June 2024 review

Let's sum up the month of June 2024.

I'm going to try and do a monthly recap to see the progress of the various projects and their impact. Think of it as a transparent log of what I'm trying to create with "Eventuallycoding". (Eventuallycoding being the umbrella name for all the projects, the youtube channel, the blogs, Hakanai and bloggrify for now).

Spoiler, it's the Youtube channel that's making the most progress of all.

But let's take a closer look.

You'll see a lot of numbers in this article. Of course, life isn't all about numbers. But that's how I work, I need to measure what I'm doing, measure my impact and set goals.
I'm very sensitive to gamification and it's a very objective way of measuring progress.

Bloggrify

Bloggrify is an open source project

June was a prolific month:

several new versions, including support for katex (mathematical formulas), mermaid (complex graphics) and some custom components
2 new templates, bringing the total to 4

Site traffic saw a slight increase in visits of +17% vs. May, with a total of 2.8k visits.

Most of this traffic comes from France. However, the rest of the traffic is fairly well diversified.

SEO is very inefficient. The only clicks coming from Google are from people typing in the keyword "bloggrify", so it's really direct traffic.

Traffic sources are more likely to come from Youtube, my own blog and Github.

There are also a few visits from devhunt and builtalightspeed.

Goals :

I've set myself the ambition of increasing traffic to 4k monthly visits by the end of the year.
I'd like to succeed in creating the beginnings of a community of users to make it a "Nuxtian" alternative to other behemoths of the genre (jekyll, hugo etc...).

Hakanai

Hakanai was launched in mid-May. Traffic increased in June by +20% to a peak of 793 visits.

If we look at the glass half-empty, it's indeed +20% but comparing a full month vs. only 15 days in May.

Most of my traffic comes from Youtube, Google and my blog.

There are also visitors from Product Hunt and Hacker News.

50% of visitors come from France, 10% from the US and 4% from Belgium. There's a real concern for diversification.

SEO remains weak but shows some positive signs. 23% of traffic comes from search engines.

There are also visitors starting to come from Jekyll or Hugo community forums, which is also a good sign.

Still, I can't call it a good start. It's still very slow and proves what I already knew: My big weakness is marketing.

Traffic is low, and so is sales.

Even if it's too little to celebrate, you have to see the glass as half full.

June represents 3 sales. That's 3x more than May. It's also 0 churn (customer departures).

Conversion increased by 216%.

And there's been little marketing action so far, so it's not catastrophic. Still, we'll have to move on to make it a better story.

Objectives:

The goal is to reach 2k monthly visits by the end of the year (tripling current traffic).

eventuallycoding.com and eventuallymaking.io

Let's talk about this blog now. There are two versions:

eventuallycoding.com, in French.
eventuallymaking.io in English (now on writizzy.com)

The blogs had 3.4k visits (including 2.7 for the French blog), i.e. -31% compared to May, but for only 2 articles, versus 4 published in May.

Most traffic comes from Google. The blog's SEO is very good, with over 65% of traffic coming from search engines.

Note that the share coming from Google has decreased from an average of 72% over the last six months to "only" 65% in June.

This is linked to the traffic coming from Youtube, the channel clearly having a positive influence on the blog.

It's also linked to the newsletter, which accounts for 1% of visits, thanks to Hakanai.

It may not sound like much, but it's steadily increasing. It's a long-term process.

(By the way, don't hesitate to subscribe to the newsletter ^^)

Goals:

My goal on the blog is to stay between 3.5 and 4k monthly visits.

Eventuallycoding Youtube channel

The Youtube channel is the project that has seen the most growth since the beginning of the year.

In June, there were 13.7k views, that's +29% compared to May.

Above all, it's +302% more views than the blog. This continues to validate the fact that many more people prefer this format than the written word, despite a blog that's been around for 20 years.

2 videos were released in June, versus 3 in May.

The channel has 2670 subscribers.

The channel can now be monetized. It wasn't really planned, but it could now generate income, which would allow me to invest in better video quality (editing, research, etc.).

I'm not going to hide the fact that it's fun to make, I've got lots of ideas to come, and the format is pretty cool to produce. There's real fun in making videos.

Objectives:

The channel's objective was to reach 500 subscribers by December 2024, so I've revised the objective upwards very significantly: 8,000 subscribers by December, with a ratio of x10 compared to the blog on the number of views.

conclusion

June was a very active month, with activity on all subjects. The channel continues to work well, which is a pleasant surprise, especially as it's an activity I enjoy.

July and August are going to be more difficult, as they're two months that are a little less active in general, and for my part I have to prepare for my departure to Japan, so I won't necessarily have time to tackle everything at once.

But I still hope to come up with a few surprises.