It's been a few months since the last report and there isn't too much to fill in other than the core business, PB Web Development, has seen some substantial growth and workload over the past few months which has been quite exciting.
Martina's business, I Am Infusion, has seen a little bit of extra growth as well since doing the last Sydney Tea Festival in August but we're a little off topic. I just wanted to let you all know why the podcast hasn't had as much attention.
I hope to get back on track with regular podcasts and blog posts over the month of October.
If you're interested in following the growth and direction of the podcast just follow the tag, Joomla Beat Update.
Growth
Over the last three months since the first update, the podcast website hasn't seen any more growth in terms of number of visitors to the site. Infact, the page views and the page/sessions have dropped since last check. Not the best sign but it is very marginal.
Since June, there have been a huge amount of changes to the code and hosting of the website in order to help increase the speed overall.
Hosting has changed from SiteGround to a SSD instance on Digital Ocean. The server environment has also changed from Apache to NGinx. Lastly, a lot of the social sharing and additional extras on the website have been trimmed down all in the hope for more speed and faster page load overall for the website. This was all inspired by Simon Kloostra, who I Interviews in episode 92 about SEO and site performance.
So far the best tests on the site has reduced the page load time to just over 0.5 seconds from New York which is the best location for the podcast server. 0.5 seconds!!!! I'm very happy with that.
See the speed test results.
Traffic Building Plans
Newsletter
The newsletter has been neglected the last few months but will pick up again in October. First thing first though, I will have to produce more content to be scheduled into the website first.
Courses
The Seblod course which was running in June/July was a success. With ~65 sign ups over the last few months to the course, people have had more exposure to Seblod CCK other campaigns run by the Seblod team before. This is also the first time we could measure the results of a call to action from the podcast as well which is a great metric.
A long with the sign ups to the four part course, we also saw a large amount of engagement on the comments of each of the videos as people progressed through each part of the video.
Overall the Seblod team have reported that they were happy with the sponsorship and results. No emails were shared with Seblod.
Showcase
The showcase are of the site is slowly growing still. Still something I haven't promoted heavily as there is still a lot of work to do on the front end design of the website to make that all happen.
Reach
The July reach stats of the podcast from Spreaker are a little off.
I realised halfway through the month that the RSS feed that powers the iTunes feed from Spreaker was broken. That was my fault for trying to be fancy and getting the content to dynamically come from the website, the Spreaker and then iTunes. It didn't work properly and hence the numbers before July 15th are so low. The rest of the month was quite steady though.
Since July until the end of September I had only launched 6 episodes meaning that there aren't the regular spikes in traffic that one would expect each time an episode is released.
You can see several spikes when podcast episodes were released and promoted.
You can also see the week long periods when we were working our butts off in our design/dev business and couldn't produce podcasts or content.
Total downloads from Spreaker now are:
- 3118 online plays
- 15,007 downloads
July-September Profit and Loss
Affiliate sales and commissions have picked up a little since the last report. With a handful of SiteGround commissions that have come through from sales
Income
SiteGround Affiliate Hosting: $320 USD
Joomla Related Affiliate Sales: 0
Website Advertising: 0
Podcast Episode Sponsorship: $100 AUD ~ $70 USD
Outgoings
Hosting changed from SiteGround to Digital Ocean $60 USD
Net: ~ $330
Running Total: $339 USD
Things are slowly picking up again and I know with more effort in producing good content and material I should see things become steady by the end of the year.
Regards,
Peter & Martina
