Ok, it's time to revive this journal.
If you've been following this journal, you would have noticed that there haven't been too many posts of real substance over the last year or so.
I've been busy building a different business which has consumed most of my time, but as we've recently been able to add more staff to the team and I've got better at managing my time and the time of others, I've got a bit of time on my hands that I'm able to dedicate back onto my own projects.
So, here is the plan moving forward:
1. Hire more staff
I've got a personal VA and a content writer on board (Hi J, if you're reading) and I'm adding a marketing manager.
The manager's job is going to be managing and implementing all of the little stuff I want done so I can free up my time to focus on bigger picture stuff. I've got interviews today and tomorrow and I'll have someone locked in by the end of the week.
2. Dating site optimisation
I've just done a complete redesign of my main dating site to try and increase conversions. It was getting around 2000 uniques a day but only 0.31% of them were opting in.
I launched the redesign yesterday and the optin rate is currently sitting around 0.59% which is a HUGE improvement, but still well below what it should be.
The goal is to hit 3% by the end of the year.
This is going to be done by adding two more optin forms as well as optimising the forms to maximise conversions.
At the moment, the site has three optin forms - homepage, sidebar, and bottom of post. The ones I'm going to add in are a time activated lightbox and a scroll activated lightbox based on the recommendation in this post:
In Defense Of The Popup
The form optimisation will be done using Visual Website Optimiser. I've signed up for the Conversion XL conversion course so that should help me design and execute the tests.
I'm also going to be doing some conversion testing of the subscriber email sequence. Last time I checked (which was about a year ago - but the sequence hasn't changed since then), the conversion rate from subscriber to customer was roughly 10%. The goal is to push that to 15% by the end of the year.
One other thing I'm going to change on teh site is decrease the page load times. Before the redesign, it was sitting at 19 seconds (according to Google Analytics) and teh redesign has dropped it to 13 seconds. My goal is to get it down to 5 seconds. I don't currently have anyone who does this so if anyone reading this knows a good WordPress speed optimiser, then please let me know.
3. Review site growth and optimisation
I purchased a product review site off a friend more than 3 years ago and haven't touched it since then. It still has his affiliate links in it! When I bought it, it was getting around 100 visitors per day but that's dropped to around 10 per day...
The optimisation of this site is going to happen in two stages:
a. Increase traffic
I'm going to do serious research into product review KW's with little competition and use my private blog network to push this site up the SERPS. The goal is to get the site to 10,000 visitors per month which given my vague knowledge about this niche, it should be very achievable.
b. Conversion optimisation
I have no idea how the site currently converts so until I have that data, it's going to be very hard to make any commitments to increases in conversion rate but the goal is to be making $2,000 per month by the end of the year.
I'll be doing this through VWO once again based on what I've learned in the conversion course.
4. Niche micro site
I've also started dabbling in my first micro niche site. I've done the research and built the site, now it's just time to see how well my PBN can push it up the serps and how much money I can make from it.
I've never done anything like this before so it'll just be a bit of fun but if I can make enough cash from it to cover it's costs and pay for a VA or two, then I'll be happy.
So, that's the plan.
If you have any comments, ideas, tools, or gifs you want to post, shoot away.
Otherwise, I'll just update this any time something relevant comes up.
