Update for the week ending on Friday, Aug 9, 2019

Is It Keto

I’m going to start paying a bit more attention to Is It Keto given that it’s my only project that grows and earns revenue.

• Analyzed my site stats to try and figure out why some of my pages rank highly on Google while others barely rank
• Posted analysis to /r/juststart for feedback
  • Takeaways
    • The best bang for my buck way to increase search rankings is to get backlinks from keto-adjacent blogs (e.g., fitness, parenting, nutrition)
      • I previously was trying to get links from other keto sites, who likely didn’t want to link to a competitor.
    • I should include more details in my title and meta tags to better match my target search queries
    • Pinterest has the potential to bring in as much traffic as Google
    • People think I’m dumb for posting financial details of my site on Reddit
    • Reddit I think has the highest ratio of condescension to useful information of any forum I post on
• Changed my title tag format
  • Before: “Metamucil - Is It Keto”
  • After: “Is Metamucil Keto? - Is It Keto”
  • Most of the queries I rank for are like “metamucil keto” or “is metamucil keto”, so I’m hoping that by structuring the titles to more closely mirror the search terms, I’ll rank higher.
• Joined Pinterest and tried to figure out Pinterest
  • Currently at 3 pins and 8 followers, some of whom appear to be actual humans
  • Temporarily had my account banned for following too many accounts (after like 150 follows, which IIRC was tolerated on Twitter)
• Joined Quora and posted some answers with links back to Is It Keto
  • Wrote a new article about Maple syrup to answer a user’s question
  • Doesn’t seem to have any effect yet
• Scouted blogs for opportunities to do a guest post
  • Messaged one, got no response
• Updated the sitemap so that food URLs have a <lastmod> field, which will hopefully encourage Google to re-index it soon after edits

What Got Done

• Set up automated database backups
• Posted a Feedbacker questionnaire to find out how well the landing page conveys the idea

mtlynch.io

• Almost done with new post, “The Dumbest Task I Ever Outsourced”
• Completed cover art with @LoLo_ology

Zestful

• Responded to an inbound inquiry from a customer interested in self-hosting Zestful
• Followed up with customer from last week who’s gone radio silent
• Did some training example curation in hopes of curing my Thursday night insomnia
  • Dropped 2.5k mislabeled training examples from the corpus
• Increased USDA matching coverage from 72.12% to 73.81%

Ketohub

• Fixed a minor bug where the thumbnail generator was failing to handle images in .webp format

Beekeeping

• Installed a pollen trap in one of my hives
• Wrote a spec for a custom logo that I can print on my bottles of honey

Misc

• Co-hosted the August Indie Hackers meetup with @dtq
• Attended my first Northampton Webdive meetup
• Installed a bike pump on my bike (after getting caught with a flat without one last week)
• Reattached a drainpipe that had fallen off my garage