April & May 2021 - Big News or not?

April was quite a difficult month for me. I made a lot of progress but things are changing in my life quickly right now. Cannot say what it is about yet, but you will all hear the news soon, for sure.

On the project side, it went quite well. I achieved many things and got back into getworkrecognized and had some good results with other things. So let us look at the results.

April Review

I was mainly focusing on this blog and getting getworkrecognized into a better state and it is working slowly and surely. In the next few months, I will try to see the first results of that work and earn some real money.

This blog

We can see that traffic went a bit down. What is sad to see is that search traffic volume actually went down. But it looks like overall traffic (blue line on the bottom) is going up. The spike in the month of March was caused by newsletter publishings. Maybe I can get into another newsletter this month.

• Goal: Create 3 Twitter threads of blog articles and create 3 image slides for LinkedIn & Facebook
• Status: ❌

I have not done that and I am quite sad about it. Hopefully, I will be able to create that content this month. It should be evergreen content that can be reposted after some time. Might be a good investment for infographics and similar things.

Create one blog article on the blog

• Goal: Create one blog article in April 2021
• Status: ✅ 1/1

I created another blog last month. Continuing the resume series on how to create good resumes. It is called "let the projects section shine" and deals with how you should showcase your projects. Not a lot of traffic but I am close to finishing the series.

Create a newsletter of this blog, every two weeks/monthly

• Goal: Create a newsletter
• Status: ✅

Wohooo, that exists now. Please subscribe here. I will post updates on the content I publish at least once per month and give you tips regarding bootstrapping, your career, and other things. I am currently at 4 subscribers but I also do not focus on the growth of this newsletter. I hope it will grow organically.

Bookmarks Page

• Goal: Add 50 bookmarks
• Status: ✅ 116/116 (currently: 116)

The bookmarks page on my website is growing and growing. I think I am actually consuming more than creating which is sad to see and I still have more than 100 tabs open on my mobile phone, so I have to clean this up still. I will work on that the next month again I guess.

Growing caseconverter.pro

We can see that caseconverter.pro is growing somehow impression-wise. I got a lot of clicks in March since I was linking to the page a lot on Twitter, but yeah impressions are going up which is good to see. Let us see how the growth goes in the next few months.

The original goal was to write one blog article and I fulfilled this by writing “How to change JSON keys in JavaScript”. It might be googled by people but we will see results probably just after a few months since SEO normally just kicks in after some months.

Growth of getworkreconized.com

The last month I have made really good progress on getworkrecognized.com. I did a lot of outstanding tasks that will also make my life a lot easier dealing with this side project.

One thing I did outside of the tasks is to finally integrate an automatic deployment to the project. The deployment is done via GitHub actions and simply SSHs into the server and restarts the scripts after pulling, installing dependencies, and building. It includes a small downtime of around 3 minutes per deployment, but before that project is making any money, I will not spend a lot of time on infrastructure.

I also brought up the ahrefs health score of the site from 94 to 99. So that should make some links discoverable by Google. There were some career ladders that you can find here that did not have proper canonical links so they were never indexed properly on Google. Now they should be. On top of that I also added two new career ladders to the career ladder explorer:

• Stripe
• Google

I hope people will find those interesting and that it will help with SEO a bit. So no on the goals I have set last month.

• Goal: Enable Email/Password register + login
• Status: ✅

This was a more painful process than I thought. Integrating passport local login and email validation was a lot of work, unfortunately. I still need to introduce Google ReCaptcha to the login process but for now, this is done.

• Goal: Trial without credit card
• Status: ✅

Another goal was reached. With the new login method, I also introduced a free 30-day trial. I have to promote this a bit more on the landing page and throughout the blogs somehow. Which I will focus on a bit more next month.

• Goal: Optimize the signup/login page
• Status: ✅

Also done, I redesigned how the login/signup looks to increase conversions. Some testimonials and more text to appear more attractive.

If this will increase signup rates I will see this month. I think the main problem is that most people do not even get to the signup page.

• Goal: Optimize the landing page
• Status: ❌

I have a lot of feedback outstanding still for the landing page. I have to implement that still. Some optimizations should boost trial conversion rates. Feedback was around wording on the actual results you can achieve with the application, stating how it can help you get promoted and bring in more personal stories. I have tried this with the most recent blog I wrote but there are many other opportunities.

• Goal: Optimize the example self-review
• Status: ❌

The self-review example does not have a clear call-to-action above the fold, unfortunately. So I should Optimize that but also fix some UI issues and show it a bit nicer with arrows showcasing the values.

• Goal: Lower prices
• Status: ❌

That is something I wanted to do but still have not done. I want to decrease the prices so people are more likely to pay. From the feedback I got, I have the feeling that prices are not convincing enough and since this project exists for a long time I want to lower the prices to see if anyone signs up and pays.

• Goal: Create a blog article on getworkrecognized
• Status: ✅

This is done 🎉 I wrote “From Junior to Senior Software Engineer at Klarna in 2.5 years” which explains my journey within Klarna and how I got promoted twice, faster than most of people. Sharing tips on what worked for me and some personal stories.

Klarna's Engineering Blog

• Goal: Finish the blog regarding technical design documents
• Status:❌

This I keep shifting away, further and further. But I contributed to another blog article that went live: “What the engineering graduate program feels like after 6 months”. It did not get a lot of views but it is a great resource for sure.

My blog article that was planned should be finished somehow the next week. Let me see if I can find time for that.

Goals for May

For May I will increase all goals to challenge myself a bit more. I will double down on content for caseconverter.pro because that project is based on content and SEO, but also functionality could be improved. Two things to do, but I am limiting myself to these two things. This blog is evolving and evolving and I am sure I will add some content but will focus on the side projects even more I think. Let us see. I need to put some more ads on some pages so I could generate some more revenue off the site, and I should also add more places to my newsletter.

To getworkrecognized, I have bigger plans. After lowering the prices and now with the free trial I have a goal to reach out to people on LinkedIn and see if they would like to sign up. Cold emailing/messaging people. I will also focus a bit more on marketing and see if I can build a small following. So let us dive deeper into this month’s goals.

This Blog

Create one blog article on the blog

• Goal: Create one blog article in May 2021
• Status: ❌ 0/1

Not sure which blog article I should create but it is always content like “How to list Technical Skills in a resume” which would continue the series about writing resumes. But I could also focus on some other topics I have researched recently. Let us see.

Bookmarks Page

• Goal: Get to 99 tabs on my mobile
• Status: ❌

On my mobile phone, I still have above 99+ tabs. This means chrome does not even show the numbers of open tabs I have left. I want to reduce that number, so after going through 150-200 open pages, I feel comfortable finally get to that limit. Most of these open tabs are kind of nice to read and will end up on the bookmarks page (TODO: insert link).

caseconverter.pro

Even though this project will never generate a big revenue, I want to slowly build up the traffic. For that, I have some strategies planned.

Blogging

• Goal: Create 1 new blog article
• Status: ❌

With blogging more people might come to the site. It is just there to give better results than StackOverflow and help users. Users might go to the online application but yeah, it might not help that much.

Features

• Goal: Replace current converting functions
• Status: ❌

Currently, the converting functions rely on something that was scripted by myself. Ideally, I want to use a package I have found recently: change-case. This should make introducing different case types easier.

• Goal: Create at least 2 Feature pages
• Status: ❌

The feature pages would be targeting direct search queries users might look for. Initially, I want to redirect them to the app with a clear click to action. In the long-term, the case converter should be embeddable on those pages. The page could host the case converter but also some functions on how to do it in different programming languages.

• Optional Goal: Create at least 2 competitor comparison pages
• Status: ❌

This is probably related to the converting function additions. Once more cases are added I can create competitor comparison pages that will list my features to the features by other sites and show the advantages of my page. This will most likely cause a little amount of traffic but high-quality traffic.

getworkrecognized.com

Getworkrecognized will still be the product I focus on the most time in the next two months. This time will tell if I continue working on it or not. Let us make some revenue at least.

• Goal: Finish onboarding tour
• Status: ❌

During the last months, I started to work on the proper onboarding and introducing react-joyride. It is a highlighting library to guide new users through the app and helps them with the initial actions they have to do in the app. I hope this improves the first impression of the app and converts more users.

• Goal: Improve call to action on the landing page, feature pages
• Status: ❌

Before two months I got a lot of feedback regarding the landing page. I set it as a goal for the last month but did not get to implement it. It was about actually showcasing the real value of the tool and some improvements on showing the actual application.

• Goal: Mention free trial, create a widget for the blog, and integrate it
• Status: ❌

Last month I introduced a free trial and email signup to the project with limited success so far. I have to advertise this a bit more throughout the whole webpage. On each blog, there should be also a widget to sign up on the website somehow to increase the signup rate.

• Goal: Lower prices
• Status: ❌

I still could not figure out how to get more people to sign up for the app, and after having a private discussion with someone on LinkedIn, I decided to lower the prices to something around 4€ per month. The general pricing I have not decided on yet, but will in this month I hope.

• Goal: Integrate live chat functionality
• Status: ❌

Currently, the feedback widget on the website is not used anyway. I should create a general chat widget with tawk.to that will help me to answer questions by potential but already existing customers.

• Goal: Have 50 people sign up for the trial
• Status: ❌

Another focus for this month should be to get as many users to sign up for the trial as possible. With 50 people I expect at least one person to stay and pay somehow for the project. This will take some time because the trial has 30 days and yeah, it will simply take a while to convince customers.

• Goal: Optimize the example self-review
• Status: ❌

Another optimization goal is to improve the example self-review. Currently is just features the self-review but adding some arrows to show the thoughts of a hiring manager will help to visualize the value a lot more.

Summary

I am quite happy with the achievements of April, but one thing that is still depressing me is that no project makes any money. I hope I can change this until July. At least that is my goal now and I will focus hard on that. Otherwise, I will switch to another idea I have on my mind or partly coded already. So let us start a productive month.