Progress Data Points:
October saw a massive reduction in page views, going from 504 in September to 63 in October. I’m attributing this to most of September’s visits being bot visits conducted by companies attempting to sell us something. There has been a lot of that. In fact, it drove me to remove comments on the website because I was having to moderate too much spam and zero useful comments.
No brainer there.
I’m still not sweating the traffic much. We’re only two months old and it takes time to build web cred. Additionally, finance is ultra-crowded so rapid growth just isn’t going to happen. We’re on the slow and steady path to growing the site; not that we wouldn’t take a viral explosion.
I won’t spend much time evaluating metrics until the 6-8 month timeframe, so check back on this in March, April, or May.
We now have 38 active posts on the site and won’t have any trouble hitting 50 in November since there are about 8 in reserve, ready to go.
Lessons Learned:
Traffic
I knew 500 pageviews was a bit unusual, but I didn’t expect quite such a regression. Oh well.
We are seeing more traffic from organic searches, which is ultimately where we want most of it to come from. Some of our friends have heard about the site and are visiting directly which is about half of the traffic overall.
We’ve also seen a little bit of success from Pinterest, but not tons. I’m not leveraging that tool as well as it probably could be used so there may be more opportunity there in the future.
Focus on Content
Our primary focus is still on producing content. I’ve been shifting more and more toward writing what I want than arranging everything perfectly for Search Engine Optimization (SEO). This has led to more pure enjoyment out of the writing process, so I’ll probably keep that up.
Get Ahead
I’ve started a new role at my company which has led to more travel and increased responsibility. At the end of the day, I’m less and less interested in working on the blog, but I remain committed to my 3 posts/week pace.
Additionally, we went on vacation for about a week in early October. Zero website work occurred while we were away.
What this has illustrated is the value of having a backlog of posts in reserve that we can set up to post automatically while we’re doing other stuff. I’m going to keep that up and try to keep at least 2-3 weeks of material in storage.
Goals:
- Still not worried about ads. This means we won’t monetize the site any time soon and we’re okay with that.
- Still shooting for 70 posts before the end of the year. Shouldn’t be a problem at all.
- Still shooting for 100 posts by end of March 2023.
- Still playing with YouTube. I’ve recorded exactly two videos and zero editing has been done on them. Honestly, we probably won’t get around to YouTube for several months yet, but it’s still in the plan.
Other:
Now that we’ve built a site, we’ve begun noticing ideas that we could turn into websites but we only have the bandwidth for one right now. Maybe we’ll expand in the future, but that is way down the road if it comes at all.
I know this was a short update, but we’re in a phase now where the focus is on posts and we’re not looking to do much else.
As always, we are grateful for your interest in our little project here. Please keep coming back.
