Month Ten Summary | Front End Remote Jobs

Tags:

• Build in Public
• Front End Remote Jobs

Here's my monthly update on what I've done with Front End Remote Jobs over the past 30 days 150 days and what results I've seen. This update is for April 14 - September 15.

The last summary I did was the Month Five Summary - Front End Remote Jobs. Work got really stressful and I stopped making time to work so much on this project over the next few months. But I quit my job at the beginning of September to start focusing on getting some internet businesses of my own off the ground, so I've had more time to devote to this project.

Goals

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

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

I shipped 1 out of 4 of those. So I did my bare minimum. But I also shipped something else!

What I Shipped

Content

Jobs

I curated ~25 jobs from April 14 to September 15. That averages to about 5 jobs a month, or 1 a week, but I didn't post a single job in August. Traffic steadily declined, with August being the lowest month since I re-launched back in November (see Month One Summary - Front End Remote Jobs Relaunch).

Articles

I didn't write any SEO focused articles myself. The monthly hiring trends article is published automatically every month, so there were five of those.

I also published an article on how to hire a front end developer (A Comprehensive Guide on Hiring a Front-End Developer), which I used some keyword research and an SEO AI tool called Drafthorse.ai to write. It's a bit of an experiment to see if I can attract hiring managers to the site using SEO.

Features Shipped

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 way back in April, thinking if i get to 50 profiles I'd start building out the reverse job board profiles and such. Well I got like 30 or 40 profiles so I decided to build the thing. It's very simple, and live on the site here: https://frontendremotejobs.com/developers/.

Here's what the landing page looks like:

And here's an example profile:

I'm now up to 61 profiles, and it's growing a bit every week (big growth the first week). It definitely grows the more I share about it on social.

Profiles are stored in Airtable. And "Subscribe to view" / "Hire me" is a link to a Stripe payment page for $99 / 3 months. If someone pays me that, I may need to build out some authentication / private data viewing, but for now I'm not going to invest more.

Updating programmatic SEO Hiring pages

I have these Hire Remote ${Technology} Developers pages on the site to try to get some search traffic from hiring managers.

After launching the reverse job board, I updated these pages to list developers who have that experience from the job board. I think it's pretty cool. Hopefully it drives some reverse job board traffic.

New footer

I had previously removed all the "Remote React Developer Jobs" links from the footer for a cleaner look, but I think it hurt my link structure in terms of SEO, so I re-added them. The footer isn't super pretty, but it gets the job done:

The Numbers

Let’s run through some numbers for the past 5 months.

Profit: -$86.33

This is sad. Really, I need to sell job listings. If I can't sell more than 1 job listing a month by the end of the year, then I need to stop spending time on this project.

Revenue: $29.43

• Job Listings: $0
• Medium payments: $9.11 (from cross-posting blog posts to medium)
• Affiliate Links: $20.32 (Swapstack)

Expenses: $115.76

• IFTTT: $4
• Domain: $1.25
• Plausible Analytics: $7.5
• Mailerlite: $17 (now $25)

Traffic

Traffic was on a steady decline, due to me posting less jobs primarily. However, between increased activity on my end and some social shares from a big Twitter account, traffic is at an all time in September since the relaunch.

Email

• Net subscriber movement: +186
• Current Subscribers: 1654
• Open Rate: 34%

Open rate has dropped a bit (down from 40%), and I mainly attribute this to me taking a break from sending emails in August.

Subscriber growth was huge in September, adding 107 subscribers in the last 30 days. That may be the biggest subscriber growth I've ever seen.

SEO

SEO seems to be trending down. I'm not exactly sure why.

Looking Ahead

I'm likely going to be focusing mostly on other projects over the next few months. The main things I may do over the next few months will be:

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

I need to make sales to justify continuing work here. If I can't do that, I'll likely abandon this long running passion project.