TL.DR

 • We missed our targets again 🙁 although these are kinda arbitrary it is fun for me to guess where we’ll be in a months time. I guess the lesson here is, that things always take longer than you expect.
 • We’ve cracked 500 email newsletter subscribers
 • We’ve cracked ~2,000 monthly page views
• LinkedIn is now our best performing content channel

Numbers

First our numbers, then I’ll recap what we’re doing,what’s worked, what hasn’t worked and lessons we’re taking forward into the next month.

I’ve made another change to our metrics – I’ve changed sessions to pageviews as that seems more relevant if one of our goals is to get as many people as possible read our content.

Recap

I think this is the first month we’ve performed worse across most key metrics. It especially sucks to lose ~50 ranking keywords. There hasn’t been an algorithym update either so I don’t really know what the cause – I guess that’s stock standard for SEO.

We didn’t do anything noticeably different this month. We’ve reconfigured our content model, but that only started a few days back. We’ve dropped some content channels where I used to post frequently like Growthhackers and Indiehackers forums – as we want to focus more on LinkedIn.

Overall April was a meddling month where we didn’t test much and so didn’t learn much. Takeaway for moving forward is – keep testing.

Deep Dive

Inbox Reads (Newsletter) Sponsorship

We ran an add on inboxreads, which cost us $32.26 and got us 8 new email subscribers, which was cheaper than our giveaway ($5). So advertising in other newsletter is still king for acquiring new subscribers.

Backlinking For Domain Authority

We’ve increased our blog domain authority to 13, by picking all the low hanging fruit and listing either Hakune or The Method on relevant directories. So now the hard work begins – at the moment we’re mucking around trying to figure out where we should invest our backlinking efforts next. Hopefully by this time next month we have something useful to report back.

Growing On LinkedIn

We’re continuing to up the anti on LI and just changed our content strategy to double down on this channel over the next few months.

These changed haven’t produced anything noticeable yet. Our April performance on LI was very close to March’s – however there are a couple of cool things brewing.

1. Followers of our company page has doubled from 20 to 40. It’s not much but when you start with nothing, every win counts.
2. Both mine and Kale’s personal audiences on LI have been growing. I’ve gained about 150 followers over the past 3 months and Kale is up about 200 odd from what I can tell
3. As predicted last month LinkedIn is now our best performing content marketing channel across all metrics.

The reason any of this matters is two fold. First readers from LinkedIN have been signing up to our newsletter at a much higher conversion rate than any other channel. And secondly I’m frequently coming us across folk who’re building newsletter audiences from LinkedIn.

The channel still offers strong organic discovery and the audience is a natural fit for our small business content.

This month I think we need to test stronger CTA’s to our newsletter. Will do this once I find some successful examples.

Changing Our Pillar Content

Last but not least, like I mentioned we’ve made slight changes to our content strategy. Moving forward we’ll treat the newsletter as our pillar content and redistribute that across other channels like Reddit, LI and Pinterest (we’re still experimenting with Pinterest).

The point of the change is to make creating content for other channels easier. Blog posts take a lot of work and to be able to produce enough of them, so we have a good volume of content to distribute across channels is tough.

Where as, 300 word blurbs from the newsletter which take a tenth of the time to produce, might be just as effective to redistribute. And hopefully this means we finally nail a content flywheel – which has been eluding us so far.

Coming Up

I’m hoping we finally launch our LTV calculator this month (side project marketing) and the email course on customer lifetime value that we’ve been writing for a while now. Assuming we get these live and promoted – I’ll write a case study on the process down the track. Need to get some results on the scoresheet first though.

We’re expecting this calculator and the accompanying email course will become a long-term and compounding source of leads for ours newsletter and boost for our domain authority.

I think Kale is going to test some paid acquisition on social media channels as well. Will be interesting to see how that goes.

Seeing we’ve fallen well short of my predictions the past two months – I need to rain it in abit. I’ll be happy here if we finish the month with 600 subscribers and 2,200 page views.