find her unfurling her yoga mat, making banana smoothies and googling her next travel destination. Find out how you can create a coaching business that sets you free at www.jessicanazarali.com.