Privacy-first Jobs

It was fun but traffic or subscriber count never really grew, and I want to focus on other projects that look more promising, so I'm going to wind up the job board and newsletter.

As with all projects, I learnt a lot so I'm grateful for the experience. Onwards and upwards!

I've been busy with life and other projects so I've put this on the back burner for the past couple of weeks. I'm still updating the database with new jobs every day, but no work on marketing or building.

And it shows.

Traffic is down about 25%, but on the flip side I gained a few more newsletter and social media subscribers. I also have an RSS feed so I assume some people use that rather than visiting the site.

Anyway, I'm not going to have much time for a while but will try to keep tweaking.

Todo:

• Add related jobs to each job page.
• I might pitch to get on privacy-related podcasts as an interview guest.

Traffic:
About 312 visitors/month (-25%)

Just a couple of tweaks this time:

1. I looked into the site's performance and although it was already pretty good, I converted the main images to WebP to make it even faster.

I was surprised to find that global support for WebP is about 97% which I felt was good enough for me, especially as the images are decorative so if they don't display, people can still use the site without problems.

2. Next was something I've been putting off for a while – converting the dates to a human-friendly format, e.g. "2 days ago". I dread working with dates but modern JavaScript now has this functionality built in, so in the end it was easy!

I have other project ideas so I'm not planning to do too much work on this over the next few weeks, but will keep the steady flow of new jobs updated.

Todo:

• Add related jobs to each job page.
• I might pitch to get on privacy-related podcasts as an interview guest.

Traffic:
About 414 visitors/month (-9%) :-(

I had a panic last week when a small privacy company (IVPN) said they wanted to pay for a job boost! After a brief "woohoo!" I then realised I had to work out how to boost their job post, as I didn't have anything set up. The next 24 hours was a rush of creating a featured job post design for the website and newsletter, and then working out how to accept payment. In the end I used Lemon Squeezy and packaged the job boost as a digital product. This worked well and the customer seemed happy. Now I have my fingers crossed that they actually get people visiting and applying for the job opening.

I also finally wrote a script to automate the weekly newsletter content, pulling the latest jobs from Airtable. I still tweak it manually before sending, but this saves me a lot of time.

I have other project ideas so I'm not planning to do too much work on this over the next few weeks, but will keep the steady flow of new jobs updated.

Todo:

• I might pitch to get on privacy-related podcasts as an interview guest.

Traffic:
About 454 visitors/month

Well I'm pleased to report there's light at the end of the tunnel as traffic has started to pick up again, thanks to mentions on a couple of privacy-related websites.

I'm starting to see Google referrer clicks as well, thanks to job posts being indexed, but also some of the articles and sample cover letter templates I created are now indexed too. I actually used AI (ChatGPT) to create the cover letters and the quality was surprisingly good. I created a few more this week, and also added links to them from relevant job posts, e.g. at the bottom of job posts for a software developer, there's a link to a software developer cover letter that people can freely adapt and use.

I also used DALL-E to make a few illustrative images for my articles. A little bit abstract but I think they look better than stock photography.

Todo:

• I might pitch to get on privacy-related podcasts as an interview guest.
• Write a script to automate the weekly newsletter content.

Traffic:
About 322 visitors/month

Still a slow start to the year, and my other project is going well, so I've been a bit demotived with this recently. Anyway, still working at it and over the past couple of weeks I've been focusing on how to use AI to help.

• Used DALL-E to generate illustrative images for my articles about job hunting.
• Used ChatGPT to create sample cover letter templates.

I was surprised at the quality of the AI output – it needed minimal editing before publishing. Next is to see how it performs and whether there are other opportunities.

Todo:

• I might pitch to get on privacy-related podcasts as an interview guest.
• Create more content for SEO.
• Write a script to automate the weekly newsletter content.

Traffic:
About 215 visitors/month

Kind of expected, but it's clear that people are not looking for jobs around Christmas and the end of the year (confirmed with a fellow job board owner). Knowing this has made the drop in traffic acceptable, and I expect (hope!) that people start looking for jobs now the new year has started.

This also means companies are not posting many new job openings at the moment, so I just did some bug fixing and SEO tweaks on the site, as well as added a little "new" label to highlight new posts.

Todo:

• I might pitch to get on privacy-related podcasts as an interview guest.
• Add more JSON-LD job data.
• Create more content for SEO.
• Write a script to automate the weekly newsletter content.

Traffic:
About 630 visitors/month

Let's start with my stupid mistake:
On launch day, I switched the DNS from my pre-launch landing page to the live site. In the dev environment everything worked well so I then focused on marketing. A week later, I got a message from a user asking whether my newsletter signup form was working properly. Huh? Panic! Investigate!

Result: Yes, I had launched the project with a broken newsletter form. 🤦
The cause was my CSP (Content Security Policy) blocking the domain of my newsletter provider, so it was a two-second fix, but so frustrating. Oh well, I've learned my lesson!

I've also been frustrated by the drop in traffic since launching. Things have settled down and I'm only getting a handful of visitors a day. Perhaps it's because no-one's looking for jobs pre-Christmas and it'll pick up in January. Time will tell.

In the meantime, I've noticed I get no traffic from search engines so I've tried to improve that:

• Started to add JSON-LD job data.
• Created some job-hunting articles for SEO.

It'll take a while but hopefully that will have an impact.

Todo:

• I might pitch to get on privacy-related podcasts as an interview guest.
• Add more JSON-LD job data.
• Create more content for SEO.

Traffic:
About 600 visitors/month (but this will go down as the launch bump fades away)

It's been a month since getting the domain name and starting an email list – now I've finally launched Privacy-First Jobs! Here's my process for getting the word out:

1. I started with my family, online network (Twitter, Mastodon, LinkedIn) and the email waitlist, as I figured if there was anything obviously wrong I'd prefer them to find it first. Most traffic came from LinkedIn.

2. I did a "Show HN" on Hacker News. That got no reaction but it did generate some traffic.

3. I've just submitted it to various project sites, including:

• Owwly
• 10words
• /r/startups
• The Startup Pitch
• Betalist
• Job Board Search

4. Next is Product Hunt, once it's past midnight in California. Last time I tried this it had no effect, so I'm not optimistic but worth trying anyway.

5. Finally I plan to send a press release using one of the online services. I don't think it'll have an immediate effect but it should generate some backlinks.

Todo:

• I might pitch to get on privacy-related podcasts as an interview guest.
• Some design tweaks.
• Add JSON job data.
• Create content for SEO.

Traffic:
About 280 visitors/month

Well it's nearly two weeks and I've had 30 subscribers and 30 Twitter followers. Considering that my projects usually get very little attention (I don't have a big audience), I'm quite pleased with this. Things that worked best were:

• Posting to LinkedIn. Probably because the project is job-related, I got quite a few likes, shares and click-throughs from LinkedIn.
• Tweeting about jobs available (I'm already building the database of jobs) and at-mentioning the relevant organisations. They'd mostly like or retweet which gives me visibility to their followers.

Todo:

• Finishing creating the website and then launch (hopefully this month!)
• Submit the site to ProductHunt, Hacker News, social media, and the email list.

Traffic:
About 170 visitors/month