Crippled by Google and Wealthy Affiliate Analytics

I seem to have a serious struggle these days with getting hung up on Google Analytics. When I get done looking at Google Analytics I usually straight away jump over and check my Wealthy Affiliate traffic to see what sort of traction I'm gaining here through my blogs, questions, and profile.

What I didn't realize in the early stages of website building and affiliate marketing is that it is so easy to get caught up in these analytics and you actually end up not writing any content at all. This leads to negative results.

All the time spent staring at the screen waiting for "grass to grow" so to speak is wasted time that you could have been writing a new, quality, content rich article.

Unfortunately, I know I'm not the only one at Wealthy Affiliate who struggles with this issue.

Fortunately, I have discovered a solution that has helped me out tremendously and may help you folks out as well!

Background

When I was in college I was terrible at sitting down and studying my engineering coursework for any long period of time. This was especially true if it came to reading monotonous material.

As I grew as an engineering student and coursework became harder I quickly understood that I could not keep browsing social media, researching sports, and Google Searching interesting facts if I wanted to succeed in my coursework.

Imagine you want a new job, but instead of applying for jobs all you do is research salaries for days on end. You likely won't ever actually find a new job, but you'll know exactly what every single person on the planet brings home.

At some point you have to move forward, and in todays world of attention grabbing mechanisms this has become harder than ever.

At this point you are probably wondering what I have done to eliminate distraction. Well, I can't tell you how to eliminate all distractions, but I can explain what I have done to eliminate particular sites.

In college, Facebook seemed to be the popular go to for me distraction periods. However, one day a friend of mine offered me a solution that would keep me off of Facebook, but didn't require deleting it all together.

That solution? Self Control.

No, no I'm not saying "hey you squirrel...have a little Self Control".

Self Control is a real app. It's free and open source. I personally use it on Mac OS X and am not quite sure if it is available on PC, but a simple Google Search for Self Control should display that result.

Self Control simply blocks access to blacklisted sites for a designated period of time. When you type in these blacklisted sites in your browser, it blocks you and displays a Self Control Result screen and timer rather than the site itself.

Understand, I'm not saying you can't stay off of analytics without using Self Control. I'm simply saying that... as a creature of habit... I often time find myself typing in analytics.goo.... before I can catch myself I hit enter and I'm there.

With Self Control turned on for my designated writing period it is much harder to wander into the depths that is Google Analytics.

Wealthy Affiliate analytics are a little bit of a different story as you cannot really block that site specifically. What you can do is block the specific "My Stats" page but there are other interesting things in My Stats that you may want to check out from time to time while writing.

So How Do You Use It?

Download Self Control and read the Quick Start Guide as shown below:

Hit Continue and you'll see the Edit Blacklist option. Click on the Edit Blacklist button and type in the sites you wish to Blacklist:

Now hit Import and return to the previous screen with the slider.

Slide over the amount of time you want to focus on writing. Hit start...

Self Control does the rest and you won't be crippled by analytics just like me!

I hope you all find some use for the app. If you have any strategies of your own to avoid paralysis by analytics please feel free to share in the comments section below. If you think I'm a total crazy person for needing to use an app to prevent me from chasing my tail all over the internet let me know in the comments since that sparks some fun conversation too.

Have a great day!

Dalton