As Digital Marketing Manager at Bathrooms.com I am always looking for ways to help make my day to day job more productive. Below I’ve shared a few of my life hacks that I hope will help you.
Page speed checker
This is a really cool Chrome add on that makes it simple to figure out how to make your pages go faster without having to know much about web page construction.
Google ‘Page Speed Insights for Chrome’ and you should be able to find it very quickly in the Chrome Store. Install it on your browser, head to any page on your site and hit f12. You’ve now got the familiar dev console, plus a new tab:
Hit the ‘Start Analysing’ button and you’ll very quickly get a list of optimisations you can make to your pages to get them loading faster. Send that to your devs and hey presto, you should have a faster site.
GA shortcuts
I don’t think I know of any companies that don’t use Google Analytics. Say what you like about its limitations as a tool, which are real, it’s definitely the most functional (and most free) web analytics tool I’ve ever worked with.
I used to spend a lot of time tabbing around the GA interface to get to the approx. four to six reports I needed to review every morning, until I decided to start using a relatively overlooked GA feature, the shortcuts menu. Simply put, go to any report in GA and hit the little ‘shortcut’ button at the top.
Then it appears in your shortcuts menu in the nav sidebar…
And now you can find everything you need in one menu rather than across five. Magic. Time saved.
Remember the Milk
Is half your time spent wondering what it was you were supposed to be doing? I know your pain, and it was my pain until I discovered Remember the Milk. It’s my incredibly easy task list of choice and definitely helps me stay focused and organised. Bonus points for it being a pure SaaS product, so I can check it anywhere I have Wi-Fi.
SEO Meta Inspector
If your job has anything to do with SEO optimisation, then hitting ctrl+U to inspect page source and looking for the page elements you need to check can quickly degenerate into a painful chore.
Enter the meta inspector. Get this little add-on and you’ll be able to check the meta attributes of a page you’re on at the click of a button:
Inspection complete in 2 seconds. Now you can blaze through attribute checks about 10 times faster than you used to.
Learn some code
If you’re in almost any kind of digital marketing role, you’re going to come up against technical issues and will need to communicate with a developer at some point. You don’t have to be a technical wizard to deal with what you’re going to encounter, but you’re going to get problems diagnosed and technical tasks sorted much faster if you already have some basic technical literacy.
I’d recommend a couple of basic steps to get you started. Go to code academy and do their basic HTML and Javascript courses to learn some simple coding. For bonus points, get yourself a cheap web development course off Udemy.com and then invest an hour a day in it for a few weeks so you actually understand what a CMS or FTP is and how they work.