2. Gluttony (gula)

No matter what you’d prefer to do with Web Analytics – I strongly advise you to take the path of least resistance: always measure “feelgood metrics” first. More than a decade back “Hits” were quite a good choice – by just applying a more complex nested-table-layout carrying more images you could easily quadruple “hits” to your web site from version to version.

Later on, “page views” were becoming a commodity. With a constantly growing audience (the so-called “Internet population”) your chances were quite good to get a fair share of these sheep through to your web site. A constant volume growth was a given for more than a decade.

Another trick was soon used on content-driven web sites: spreading an article across four or five pages. This naturally increased the amount of page views to web servers – if the article was only interesting enough. But even if not: the one page view you would normally get per reader earlier would now easily be enhanced. At least a small fraction of people would continue reading – just to see if the article would become any better or finally has a point in the second part. Expert advice: inserting cliffhangers at the end of each page will increase the likelihood for readers to commence.

If you want to be more contemporary I would suggest to be present in social media networks. Particularly in those which have a big and/or rapidly growing user base.
Page view and click increases by several hundred per cent should be easy to achieve there in the first six months – and this will be precisely the time span you will need to advance to a place higher up in the hierarchy where people actually don’t expect you any longer to cut through all the grease and grime.

The essential cornerstone of your career advancement is to brag about the great achievements towards your boss: “280% increase in page views from [add any geographically remote location from your market here]. That should seriously boost sales for the regional sales office!”. Or try this: “600% increase for visits from Vanuatu. I wonder whether the regional sales manager already considers opening a sales office there.”

Bottom line: First, make sure your organization can bath in a constant flow of good news. Remember to brag with relative figures instead of absolute ones for two reasons: nobody cares what it is you’re talking about – huge numbers are understood by nearly everybody in your company as they just have to indicate an impressive tendency, and: pairing your good percentages with those of really hip services (“Twitter: up 109 per cent!”) creates a notion of co-awesomeness.
Second: never talk or agree about what YOU would do – always choose your statements so that somebody else needs to act upon the numbers you are randomly shouting.
This makes clear that you have no intent whatsoever to secretly take career advantage of the arcane knowledge you have made accessible for your company.

As companies tend to rate “knowing” things genuinely higher than “doing” things it is perfectly sufficient that you constantly spit out random notes like that. Soon people will start to ask you things – and keeping the mode of delegating and externalizing (cf. chapter 1) will soon boost your career as you are showing both commitment and vision to your fellow bosses.

Now that you’ve taken the first steps in your career advancement you are ready to transform the organization further. Or, with the slogan of a personally well-liked, but otherwise utterly unrelated brand in this context: “Whatever you do, take pride.” (chapter 3).