As predicted, it’s been a mixed month. Despite clicks being up 12% and users being up 13%, income was down 22% this past month. In January I earned just $80.95. That’s four times higher than this time last year, but sill lower than the trend. Despite that I’m cautiously optimistic about February for a few reasons:

– My users searches per day, my preferred metric, was actually down the first half of the month, and didn’t start to get back on track until the 16th. The second half of the month was much stronger (user search wise) than the first half.
– I’m in the process of changing my mobile strategy so hopefully I can start boosting those metrics more.
– I’m seeing near immediate effects from the improvements I’ve made to the site this past month.

This month I spent mostly fine tuning my website. I ended up redoing much of the supporting page layout and content management scripting. The one is more streamlined while offering greater flexibility in terms of setting meta parameters and descriptions. Two days after the change I noticed a large bump in search engine traffic. And that was the second noticeable bump in traffic after a change this month! I don’t want to jinx it, but at the current growth rate 1,000 unique visitors a day, everyday, including weekends, in February may be possible.

In addition to the overall site update the Word Analyzer and the Pregnancy Week by Week got a significant upgrade.

It took over a week, but I finally finished the first pass of a synonym list for the Word Analyzer. Now the Word Analyzer can suggest easier (and harder, if that’s what you’re after) words with greater/lesser audience familiarity. The synonym list is by no means complete. Only 35% of the words entered into the analyzer so far have had synonyms. Since the word analyzer is a relatively infrequently used app (currently between 10-15th most popular) it’s not clear if the effort to improve the list will be worth it. On the other hand, improving the apps functionality may draw more visitors.

The Pregnancy Week by Week’s update was more design focused. My favorite feature about the Pregnancy Week by Week comparison was the hand sizes. I loved seeing when a baby would be as big as mom’s hand, or a theoretical big sister or brother. The feature was somewhat obscured, and the old layout made seeing the full calendar and important dates more difficult. The new layout is much nicer, though admittedly a little slower.

For February I have a new app and two new articles planned already. February is a short month, but I’m optimistic.

Posted in Work Life | Tags: Sarahsoft