January 2023: SovSpot Platform Recap

Almost hit that 10k visits/month mark!

Welcome Avatar! This is our regular monthly platform update. For more details on the idea & platform roadmap, we recommend you read The Road to the SovSpot Mobility Platform if you haven’t already.

General overview

January has been a record month so far in terms of traffic (roughly 75% is organic traffic).

BowTiedMara @BowTiedMara

🚀🎉🥳

Ad revenue increased this month, and the online store is active, with Bitcoin transactions and Stripe creditcard payments integrated. We announced our partnership with BowTiedGlobe (who has been an advisor from the start for the mobility options & international tax options)

BowTiedMara @BowTiedMara

Also happy to announce that @BowTiedGlobe is now officially on the site as an advisor (which he has been from the start). More to follow soon 🚀

In combination we also launched Globe’s excellent country guides as products on the site, which are now available on the SovSpot shop and each of the individual country pages (three so far):

• Brazil

• Portugal

• Uruguay

We updated the home page with a new hero image, which was just an image swap but it does create a completely different look and feel (more inline with what SovSpot is supposed to communicate)

New home page hero, the unbeatable Cidade Maravilhosa of Rio de Janeiro.

Another big update was taking out the Q&A separate install. This is a typical case of killing your darlings, and I decided to ask poll the community first:

BowTiedMara @BowTiedMara

Debating to nuke the Q&A on SovSpot. So far, minimal visits and no interaction, and I don't have the time to populate it myself or with my team. Maybe if we reach Quora volume it would be worth it, but seems like people are more passive and will not ask a question on a forum.

At the start I thought the idea was great to start ranking on a bunch of questions etc, but it turns out to be much easier to just incorporate these as FAQs on each different blog post, versus waiting for users to create an account, and publish a question.

The days of Quora are over in that sense, unless it is on a platform like Quora or Reddit that does only this.

Also, populating it with “fake” questions and answers seemed like a lot of work, and not natural. So, in the end nuking it also solved multiple issues:

1. No more separate WP installs / user accounts having to be carried over

2. No more soft 404s generated by the Q&A theme for certain pages if a user wasn’t logged in

3. No more thin content / duplicate content since many of the questions only had 1 paragraph of text.

My suspicion is that nuking this also contributed to the rise in organic visits, besides the new content of course.

Attorney listing type update

Some progress on this front after the payment integrations:

1. Listing claiming functionality fully working

2. Paid plans integration working on staging

Seems I missed my hard deadline of Jan 31st! A bit disappointing, but a lot of progress on many fronts nonetheless.

Instead of launching the attorneys, we now have a full membership content option on staging, which will give access to Globe’s guides and more based on a monthly or yearly membership.

Platform Analytics - January 2022

Organic & all traffic in January

Unique page views: 11,084 (+160%)
Total sessions: 8,860 (+166%)
Total unique users: 7,978 (+163%)
Organic sessions: 6,481 (+194%)
Social users: 265 (+119%)
Substack sessions: 4 (+100%)
User accounts created: 14 (+180%)
Development/Software/Mkt costs: $199 (not including dev time, mainly linkbuilding)
Ad Revenue: $39.01 (+79%)
Product Revenue: $0.00 (-%)
Memberships: $0.00 (-%)
Listings: $0.00 (-%)

Will be interesting to see when the other revenue streams start picking up, but so far ad revenue has been consistently growing.

Impressions, Clicks, CTR and Average position in Google

Bing Crawl Metrics

Average position increased + more positions in top 10

Marketing Stack

As of this month, we are using the following marketing tools to track progress & create content:

• Google Analytics + Google Search Console

• Moz Pro

• Semrush

• Ahrefs

• Quillbot

• Rytr

• SEO Surfer

• Outscraper

Content created

This is an overview of all the content that has been created last month:

Articles:

• Hungary Digital Nomad Visa

• New E2 Visa Restrictions for CBI Citizens

• Paraguay Residency Changes 2023

• Malta Digital Nomad Visa

• Portugal Digital Nomad Visa

• Seychelles Digital Nomad Visa

• Romania Digital Nomad Visa

• Mexico Digital Nomad Visa

• Panama Digital Nomad Visa

• Cape Verde Digital Nomad Visa

• Sri Lanka Digital Nomad Visa

• Thailand Digital Nomad Visa

• Taiwan Digital Nomad Visa

• Argentina Digital Nomad Visa

• Croatia Digital Nomad Visa

Pages:

• https://www.sovspot.com/shop/

The digital nomad visas content cluster is almost done now. The next batch will be around the “Residency by Investment” cluster, which is one of the most competitive ones in this industry.

Future Rollout Stages

The upcoming rollout stages will be as follows:

• v3 - Exclusive member content

  • Introduction of member tiers (pro subscribers on this sub will automatically be on the highest member tier)

  • Additional roll out of country data (Digital nomad visa data for countries) - started with this overview here, but still need to integrate this on a per country basis

• v4 - CBD Attorneys (1000+)

• v5 - Immigration Attorney listings (30,000+ collected so far)

• v6 - Immigration Consultants, Professionals & Agencies (200+)

Comments are open, let me know what you think. Any input is welcome.

See you in the jungle, frens!