Month Two 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 December 16 - January 15, so it includes the holidays which was a bit of a slow down for me.

Here's last month's summary if you want to see how this month compared! Relaunch - One Month Summary.

Goals

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

  • ⚠️ expand SEO strategy to more blog posts using methods from the Lean SEO course, shipping at least one experiment (3 posts total)
    • The experiment I planned was a content type for "50+ BLANK Resources for Front End Developers". I planned to do performance, accessibility, and...another topic. I only got a first shot at the performance topic out: Web performances resources for front end developers. So I missed the mark here.
  • ✅ putting up some kind of page for hiring managers
    • I added a first shot at a hiring page here and linked it in the main navigation. I don't think it's great, but it's a first shot. This next moth I'll add a form instead of the mailto: link and work on making some improvements.
    • I haven’t gotten any emails through it yet unfortunately.
  • ✅ Automate social media strategy
    • With a combo of Buffer, IFTTT and Zapier I have social media posts going out as soon as a job post is published, 3 days after it is published and 7 days after on both Twitter and LinkedIn. This drove more traffic and freed me up to do other stuff

What Else I Shipped

Considering I missed one of my main goals, I probably worked on too many other things. But I am quite proud of what I accomplished this month.

Content

Jobs

I curated ~8 jobs, about 2 a week. There was less jobs out there due to the holidays, and I didn’t post any between Christmas and New Years.

Articles

  • I put together Web Performance Resources for Front End Developers, which was supposed to be one third of a three post experiment, but didn’t finish the other two parts.
    • I did a small bit of promotion in cross-posting to dev.to and medium. These have driven small amounts of traffic to the site. In the future I'll add a bigger call to action to join the newsletter.
  • December 2023 Trends Report: The trends report is something I thought of one day when I was thinking about how I could make landing pages richer. I realized I could highlight trends over time to keep each of my tag landing pages (example - Remote FED jobs in Europe) relevant in any given month—and that I could also turn that data into a blog post each month highlighting trends in front end hiring.
    • The post is completely automated!
    • Each month on the first of the month, a post highlighting the trends in technologies, seniority and regions will be added to the article page.
    • I maybe spent too much time on automating it, but the prospect of having at least one article each month guaranteed was too much to resist. I’m proud of how it turned out and hopeful that it will drive organic traffic.

Features Shipped

Newsletter Sponsorship

Reading through my weekly bytes.dev newsletter and seeing all the sponsorships, I realized that I, too have a newsletter that could be sponsored and that could be a different way to get money than just job postings.

I quickly Added a newsletter sponsorship link in the newsletter ($250 a month), and on the new newsletter page. (If you are reading this and want to sponsor - I'll give you 10% off - shoot me a DM)

To figure out a price I did some really quick googling, which also led me to Swapstack, which is a newsletter sponsorship marketplace. I don't have quite enough subscribers yet to apply to any partnerships (looks like they mostly start at 5k subs), but they do have some easy to add affiliate deals, and that's what I ran with in the last newsletter:

It pays out $75 per conversion - so a few sign ups would be worth it for sure.

AI Cover Letter Generator

This was an idea I had after seeing a twitter thread along the lines of "I don't know how to code and I asked ChatGPT to help me make a website that uses AI and launched it in an hour".

It sounded like the kind of thing that could possibly go viral - so I thought I'd give it a try.

I went and asked ChatGPT if it could help me generate cover letters and it obliged. I added a form to help put together a good prompt and shipped it late on Friday night.

Here's a thread with some examples. You can try it out here: AI Cover Letter Generator for Front End Developers.

Quick Hits

Some smaller updates:

  • Created a template script for adding new jobs, just creates a new file with the right boilerplate. Removes some friction on creating new jobs.
  • Light redesign on the newsletter - somewhat inspired by the ui.dev bytes newsletter.
  • Added a facebook page
    • asked for help on starting a facebook page on Indie Hackers with no response.
    • Tested a facebook ad for $7 targeting senior front end developers, front end programming, 25-40, but my ad kept getting rejected and I'm not sure why, so I gave up for now.
  • Enriched the data on region tag pages to try to get more organic traffic. Initial results are promising (Example: Europe).

The Numbers

Let’s run through some numbers for the month.

Profit: -$12.75

Revenue: $0

Nothing…yet

Expenses: $12.75 (monthly)

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

Traffic

Traffic over the past 30 days was down from month 1, but I think this is mostly a holiday slump. It’s also partly because at the end of December I got lazy about posting jobs to social media. I’ve since automated the social media posts which has helped drive traffic.

This past week is trending the highest of any week since launch so far so I’m feeling good about the trend overall.

Email

  • Net subscriber movement: +18
  • Current Subscribers: 1382
  • Open Rate: 39.1%

In month one, each newsletter send had enough in subscribes that would wipe out any growth for the week. I attribute this to me sending to a really stale list - some people have been on the since 2019 and hadn’t heard from me in over a year.

The good news is that I have started to see week over week growth and a decrease in unsubscribes. The list has grown each week over the last four weeks and is now higher than it was at the relaunch in November.

SEO

  • Search impressions: 1,710 (up from 935)
  • Clicks: 12 (up from 9)

Nothing dramatic happening here, but it’s trending in the right direction!

Tools and Resources

  • Swapstack
  • Gatsby Cloud!

Looking Ahead

Top priorities for the next 30 days:

  • 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 😅

That seems like a lot...we'll see!