Traffic and Income Report Month #2
Another month is in the books! This is where I am at so far.
Date | Pageviews | Monthly Revenue
| 3/8/2021 – 4/7/2021 | 12 Pageviews | $0 |
| 4/8/2021 – 5/7/2021 | 29 Pageviews | $0 |
I have almost doubled my pageviews from last month to this month. This is without hardly any promotion. This is all from Google while blocking myself from the analytics. This just means that if I see the page it won’t count myself. I generally don’t expect any pageviews for the first 3 months. So I am happy with whatever I can get.
Updates to similarfont.io
This site still needs a LOT of work. When I launched it, I basically just gave myself a due date and told myself that I would launch it no matter what condition it was in. I did this mainly because I knew that it was going to get little to no traffic at the start.
One major change needed to happen and that was changing the images out. I provide images to of each font so the user can compare for themselves how similar they are. The pictures before were pretty bad. The font sizes and spacing were all over the place.
These new images have a better flow and show off more of the letters. This will help the user be able to compare the fonts better.
I’m really happy with how they came out.
I also added a really simple about us page and that was it!
Getting distracted with other ideas
My Achille’s heel as an indiehacker is that I get distracted with new ideas. Always when I am working on one thing I thing of this SUPER AWEOMSE AMAZING IDEA that has to be started on right away or someone else will take my idea.
During this last month, that hit me hard. I started to explore this idea almost becoming obsessed with it while still working on similarfont. One of my biggest regrets is not sticking with ideas that I had two – three years ago.
I dumped a lot of time into this idea this month really only to discover the apis I was using really were not going to work. Also it required a LOT of backend development along with a time series database. All of this would be well above my current skill level.
Currently I am redoing my portfolio and will soon my applying for a new day job. So I was redoing my portfolio, working on similarfont, and trying out this new project every night after work. This would be after working for 8 hours, going to the gym, and still doing church stuff (takes about 8 hours per week).
Needless to say it was too much.
Moral of the story, stick with your original idea and don’t overwhelm yourself.
For right now, I am going to work on similarfont and continue to redo my portfolio.
Quitting caffeine
For the past 6 years, I have been addicted to energy drinks and diet coke. When I was younger I use to always have so much energy. I would wake up early for school, then go to work, come home to do home, and if it was the weekend I would stay up late with friends. Then the next day I would wake up to work a 10 hours shift on Saturday.
Nowadays I’m exhausted even just after my 8 hour shift! The worst part is that I sit all day!
I want that same energy back and the difference between me then and me now is caffeine. Growing up I was not allowed to drink any caffeine. Now I drink about 300mg per day. It’s not a lot compared to some people, but nonetheless I don’t like how I feel after it wears off.
For the past 2 weeks, I have been slowly cutting down my amount of caffeine. First I started by just drinking water instead of diet coke for lunch. After a week of that, I cut down my afternoon trips to get a mountain dew. I was getting a mountain dew from a soda shop nearby about 4 times per week. I am down to just 2 times per week.
Finally the hard one is Monster. I LOVE drinking the white monster energy drinks. I drink one every morning. So I started drinking the smaller one which is only 12oz instead of 16oz.
This past week, I took a vow on twitter to never drink caffeine again only to break that vow the next day! It happens ok.
I am proud to say that I have gone a few days with no monster and little mountain dew. I even had a day or two with zero caffeine.
My sleep has improved dramatically and my energy levels are already better. I also have way less heart burn. Since I have been going off it so slowly I have had zero headaches, but a little bit of brainfog. It has been easy than going cold turkey for me.
My plan is to be completely off caffeine within the next week or so.
Idea of Second Shift
One thing that has been helping me a lot in terms of productivity is to work what I call 2nd shift. It’s what I call my dedicated time every evening to working on my side projects. Most nights it is 6PM-9PM, but it will vary throughout the week.
Having this set time has greatly improved my focus and ability to get things done. I will put on a 2-3 hour playlist on youtube and pull up note pad to write down the things that I want to get down for that evening. It will look something like this.
It’s just a real simple do to list and it works really well.
I plan on continuing this process.
Books I read
This past month I only finished one book. But this book certainly changed my look on life. I read A Man’s Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl. The book takes you through the experience that Viktor had in a concentration camp during WW2. He talks about all the hardships he had, what he saw and observed. He goes into detail about the treatment they had undergone and how the prisoners had dealt with it.
It’s pretty graphic at times. However, in the second part of the book he describes his own way, which he calls logotherapy, to help deal with traumatic events in our lives. He gives practical advice in how we can’t change what has happened to us, but we can change how we will move forward for our lives.
It’s a short read. I highly recommend it.
Weight Loss
My average weight starting the month of April was 193.6 and now it is down to 190.7. That makes for 2.9 pounds for this month! I was hoping to lose around 4 pounds, but I got off track on the last week. My end goal is to get down to around 165lbs. I believe that I can lose about 1 pound per week which means that I will hit my goal close to the end of October.
My routine is pretty simple. I eat around 1900 calories on average and I lift weights for around 30-45min 5 days a week. Since I literally sit all day, I have to keep my calories low and workout to see any results.
Goals for this upcoming month
The last improvement I am going to make to the site is to simply improve the content. I was reading through the site as if I was a user and honestly the writing kinda of sucks. I had attempted to do what people call programtic seo. Basically I stored each font and it’s description inside of a json file. It was an array of objects with each object containing the name of the font, a description and links to it’s images.
The idea was that I could simply add new fonts to this “database” and then it would print out an article for me! It does work. However, the content is not very good.
So my goal for this month is to content a CMS to my project (it’s built with next) and then rewrite each article. I believe that it will go by quick since I already have all the images, similar fonts picked out, and descriptions. If I could have all that finished by the end of this month that would be awesome. I will then have a helpful resource to designers and developers that is a lot easier to read.
After that I plan on attempting to write at least one new article per day. These articles are pretty small so I don’t imagine that it will be too difficult to do that.
I will still move forward with the other parts of my life. I plan to put a major dent into my portfolio, continue to lose weight, and finally be off caffeine!
You can find me during the month on
twitter https://twitter.com/bensmithcodes and on my blog https://askbensmith.com/
