Blog update 6/6/2018
Haven't updated for a while, but things are doing well!
In March I was talking about publishing a post about making a website without design skills, and that's actually the last article I published on the site for now. Work at my day job (web developer at an ad agency) got incredibly busy for a while and I was working till late at night for a couple weeks. I definitely got a bit burned out by it, and just had no energy to work on the blog.
Fortunately, that is all changing-- I am quitting my job! My last day is next Thursday and I'm incredibly excited. I'll be working half time doing web dev contract work (partially for my by-then former employer), and hopefully will have much more time to work on the blog.
I've started trying to develop a system for all the tasks to do for it: researching, writing, posting on social media, etc. I'm also going to be working with my husband on creating an amazingly awesome and in-depth course on HTML and CSS. The goal is to create a course that goes super in-depth and is focused on practical information that other sources may not get to. I'm very excited for that, although I know it will take a ton of work.
Email
Still using MailChimp for now. I had to get GDPR compliant and so for now have gotten rid of content upgrades, since you're supposed to be up front and clear with your subscribers on what you are signing them up for. I think I still need to work on my language on the subscribe form and thank you page. My plan here is to change and be extremely transparent and be as non-scummy as possible when it comes to the marketing. Part of me wants to actually raise the bar for signing up so that only those who are very interested will want to sign up. I'd like eventually to create a free 5 day email course that will be similar to the type of course I'll create. And start making the sales funnel that way.
Stats
Despite not publishing new content in a couple months, my traffic has steadily been going up. I actually broke 5k users and 6k sessions in the last 30 days. So I am quite hopeful that I'll continue to build up once I start creating content again.
For traffic, 63% (~4k sessions) is coming from organic search, 12% from social, and 6% from referral. I'm actually not doing too bad on organic search-- my top ranked search is just "coder" which not surprisingly doesn't have a high (CTR) click-through ratio. But I'm also on the first page for searches like:
Social Media
Surprisingly, most of my social traffic is now coming from Pinterest! Of my referral traffic (clicking a link somewhere else to land on the website):
In March I was talking about publishing a post about making a website without design skills, and that's actually the last article I published on the site for now. Work at my day job (web developer at an ad agency) got incredibly busy for a while and I was working till late at night for a couple weeks. I definitely got a bit burned out by it, and just had no energy to work on the blog.
Fortunately, that is all changing-- I am quitting my job! My last day is next Thursday and I'm incredibly excited. I'll be working half time doing web dev contract work (partially for my by-then former employer), and hopefully will have much more time to work on the blog.
I've started trying to develop a system for all the tasks to do for it: researching, writing, posting on social media, etc. I'm also going to be working with my husband on creating an amazingly awesome and in-depth course on HTML and CSS. The goal is to create a course that goes super in-depth and is focused on practical information that other sources may not get to. I'm very excited for that, although I know it will take a ton of work.
Still using MailChimp for now. I had to get GDPR compliant and so for now have gotten rid of content upgrades, since you're supposed to be up front and clear with your subscribers on what you are signing them up for. I think I still need to work on my language on the subscribe form and thank you page. My plan here is to change and be extremely transparent and be as non-scummy as possible when it comes to the marketing. Part of me wants to actually raise the bar for signing up so that only those who are very interested will want to sign up. I'd like eventually to create a free 5 day email course that will be similar to the type of course I'll create. And start making the sales funnel that way.
Stats
Despite not publishing new content in a couple months, my traffic has steadily been going up. I actually broke 5k users and 6k sessions in the last 30 days. So I am quite hopeful that I'll continue to build up once I start creating content again.
For traffic, 63% (~4k sessions) is coming from organic search, 12% from social, and 6% from referral. I'm actually not doing too bad on organic search-- my top ranked search is just "coder" which not surprisingly doesn't have a high (CTR) click-through ratio. But I'm also on the first page for searches like:
- "web development for beginners"
- "simple html website" -- I'm actually #2-3 for this one!
- "responsive css grid"
Social Media
Surprisingly, most of my social traffic is now coming from Pinterest! Of my referral traffic (clicking a link somewhere else to land on the website):
- 30% is from Pinterest,
- 20% from freeCodeCamp,
- 10% from YouTube (freeCodeCamp reposted an HTML video on their channel), and
- 2-3% from other places like Reddit, Instagram etc.
On Pinterest I've had my pin for the Absolute Beginner's Guide go semi-viral-- it's been reposted on a couple other boards that have a lot of traffic. I've had around 500 sessions just from Pinterest (~7% of total traffic). Pretty crazy. I think Pinterest is one area that I'll really need to make sure I have beautiful looking pins-- that one is doing so well b/c of the title, and the art that Joe designed for it. Also I've noticed most pins use a photo background, so mine may have stuck out a bit more because it has a bold purple background with cool illustrations.
Plans for the Future
The main plan is to actually be writing consistent content, once post per week. I need to figure out how long it takes me to write one post of reasonable length.
The long-term plan is to work on that video tutorial series on HTML and CSS, and post them to Udemy, SkillShare, and potentially other places. I've been watching John Morris Online, and he has an interesting model where he has free tutorials on his YouTube, then more in-depth courses on Udemy and Skillshare. Wes Bos does a similar thing where you can buy his course on Udemy, but if you buy from his own website he includes more content. I definitely want to try to drive traffic to my own website and sell from there. It may take another 5-6 months to release a full HTML & CSS course, but I think it will do very well.
I was also reading a post by Neil Patel called "Everything I Taught You About SEO Was Wrong" where he says that the focus on just traffic and growing traffic is a bit misguided. Instead, we should be focusing on our potential customers. For example, my target audience is beginner web devs because I eventually want to create a course just for beginners. If I start writing articles about advanced topics, then while they may get me traffic, they will not be making me any money unless I start focusing on advanced web devs. So good food for thought. You don't need a tonnn of traffic to make good money online; just keep things focused.
Looking forward to the rest of June and my first week or so post day job!
