It’s been a phenomenal month, but before I dive into it, let’s recap last month. In October, I had my highest ever grossing day ($4.03), and an 8 day stretch averaging $2/day. In total I earned $36.51 which was one of my better months. I didn’t mention it in my previous blog post, but the number of users is up 48% compared to September. That’s the first major increase in user base I’ve had since starting my business back in 2014!

On to this month.

This month I earned $70.72, for a daily average of $2.28. I had a $6.10 day, a $6.05 day, and a 15 day stretch averaging $3/day! I also had a 74% increase in the user base compared to October! A very good month indeed. More good news: I’ve also had a number of clicks on the static ads I generate when an adblocker is detected. I’m always happy when something I’ve spent a lot of time on bares fruit, and I spent a great deal of effort on that script!

It’s been a good month and their are plenty of reasons to be even more optimistic about November. I indicated early this month that my search clicks were ever increasing. That patterned mostly continued throughout the month. This past week the increase is a little less clear, but that could be due to the holiday. That means even if everything holds steady, November will likely have a larger user base than October. The value of a click is still higher than it used to be, but lower than last month. It may seem counter intuitive to be grateful for that, but I worry that a high click value is a random event and not sustainable.

This month I’m hoping for $100 for the month. Given the ever increasing user base I think it’s possible. There are a couple of possible monkey wrenches, however, that could keep me from reaching that goal. There’s one day less in November, and the Thanksgiving week is historically a tough one for my business as most people are offline and enjoying family time. Least year I had a 17% decrease in average daily users after November 21st than compared to before. Revenue practically disappeared. Over Halloween weekend (which I’m defining as Friday the 28th though Halloween) I only had a 8% decrease in daily users, but that corresponded to a 36% decrease in daily revenue.

As for progress, it’s another month of mostly tinkering under the hood.

The increase in traffic is forcing me to address some long standing issues. Now that my user base is up so much even my unpopular apps are getting some hits. Up until this point my modus operandi has been to release early and give the search engines a chance to index it. In entrepreneur terms it’s called the Minimum Viable Product (MVP). My Site Navigability Analyzer, for example, did not have a way of re-crawling a page. If one had a broken link on their domain, the Site Navigability Analyzer would record the error and move on to the other pages. There was no way to tell the crawler that the page was fixed and to recrawl just that page. The webmaster would need to start the crawler over at the beginning. That’s fixed now.

I did release a new app this month, but I’m not ready to talk about it as it’s accuracy just isn’t where I need it to be yet.

This coming month I’m going to divide my focus between continued app improvements, and the continued Search Engine Optimization (SEO) effort. The correlation between increased search traffic and increased forumn linking to app URLs is stronger than I anticipated, and runs both ways. Continued SEO is likely the best path forward to quickly grow my business.

Posted in Work Life | Tags: Sarahsoft