Month 11 Summary | Front End Remote Jobs

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Here's my monthly update on what I've done with Front End Remote Jobs over the past 30 days and what results I've seen. This update is for September 15 to October 15

The overall summary is "not much".

Goals

In my last review, here's what I said I wanted to accomplish:

  • Sales
  • Posting jobs / automating this
  • Posting some targeted SEO content

What I Shipped

Content

Jobs

I curated ~13 jobs over the past 30 days. I found that YCombinator is a good source of remote front end jobs, so I've largely been sourcing from there.

Articles

I published an article on Senior Front End Developer Interview Questions as an SEO play, as well as the automatically created September Hiring Trends report.

Features Shipped

I didn't ship any features this month, but I did fix some SEO errors / warnings that SEMrush identified for me. My site health improved from a 76% to an 89% which hopefully turns into some more SEO traffic. There weren't any huge changes, but the main ones were:

  • add a robots.txt
  • link to my sitemap in robots.txt
  • resolve some issues with duplicate content due to bad tagging on my part (ie combining GraphQL and graphql tags)
  • Fixing alt text on the /developers section of the site

Some things that are on my radar to fix:

  • automatically create "hire" pages for technologies that developers include on their profiles (right now this is creating 56 "broken pages", since I create links for each of this, but not pages)
    • honestly this is the main "error" left, score will probably go up into the mid nineties once this is fixed
  • I also want to interlink my blog posts more (maybe with a next / previous or related links section) so that more link juice gets passed down to them and google sees them as more important

Sales

The main work I did this month was testing out cold outreach. I set up an account on Apollo and started targeting technical recruiters with messages like this:

Hey 👋

I saw you're hiring front end developers.

I'm putting my weekly newsletter together now that goes out to 1659 front end developers looking for work.

There's still time to make it into tomorrow's newsletter if you need to get extra eyes on your job listing - you can add yours here: https://frontendremotejobs.com/hire/

Ben

I sent over a hundred emails and got a fair amount of traffic to the hire page (49 visits), but nobody bought.

I tried running a few sequences during my free trial of Apollo, but didn't make any sales.

I'm not quite sure what to do here or how to make progress on sales. Maybe try LinkedIn ads? Maybe try outreach to managers, rather than recruiters?

The Numbers

Let’s run through some numbers for the past 1 month.

Profit: -33.35

Revenue: $4.40

  • Job Listings: $0
  • Sparkloop: $4.40

Expenses: $37.75

  • IFTTT: $4
  • Domain: $1.25
  • Plausible Analytics: $7.5
  • Mailerlite: $25

Traffic

Traffic was down a bit, but still over 2k which is high.

Email

  • Net subscriber movement: +38
  • Current Subscribers: 1692
  • Open Rate: ~20%

Open rate seems to keep dropping, heading into the 20% range. I have no idea what changed there.

Subscriber growth is down from September, but still steady. Just over 1 added every day.

SEO

SEO seems to be trending back up slightly - perhaps my improvements and also just updating the site more regularly is helping. Seems more of my programmatic pages are starting to get impressions.

Looking Ahead

What will I do in the next month?

  • possibly experiment with LinkedIn ads
  • Look for ways to automate the job curation process
  • a few SEO improvements
  • possibly test out "free" listing (taking a cue from How to Create a Niche Job Board)