TL.DR

 • We missed our targets for March (600 Subs & 2,000 Sessions) but made decent progress – which you’ll see below
 • We received more positive feedback than all other months combined across this blog and our newsletter
 • We’ve found our second content marketing channel – LinkedIn
• We hit a new SEO record of 300 clicks in 28 days and 424 clicks for March

Numbers

First our numbers, then I’ll recap what’s worked, what hasn’t worked, and where we’ve been spending our dollars.

I’ve changed how we’ll report numbers moving forward. Instead of showing total numbers for each category – we’ll show the results for this month in comparison to the previous month.

The Details

Hakune Giveaway Competition

Our giveaway finished up this month. Overall it looks like we gained ~200 newsletter subscribers from our giveaway which is an okay result. That’s roughly a $5 spend per subscriber.

We’ve started to see those subs churn over the past couple of weeks at ~4 per week. Which is expected from doing a giveaway. Looks like we’ll finish with a net gain of 180 newsletter subscribers.

With a few tweaks, I think we can easily gain up to 500 subs from these giveaways and will run at least one of these during Q2. If we can get the cost per acquisition down to $2,50 then this is an acquisition method we’ll look to scale long-term.

Backlinking

We’ve been investing a couple of hours each week into building backlinks for the blog. We started with local business directories and then expanded to newsletter and blog directories.

During this time we’ve seen our Domain Authority increase from 8 to 14.

The key takeaways here are.

 • The quality of your backlinks matters more than the number of backlinks. Three backlinks from high authority sites with D/A > 60 made a bigger difference to our Domain Authority than the 150+ backlinks we’ve gained from low DA i.e. >20 websites.

 • As D/A has increased so has the number of daily impressions our blog receives on Google. We’ve jumped from ~500 daily impressions to ~1,000 daily impressions. So small increases in domain authority can make a big difference to your SEO results.

LinkedIn

I hypothesised last month that LinkedIn would become our best-performing content channel. Which has turned out to be true.

With not much effort (~8 posts on LI) we gained ~20 newsletter subscribers from LinkedIn during March and ~150 website visits.

We’re posting on our personal pages and our blog page and we use the simple AIDA copywriting framework as well as link out to a blog post.

We now have two content channels Redditt and LinkedIn that consistently perform well for us and are where we should focus all our content marketing efforts. The next step for us is creating a content distribution framework so we are consistently repurposing our blog posts for these channels and driving more traffic to our blog.

I think we can 10x our results here over the next 2 – 3 months.

Founder Interviews

Last but not least, we’ve started interviewing and profiling founders.

I’ve enjoyed the process of writing these. They take way longer than I expected (~10 hours) but learning about other people’s journeys is fun and is a good chance to learn from others on similar journeys.

We published two profiles last month and saw great results from these posts. They perform well on LinkedIn (as you can see above) and okay on Reddit.

I think we’ll keep doing these – perhaps a couple per month.

Coming Up

We’ve got a ton of areas we can improve but just need to keep focusing on the 20% of work that is getting us 80% of the results.

For us this publishing long-form blog posts with more founder interviews mixed in. Continued work on improving our domain authority and refining our content distribution process – similar to how Gary Vee uses his pillar content model.

All going well I expect to see us crack 2,000 sessions in April and 700 subscribers.