I was convinced when I woke up this morning that it was Wednesday, because yesterday was The Big Presentation and I had thought that was a Tuesday. Turns out today is Friday, because TBP was on Thursday. It went pretty well, incidentally, and my month of 12 to 16 hour days is now over. There is now a functional spam filter where there wasn’t before, and within the month it will be OSS for all the world to enjoy.
You know what I really like about the prospect of self-employment? No months of 12 to 16 hour days, and no forgetting what day it is. (I still like my day job, incidentally.)
If you’re signed up for Google Sitemaps (aka Webmaster Console) you can now see backlinks to your website. This is useful as backlinks are SEO mana from heaven and you can spy on whether your marketing is having any effect. I took a quick glance at mine and while the overwhelming majority are either download sites or spam blogs (they search for bingo related keywords and link to them with the hope of getting Google to rank their casino site — I hate this), I can see a few mentions from actual customers or people who find my site useful. The Dolch sight word list, for example, got linked to by an elementary school.
Regular readers know that my AdWords campaign, which I spent a great deal of time optimizing back when I started my business, has been not performing well for the last several months. I have recently fixed this — amount spent is down 50%, CPA (cost per marginal trial download) is down 50%, and conversion to purchases is now measurable. I get $2 in purchases for every $1 on AdWords, as opposed to $0.60-0.80 as of a month ago. I might be jumping the gun, as this is just my results from one week, but tentatively I think my tweaks worked.
