Month Three 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 January 16 - February 15.

Here's last month's summary if you want to see how this month compared! Month 2 Summary

Two huge wins this month:

  • first month with revenue!
    • sold a job listing!
  • huge SEO growth!

Goals

Last month, here's what I said I wanted to accomplish:

  • Test affiliate campaigns on the actual website (I saw 4daywork week doing this!), let's get money!
  • Add a real form to the hiring page
  • Ship some content
  • Add a "Your job here" spot on the main listing page
  • Enrich the tech and seniority tag pages the same way I did with the regions pages
  • Ship a better mobile menu 😅

I hit 4/6 goals. 66% is just ok I guess, but I'd also weight some of these as higher value. I tried to target the things that I thought would lead to getting revenue faster.

What I Shipped

Content

Jobs

I curated ~13 jobs, and posted 1 paid listing. I started pulling some jobs from Indeed, where there are a lot of opportunities.

Articles

Features Shipped

Hiring page and form

I revamped the hiring page and added a form so people can submit jobs and pay money! Replying with a link to this page got me my first sale this month - so I count it as a huge win.

Mobile Menu

The header was pretty bad on mobile before, and as a site focused on front end developers, it was embarrassing. Added a nice slide out menu to improve that experience!

Affiliate Ads

I tested out adding affiliate ads in the job feeds. I tested ads from Digital Ocean, Notion, 1Password, and Todoist (using Swapstack). Overall I see ~22 clicks generated on these ads, but it hasn't turned into any conversions yet and so revenue is $0. I set up the ad to randomly serve one of four advertisers, but I will probably change it to serve just one for a month to see how that works.

Quick Hits

Some smaller updates:

  • Add a bit more automated content to seniority and tech pages
  • Programmatic "Hire xxx Developers" pages - example: Hire Remote Javascript Developers
    • I started to see these keywords show up in Google Search Console so I wanted to make sure I had a page that would be relevant.

The Numbers

Let’s run through some numbers for the month.

Profit: $85.07

Revenue: $100.99

Woohoo! 🎉 First month with revenue since relaunch!

  • Job Listings: $99
  • Medium payments: $1.99 (from cross-posting blog posts to medium)

Expenses: $15.92 (monthly)

  • IFTTT: $4
  • Domain: $1.25
  • Plausible Analytics: $7.5
  • Stripe fees: 3.17

Traffic

Huge growth from month prior - 75% increase! SEO traffic has increased 10x. Curating a couple of Junior positions has helped SEO and all other traffic. Sending out the "Resources" newsletter also added quite a bit of traffic as well.

Email

  • Net subscriber movement: +41
  • Current Subscribers: 1423
  • Open Rate: 40.7%

Still seeing some unsubscribes in each email from early 2020 / 2021 sign ups, but the growth more than makes up for that.

SEO

HUGE growth in SEO! From what I can tell, curating two Junior positions is the main boost here - I landed in spot 1 for several "junior front end developer" keywords.

  • Search impressions: 6.71k (up from 1.9k)
  • Clicks: 185 (up from 13!)

Tools and Resources

Decision Log

  • Will pause on making updates / optimizations to programmatic location pages. Haven't seen traction here and so will leave them alone.

Looking Ahead

Top priorities for the next 30 days:

  • 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