Month Five 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 60 days and what results I've seen! This update is for February 16-April 14.

Here's the last summary if you want to see how this month compared! [[Month 3 Summary]]

Probably the biggest thing to call out is that I didn't do a month four summary, and didn't ship a whole lot in the last two months. In February, Netlify acquired Gatsby and going through that process took a lot of my energy and focus.

I also started working on an AI project (sneak peek at supersupport.ai and some demos here), which has been super fun but took most of my free time. And frankly, is a lot more interesting project than a job board.

Goals

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

  • Fix the /articles white screen of death for ios devices
  • Migrate to a new email provider (Mailchimp is raising prices) - will probably move to Mailerlite (but considering buttondown as well.)
  • Sales! Outreach via Twitter and LinkedIn to drive more job listing sales

I set a pretty low bar for myself, knowing that the acquisition was going to take a lot of mind space AND also that I wanted to try not to "build" anything and move into sales mode.

I did not make any sales. But I did ship some extra things beyond these goals.

What I Shipped

Content

Jobs

I curated ~8 jobs from March 16 to April 14, and 11 jobs from February 16 to March 15. I've been less aggressive at posting jobs to see what kind of traffic will naturally come through via organic and newsletters.

Articles

I didn't write any SEO focused articles, but I did start announcing new features on the blog. I'm also still autogenerating the Hiring Trends every month, so two of those were automatically created!

Features Shipped

Salary Guides

As an SEO play, I added a first pass at a Remote Front End Developer Salary Guide, which is auto-updated based on salary data from the jobs posted on the website. This is linked in the header and newsletter.

Additionally, each technology tag that has salary information for at least 2 jobs gets an individual salary guide - like this Remote Next.js Developer Salary Guide. These are linked from the main salary guide and from the technology tag page. And I've been sharing the individual ones out on social media occasionally.

Developer Profiles

Inspired by Joe Masilotti's Rails Devs project (and open startup numbers), I thought I'd take a stab at collecting developer profiles to see if I could monetize via the reverse job board method.

I announced it via the blog and have kept a link in the newsletter for a few weeks to see if I could get enough profiles to justify building out the feature. Over the past month, I've collected 14 profiles.

I'm thinking if i get to 50 or more I would start actually building out a front end feature and trying to monetize. I found a collection of pricing here (would also try to get a backlink there!).

Mailerlite migration

My mailing list size was beyond Mailchimp's new free limits, and the pricing was going to be beyond what I wanted to pay. I weighed a couple of options, but decided on Mailerlite - primarily on price. I'm at $17/month for the current list (1467), which doesn't feel too bad.

I also got to redesign the newsletter, here's what it's looking like now:

I removed all the "Remote React Developer Jobs" links from the footer. It looks wayyyy cleaner now:

But my SEO traffic dropped pretty clearly after this change. I'm gonna try to find a way to cleanly add those links back to the footer to see if I can get that SEO traffic back.

The Numbers

Let’s run through some numbers for the month.

Profit: -$38.60

Revenue: $20.90

  • Job Listings: $0
  • Medium payments: $12.26 (from cross-posting blog posts to medium)
  • Affiliate Links: $8.64 (combo of Swapstack and Postapex)

Expenses: $29.75 (monthly)

  • IFTTT: $4
  • Domain: $1.25
  • Plausible Analytics: $7.5
  • Mailerlite: $17

Mailerlite is a big portion of my expenses now. $30 a month isn't too bad though - would be better if I could cover all expenses!

Traffic

Traffic in March was up 1% from the month prior.

March to April is trailing down 17%. I attribute this to:

  1. Me posting less jobs
  2. Decrease in SEO (my theory is that my changes to the footer caused this)

Email

  • Net subscriber movement: +45
  • Current Subscribers: 1468
  • Open Rate: 41.7%

One thing I like so far about Mailerlite is better subscriber analytics. I can see that ~30% of users on the list have not opened an email since the migration. I'll probably start a list cleanup campaign to reduce list size and get the open rates / engagement higher.

SEO

SEO was doing really well in February, but started trending way down in March. This got me down to be honest and has been demotivating. My hunch is that my changes to the footer could have caused this, which should be easy to test!

Looking Ahead

I'm going to be a bit more passive with the project going forward, as I try to get SuperSupport.ai launched :)

At the very least, I want to ship:

  • Re-add job tag links to the footer to see if this helps SEO

As a bonus, I may try to ship:

  • Job listing refresh - add salary info since I'm collecting it now.
  • Email list clean up automation
  • Start collecting more "resources" to programmatically create new blog posts