Big Timer
The big fullscreen countdown timer for workshops
WOW - 1 MILLION!!!!!!!!!!!!! I only got a few more backlinks, but Google now ranks Big Timer pretty high for most relevant keywords. As an experiment, I spent a little money on Google Ads and it only got me few dozen click. That's just not worth it.
I did very little development or marketing. During the pandemic teachers and students discovered Big Timer and they have been sharing it on learning platforms.
In the meantime traffic via search engines grew 14x. This was mainly Google (December 2020 had 25x the number of referrals as December 2019), which shows me that SEO takes a long time as I haven't made any changes to this since June 2019 and there are no new major indexable backlinks. Perhaps the number of backlinks helped?
With Big Timer targeted at creative professionals, I'm now at a point where I should decide if I want to get more users there (better monetizing options?) or in education (biggest growth, possibly bigger audience).
Optimizing meta data for the site didn't make a measurable difference so far, but ever since Big Timer was featured on Smashing Magazine, Google is increasing impressions and every week.
Nonetheless, I added prettier page titles, like '10 Minute Countdown' instead of '10:00'. Let's see what effect that will have.
The hard part is making iOS do CSS well though.
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Okay, months later I found out that with every change to my manifest.json, the application wouldn't load for anyone who'd visited a previous version. Not so easy after all—I don't know how to fix this, so I removed the offline capability.
So Google does index single page applications well, but they have to have 'routing': urls pointing to states (or pages). I've added routing now, let's see what happens when Google has indexed my new sitemap.
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how did this go? is it still a react spa app? or do you do any pre-rendering or server rendering now to get open graph tags set up?
Odd, according to Google's webmasters tool everything is fine...
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yup, there a lot of good business traffic now coming from big, smart, savvy customers too.
Found out that creating customized fonts is quite useful and not that hard!
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this you have to explain, firstly why bother when pretty good tested, quick loading fonts out there.
1 Comment
Congrats. The UI/UX is really impressive.
I want to ask whether the "Pay what you want" model works? I read somewhere that if you use this strategy, users generally don't tend to pay.
Have you experimented with other call-outs like "Buy me Coffee"?