Hi, this is Grace. Each month, I talk about what I tried and stumbled upon as a creator. I share exciting findings and honest learning along the way.
A few new subscribers found this newsletter from all kinds of sources. Welcome! I’m always amazed at how the internet connects us.
For those who came across my teaser on Twitter last Friday, dug through the links, and landed on this newsletter, you’ve made it. I hope the content is helpful to you.
New Book Release
I recently published my new book - Dynamic Trio: Building Web Applications with React, Next.js & Tailwind
I’m flattered to receive a lot of interest from the initial launches. For some of you who replied to my emails, sincerely thank you!
Amazon and Leanpub have been the primary publishers for my books, consistently providing steady distribution. Lately, after some research, I found Apple Books accounts for roughly 10% of the global ebook market (source). I'm experimenting with it right now.
SEO Learnings
Do you know there is an SEO Twitter? I learned a lot from them. This is the tweet thread I find myself always going back to, to optimize my content:
I mentioned in Issue #5 that I have been working on a secret niche website. It was my guinea pig to learn about SEO.
Last month, many things happened to this website -
I wrote an article that went viral on Reddit. This article helped the page earn a spot at #4 on the first page of SERP.
I enabled ads on the website and started earning.
I also did some adjustments to experiment -
I disabled ads to see whether this could help accelerate indexing on Google.
I removed all “noindex“ tags to see whether this would accelerate indexing.
I reworked some of my indexed articles based on the tweet thread I mentioned above, to see whether this would improve rankings.
SEO is a very long game. It may take some time before I can see the results of the adjustments I have made.
My Next Shiny Small Bet
In my view, long-term focus on thing is way overrated. I believe if you design your projects self-serving enough, you don’t need to focus on one thing all the time. When I don’t focus on the old ones, they can still operate on autopilot. This is why I called my project folder on Google Drive “Next One”. 😉 It is always the next one.
Yes, I have been brewing my new small bet - a job board, SolarJobHQ.com
You might recall that, last year I wrote an article about job boards - Is Running A Job Board Really Worth it? It was a sketch for running a job board, which runs some P&L for this business, based on what I learned from Peter Askew (One of my favorite follows - he is knowledgeable and fun. He’s also very kind and has helped me a lot).
Initially, I wanted to build a job board for data scientists and machine learning engineers, as I mentioned in Issue #1.
But I didn’t pursue it, for a number of reasons:
I don’t really like this niche, i.e. it’s not my DNA.
In 2022, tech was facing layoffs and ML folks were the main targets, so weak demand.
Absolutely my pet peeves: I don’t like to pay for recurring subscriptions to do something I can quickly do by myself. 🤣 The existing job board solutions were nice but not flexible, and expensive. (But I have seen successful job boards using templates. So please ignore this!)
I will reveal in later newsletters why I decided to pursue this niche.
I built an MVP of this job board (I just checked, and the initial commit was April 19, 2023), and launched immediately to let SEO mature. Over time, I added features as needed. Most of the shipping decisions are driven by SEO.
Thanks to Next.js + Vercel (I mentioned in my book Dynamic Trio), I was able to launch it in such a short time.
Medium
I published one article in the past month, mainly to answer questions that my readers had in another essay “Optimizing The 4% Rule” -
On a side but surprising note, Medium gave me a blue check for Verified Book Author (for free). 🙏
Life
Lately, I started to notice the main benefit of not working a corporate job:
I now have the mental bandwidth to really listen to what my children say about their life and struggles. In the past, my mind was already full of my stresses and challenges in corporate life and left no room for them.
My kids are worthy of my attention.
That’s all for this issue! If you have any questions, let me know by replying to this email. Until next time.✌️
P.S.
I wrote a significant portion of this newsletter last Friday. Now I feel privileged to send this out today. 😭
On Saturday, we were supposed to go to Allen Premium Outlet, to that H&M store to pick up a few shorts for the summer. But I needed a new pair of sunglasses, so we went to Walmart instead. After getting home, we heard about the mass shooting. Our Walmart receipt showed we checked out at 2:40 PM. The shooter outside the H&M opened fire around 2:50 PM.
We dodged it, but 8 people did not. My heart is truly breaking for all the victims and their families. I could not even imagine the pain. 💔
I love this country, but please pray and heal America.
I’m sorry to end this newsletter with such a heavy note. This issue might have been in draft forever.
😔
Hey Grace!
I love your small bets newsletter!
Apparently, me and my brother Alex, who is a talented data scientist, have started running a data science job board in June 2023. It is called datajob.io (https://www.datajob.io/). We currently focus on data science jobs in Germany at modern tech companies, that offer relocation support, visa sponsorship and require only English language. Apart from DS background, we are immigrants ourselves, hence the reasons for the niche choice.
I have written several articles on the specifics of life and work topics in Germany, but now that I am reviewing the SEO thread you have shared, I think I need to come back to them and do some revising.
I would be super if you could share your thoughts on the niche choice, current SEO settings (all of the meta data is available in the inspector 👀 🙂) and maybe recommendations on how to further improve the growth of the product. I do have doubts on the niche to be honest, looking at the free of charge key words section on AhRefs.
Thank you,
Dima
PS I have built out the site using Webflow and a little bit of custom code. I cannot yet code well enough myself and use the help of no-code to compensate for poor engineering hard skills 🙂