Looking advice and feedback on my first project
Hi all,
The purpose of this post is to obtain advice and feedback on a website I am building in order to move on with some issues and doubts I am facing.
Intro
On January '23 I decided to start building my first project, HandyQuotez.com, as a solo-builder in order to achieve these goals:
- improving my web development / programming skills (as I am not a sw developer)
- learning by doing the different aspects of building a website in terms of: tech stack / development tools, marketing, SEO, monetization, content creation, ...
HandyQuotez.com is a famous quotes website with a library of more than 50.000 famous quotes, featuring over 15.000 authors and covering more than 100 topics.
I also have a blog covering topics about motivation, attitude and so on (37 posts with an average of 1.000-2.000 words).
What I built till today
Tech stack
As anticipated above I run both a website and a blog on two different domains.
Website tech stack:
- Front End: Vue JS 3, Javascript, Tailwind CSS
- Back End: Firebase
Blog: Wordpress.com.
I am using the AI in order to create the images with the quotes and to write the blog posts.
In the last 30 days the website received 1.2k visitors and the blog 1.6k; I would say that the traffic is 100% paid through Facebook ads.
The website is still in beta as I need to integrate more must-have features (ie. a good searching component for authors/quotes/...).
On Wordpress I have a "Subscribe" form to the newsletter offered by Wordpress; at the moment, 14 subscribers.
Social Media
I am only using Facebook and the HandyQuotez Page has almost 10k followers that I used to get through paid ads.
Monetization
Right now, the only monetization stream I am using is Amazon Associates inside the blog.
In particular, at the end of each post, I insert a section with the top books relevant to the topic with the referral link to Amazon.
Based on 1.6k visitors last month, the links received only 10 clicks (0.6%) and 0 purchases.
Feedback and advice I am looking for
How do I get indexed by Google?
Based on the Google Search Console:
- Website: it is not indexed. I think (not sure) it could depend by the fact that the site doesn't have a sitemap.xml and I don't know how to create one with Vue.
- Blog: I downloaded the sitemap but till know Google indexed only the homepage not the posts.
In general, I am looking for advice on how to get indexed by Google.
Would it be preferable to integrate the blog into the website?
As I didn't manage to find a good solution to write articles within the website tech stack (vue + firebase) I chose to use Wordpress to write and easily formatting the articles of the blog. However, now I have two different domains to manage.
Do you think would it be better to integrate the blog into the website? If yes, how should I move on?
I tried to use the Wordpress API in order to integrate the posts into the website but the format is totally different.
Best way to manage subscribers to the newsletter?
I am using the subscription form provided by Wordpress but with this approach I can't put a subscription form inside the website.
Should I use another provider like Mailchimp or do you have any other advice?
How could I improve monetization?
As anticipated above, at the moment, I am using Amazon Associates but I didn't expect a conversion that low (1.6k visitors --> 10 clicks --> 0 purchases).
Any advice on possible ways to increase conversion and other streams I could try?
Really appreciated any other suggestion!
Thank you all,
