A couple of months ago I announced on Twitter that I was going to follow Postma’s recipe to build and grow a small business without an audience. Since I don’t have an audience, I have less than 450 followers on Twitter, it looked like a perfect choice for me. It’s almost 2 months since I launched the first of these 2 projects on PH, so it’s time to see what happened.

Data Internships

TLDR: I launched on 5 June with a few internships position in the Database. SEO didn’t take off, I made too many mistakes. Reddit likes it and I am sending a newsletter.

• SEO is not working and I think I need to change a couple of things in the copy, the page names and the keywords in general, to make it more similar to the way users look for jobs on the internet. I also need to add those Job Posting structured data that Google likes so much.
• Twitter posting also didn’t move the needle that much. People were interested but I get usually less than 200 impressions on the tweets where I place the link of datainternships.co. Twitter algorithm doesn’t like external links.
• On the positive side, I posted the site link on r/datascience and got a lot of attention last week. More than 150 users visited the website in one day. That community seems a lot more responsive to this type of content. I should probably write there more often in the future.
• The post on Reddit brought also a few subscribers to the newsletter. I sent the first issue to a bit more than 20 people today.

Stoic Quotes

TLDR: I launched it one month ago. SEO seems ok, Reddit loves it but cannot drive traffic on the site from there.

• Some attention from SEO. It looks like I have hit some nice long-tail keywords there, but there is competition. For a while, I was very low in the ranking but I made a couple of optimizations (added images and improved the site speed) and maybe I am seeing the results in the last couple of days. Still, no clicks, but the position for some keywords went from 40 to 20.
• I have started to post images with quotes on Reddit and some of those posts have been really appreciated. They were collecting something between 20 and 50 likes with 1.5k impressions in the last 48 hours. I have not placed any link to the site, because Reddit can be unforgiving and it’s hard to place a link on an image. I might just leave it like this and see what happens.

So, overall, SEO has not kicked in for my projects. I am probably doing many mistakes in the implementation of the SEO strategy. I have made mistakes in the copy, in the site content, and in the website performance. However, the keyword research was done right. I can see that people react to the content I have on various communities (Reddit above all, I love Reddit).

I surely will give it more time. In the meantime, I will try to automate what I can and try to use more Reddit as a Marketing channel. Maybe in the end, the websites will still be there but they will be part of a bigger strategy involving many channels. Who said I need to completely rely on SEO. It’s just another traffic channel after all.