One year ago I rebranded and moved all my apps from SarahKTyler.com to Datayze.com. Since then, growth has exploded. I remember when I used to be excited to have 600 visitors on a week day. A year ago I was happy to get 300 visitors a day. Now it’s a common occurrence to have had close to 1,000 unique visitors by the time I wake up in the morning and start my day. Page visits are up across all apps, and user satisfaction seems to be near an all time high.

After months of hard work I’ve finally struck the right balance between technical enough for the Math enthusiasts to trust my apps, and approachable enough to not scare away the general audience. The rebranding likely helped in this regard too. I regularly get emails assuming datayze is run by a team, and not an individual. I’ve put a tremendous amount of effort into making datayze a smooth, sleek website and it seems to be paying off. I’m much more optimistic about the future of my small business this year, than I was at the same time last year.

I still have a lot of work ahead of me if I’m going to grow to where I need to be. I need to get users up. I still think I need a minimum 10,000 users a day to be viable and while growth will likely continue slowly without additional input from me, I’d like to get there as quickly as possible.

The best strategy, I think, is to continue to build new apps, particularly apps that build off of the existing ones which can appeal to the audience I already have.

A side goal I have is to improve my Alexa rank. I’d love to hit the magical “100,000” club, the point at which Alexa considers the differences in ranks to be statistically meaningful. My Alexa rank does appear to be correlated with the amount of traffic I get, but some of it’s other reported statistics of datayze, such as bounce rate and top queries, is way off.

The Alexa rank is purely an ego metric for me, since I rely on google Adsense and don’t solicit advertisers. Still, it was quite rewarding crossing the 1,000,000 threshold this past January. Once you cross the 1,000,000 threshold your rank is graphed and I love seeing my progress rather than an “insufficient data” message. I am, after all, a data person.

Posted in Work Life | Tags: Sarahsoft