dscienceinc(Extremely sorry for the delay in posting, I got super sick and was down for a while.)
Over the past 48 hours, I have been working on our website redesign. Understanding why you should do a website redesign is extremely important in creating a successful redesign. A redesign is a big endeavor and costly in either time and money.
We are redesigning our website because the overall functionality was not up to snuff with our current direction. When we were running a branding agency, our primary focus was to show the talent we had and our ability to generate results. Basically, our intent was to showcase awesome designs and case studies. Our sales at the time were all through face to face meetings. The website was just a way to showcase our professionalism.
Check out our site now before we change it www.dscience.co
Since we are moving out of client services such as running social media, and more into a business lifestyle blog our site needs an overhaul. First and foremost when designing a website you have to look at your buyer personas. Our users went from being CMO’s and CEO to bootstrapping millennial entrepreneurs.
The intent of the user and our new website is to put the content first. This also puts the user first, by not asking for a sale or opt-in right away. We decided to pick the Redwood theme from ThemeForest.
Particularly because the top slider can send users to different top blog articles. This function we found to be extremely friendly to the user. Secondary the small box’s below allows us to segment our traffic into different sales funnels.
This theme is also very light in code and we are determining that it will load quickly.
Our goal is to make a kick ass blog!
Knowing this, and also looking at our recent traffic sources we felt confident about this shift.
Our first month of working on this blog we went from an average of 400 unique hits a month to 1400+. Not a bad bump but still small fries. We have been spending this month as a testing phase. To see where the best traffic sources are coming from.
From a social standpoint, it is very clear that Pinterest is number 1. We have been getting awesome results with Pinterest advertising, drive clicks to our website for as low as 10 cents but averaging around 30 cents. Number 2 is actually Twitter and not Facebook even though the numbers contradict.
Twitter is easier for me to manage and handle, plus the quality of the traffic is higher overall. It simply just needs more attention.
From a guest blogging perspective, www.justcreative.com has a TON of high-quality traffic and we received a nice bump in opt-in’s. This is our number 1 guest blogging spot for anything in the branding niche. Anuncomplicatedlifeblog.com happened to be a backlink from a native post by the owner of the site. She found our article www.dscience.co/blog/how-to-grow-your-instagram-following from Pinterest and generated us a nice source of traffic.
Lastly, tut.com is a great source of traffic. Even though they do not appear on this graph the niche is extremely focused. We received a number of sales for a single guest post and the bonus being it was content we had already produced.
Live Streaming traffic is growing
Since being sick last week I spent a good amount of time live streaming and planning. I used the neat trick called couch mode for periscope and perused random channels. just got to periscope.tv/coachmode. Watching the steams has helped me understand how it will play into the overall growth of the blog. Let’s just say it will be playing a huge part. I have since been spending more time broadcasting and my live streaming audience is growing (up to 700 followers on Periscope, watch my replay here) The traffic source is small but I see huge potential in that audience and will be investing more time in it.
Final thoughts.
Today has been a head down get work done kind of day. I believe that sometimes we just need to close off from the rest of the world and execute on our business. I have been slowing planning things behind the scenes and will be explaining them more to my audience on periscope and here.
I Hope this has been helpful for anyone who is following my journey, something I have learned in all my years is this. Even when you think no one is reading your content, there are quite a few that do and you find out later. So just keep going.
Thanks everyone have an amazing Monday night, see you Tuesday.
P.S please share this with anyone you think would find this valuable.