Epilocal - May 2021 Report: $48 Total Revenue (-$102 from April)
May was a frustrating month in many ways, but stepping back, the trend-line is still going in the right direction. Traffic was mostly up I think, although it's tough to get a good comparison since I moved to Plausible Analytics at the end of April. Before that, I was only getting the Google Analytics data from people who accepted cookies. That ended up being only like 1/3 of people.
Will be excited to get another month in the books running on Plausible to start making some real month on month comparisons. Looking at Google search clicks though, it looks like there was some modest growth vs. April... funny though, since my impressions more than doubled. I think it has to do with new blog posts targeting higher volume keywords that haven't ranked well yet... but I also went through and did some Title and Description improvements to try to improve my click-through-rates.
Sales were disappointing this month, but that was my fault. I have been thinking for a while now that my Mailchimp data studio connector needed a free trial, but I was using license keys from Gumroad as a quick and dirty way of charging and authenticating users. I decided to layer a home-made free-trial service over the top of this using my mailing service (Mailerlite) and an AWS Lambda.
Long story short, it didn't really work out. I ended up with 3 people signing up for trials and the trial service failing all three times. I ended up sending a bunch of sorry emails and never really figured out quite what was wrong, although I suspect it was something going on with Cloudfront caching.
In the end, I pulled it back out and worked like crazy yesterday to switch over to Paddle. I'm optimistic this month things will go better with their automated free trial service doing things the right way.
Despite that, one person actually did end up buying the product anyway. I refunded his first month so he could still get a free trial period - not sure he'll stay on, but at least there's something in the MRR to show this month.
Finally, I also launched a new product this month, my Google Docs to Ghost add-on. It doesn't solve a huge problem, so it's a really tiny product priced at $3/month with core features available for free.
It's too soon to tell, but it has gotten around 30 free installs so far from the Google Marketplace. Two people bought paid licenses but both cancelled... have to do some investigating there.
Total Revenue:
May: $48
April: $150
Monthly Run Rate (MRR):
May: $70
April: $55
Newsletter Sign Ups:
May: 30
April: 21
Unique Site Visits:
May: 610
April: n/a (switched to Plausible Analytics in May)
Google Clicks:
May: 315
April: 289
