February at a glance

Stats for Fantasy Congress:

  • $942 total revenue
  • $946 MRR
  • 7 new users
  • 6 churns

I spent the first couple weeks of February launching a referral program for Fantasy Congress. Now, educators can get $10 off for each person they refer. And those signing up with a referral code will get $50 off their first year.

Likely, this will be the last big initiative I complete for Fantasy Congress for a few months. I've begun to set my sights on other projects, and I'm adjusting to learning how to balance them.

Full recap

In the two weeks since its launch, no one has taken advantage of the new referral program for Fantasy Congress. But this isn't a huge surprise. We're entering the end of the school year and educator sign ups are beginning to taper off. On the bright side, the off-season gives me time to prepare for promoting the referral program in the fall.

I spent the rest of February working on Garden Auntie, which is part of my ongoing SEO experiment. Over the course of a week, I was able to add 50 new pages of content to the site. This brings the total number of pages with indexable content to about 150.

Traffic for Garden Auntie continues to march upward. And this month, I started to think seriously about how to implement monetization on the site.

Ads and affiliate links seem like the best options since my goal is to generate income as passively as possible through SEO. Garden Auntie doesn't get enough traffic to actually follow through with these yet, so maybe I'm getting ahead of myself. But I decided to dip my toe into a couple of affiliate programs this month anyways, just to get a better understanding of the space and how these programs work.

March plans

With my immediate plans for Fantasy Congress complete, I want to focus purely on SEO projects in March.

SEO takes awhile to grow, but its returns increase over time.  If I want to capitalize on SEO, I need to get content published and indexed sooner rather than later.

There's still quite a few changes I'd like to make to Garden Auntie. The initial launch of the site was sort of an MVP to see if the idea would even work. Now, I'd like to expand on my existing templates to give the site more comprehensive information, and overall, more value to readers. And as we enter spring, I've thought about sharing posts regarding my personal garden to make the website more "blog like". This probably won't help with SEO, but it might keep users on the website longer and decrease the bounce rate.

I also have ideas for other "programmatic" websites. Ideally I'd like to launch at least one more this month. Since Garden Auntie is already getting traffic, I'm torn between which to do first: launch a new site or improve an existing one.

And lastly, I'd like to publish at least one article for my personal blog (this site) focused on getting traffic from SEO, as well as clean the site up a bit to be more reader friendly.

My main goal is still to learn as much as I can about SEO. I've had some meager success with programmatic SEO so far, but there's probably a lot I can still learn from the traditional approach as well.