Conference HQ - August 2019

04/09/2019

This article is the first update on Conference HQ since I launched it. I will briefly describe what I did in August and what I want to achieve in September. I will also share the numbers for August.

What I did

Unfortunately August was a busy month at work so I didn't get as much done as I would have liked. The good news is that I've seen steady usage without much marketing work.

At the end of July the site had around 100 conferences. In the beginning of August I focused on adding more.

In the middle of the month I switched focus to adding a new feature. The feature I've been working on is searching and filtering. I think this is an important feature that will drastically make the site more useful. Unfortunately I didn't finish it as work responsibilities picked up towards the end of the month.

Lastly I've been writing an article about using Airtable as a backend. But as with the search and filter feature I didn't get the chance to finish and publish the article before August was over.

Stats

Visitors

  • Pageviews: 2190
  • Unique Visitors: 780

SEO

  • Impressions: 1009
  • Clicks: 14
  • CTR: 1.3%
  • Average position: 33.9
  • Top Ranking: 5

Conferences

New conferences: 76

I've started gaining rankings in Google which is exciting. I haven't gotten many backlinks to the site so I'm a little surprised to see that. I suspect it's because most of the keywords has low competition.

The page view and visitor numbers look good. I do however suspect some of it is spam bots and crawlers. I haven't gotten much traffic from Google and I can see in my analytics that most of the traffic is direct. Still encouraging to see some traffic though.

Goals for September

Features

My primary focus for September is to release the search feature. I suspect it's around 40% done. The good news is that I've figured out what criteria users should be able to filter for. I've mostly figured out the design as well. That means I can focus on the implementation.

Marketing

For now I want to focus on writing content about Conference HQ. In the beginning that will revolve around the technical aspects of the site.

The plan is to publish it on my blog as well as dev.to and Medium .

In September I plan to launch two articles. In the first post I will talk about how I used Airtable as a backend for the site. In the second article I want to talk about the implementation of the search feature.

Lastly I want to continue adding conferences. It can be tedious work at times but it's important to make the site more useful. And there is added time pressure as most conferences I have on the site now will occur in the following months. That means the site will have less content if I don't keep adding new conferences. My hope is that I can add 70 new conference in September which will result in 250 conference in my database.