Three steps forward, two steps backwards, so the saying goes. I think that will be our lot for a long time to come.

Notable milestones for the month are:

Hired our first writer (Peter Otieno). Peter will be covering podcasts we’ve listened to that we think will help others.

Launched our newsletter ‘The Method’. First edition went out November 1st.

Created a brand guidelines doc, which will be useful for Peter and other writers or editors that we onboard.

Setup with Sumo popups to try improve our lousy newsletter signup rates

Made a bunch of site speed improvements. Load time is down from 14 seconds to 6’ish seconds

Sent out personal invitations to join our newsletter list

First post on Reddit

^ The Reddit spike.

So what about our KPI’s? Well we’ve made better than expected progress here

Articles Published | +4 
Website Traffic | 1109
Email List | +19
Money Spent | $236 ($163 on ppc)
Backlinks | +15
Ranking Keywords | +0
Domain Authority | +2

The two big needle movers for us this month were our Reddit post and our email list invite. Our first two Reddit posts resulted in 130 website visits and our email list invites accounted for 15 of the 19 new subscribers.

I’ve realised because we haven’t established ourselves as an authoritative voice for small business, no matter what copy I used, ‘join our list’ type pop-ups just didn’t convert, at all, 0. I tested 20’ish different pieces of copy and didn’t get a single list signup.

At the end of the month, I gave up and switched back to using a lead magnet. That same day we got 2 new subscribers. The first in more than a month.

I read on Trends that some blogs are converting website visitors at up to 7% which seems crazy to me. We’re sitting at 0.2% so it’s a long way to go for us here.

The biggest insight for the month, from reading thousands of words about blogging, is quality and quantity over everything else. The more high-quality pieces of content we can publish each month the better we will do.

Four posts over a whole month is simply not enough and at this rate will take us forever to catch up to the likes of the entrepreneur (mentioned last month).

So for the next few months we won’t be worrying about backlinks, domain authority and all that other SEO stuff. Instead, we’ll do our best to put out at least 8 good quality articles a month to close out the year.

So more high-quality content, more posts on Reddit and likely more traffic/traction tests for November.