I’m a self-confessed data junky. I love my numbers and if they can be plotted on a graph so I can see a trend then so much the better! Domain investors live and die by their numbers. If you ignore looking at the stats then you can miss out on some significant opportunities and take bullets rather than dodging them.

Beyond the numbers and charts is understanding how to interpret them and how they may impact your business decisions. From a very high level there are a number of charts that I like to pay attention to and in this article, I’ll step you through them.

World-wide Growth in Internet Users

Ultimately underpinning every e-commerce transaction is a person wanting to buy, watch, click or doing anything. If the number of Internet users suddenly began decreasing then I can guarantee that it’s going to have a big impact on your business.

Over the last year I’ve been watching my daughter, Sarah, as she embarked on growing her social presence through Instagram. It’s been an up and down journey but since social is vitally important for any online business I thought it would be worthwhile picking the brains of my resident expert.

She now has close to 10,000 followers and this is continuing to expand. She has not spent a penny on any advertising and the growth has been entirely organic. More than that, her engagement with her followers is incredible with it being much higher than corporations that have five to six times her number.

As an example, last night Sarah posted a photo (she’s VERY particular when they are posted btw) and within five minutes she had 20 likes and a couple of comments. Within an hour she had over 100 likes and 20 comments. By the morning these numbers had grown to 295 likes and 38 comments.

I just checked out some other images that she’s posted and one of them received 696 likes and 115 comments so it looks as if it’s early days for last night’s post.

In this article, I’m going to make myself a little vulnerable as you read about some of my innermost thoughts. I hope and pray, that you respect this as well as receive some additional insight into what makes Michael Gilmour tick. Ultimately, my goal is to hopefully encourage you to think about your own life and what’s important to you.

Over the years I’ve found people journey through life in one of three ways:

1. They avoid making decisions as much as possible and let others make the decisions for them. This is like being flotsam on the water and tossed back and forth while blaming everyone else for the mistakes you find yourself in.
2. They make decisions based upon what is directly in front of them at that point in time. This is like playing a game of chess by looking one move ahead….you’re unlikely to get anywhere.
3. They have a core sense of purpose which is based upon a set of beliefs that influence everything they do. Sometimes this core set of values is articulated while most of the time it comes of a sense of what is right and wrong.

Monday was not a good day for me. Normally speaking, I love Monday’s as they are the start of a new week and I’m full of unrealistic aspirations of what I’m going to achieve. So what happened to change my typically upbeat positive demeanour?

It all started when I looked at my beloved computer that had been with me through thick and thin. I knew instantly that something was wrong and it wasn’t long before I found that my applications drive was non-existent. It was dead, kaput, cactus, non-useable and worse than all of these “invalid”.

I’m quite regimented in how I setup my computer. Data is on my NAS (Network Access Server) in a mirrored array that is backed up every night to a separate drive in a different machine. All is good. My operating system, MS Office and browers are on drive C in my PC on an SSD drive that is regularly snapshotted as a backup. The rest of my applications are on drive D and Drive D was the one that blew……sigh…..

I know of very few people that don’t suffer from stress and fewer still that haven’t been massively stressed at some time during their life. So over the years, what have I learned about handling stress?

When I was training for my private pilot's license, my flying instructor explained to me a simple principle about how to handle stress in the cockpit. He said there may be a time when the workload increases to the point where you become incredibly stressed and find your decision making suffers.

I must admit that I thought that could never happen to me, after all, I’m a smart guy so my instructor must have been thinking about other people. How many times have you listened to someone sharing some wisdom born out of experience only to think they were talking to someone else?