July 2022: SovSpot monthly update
July 2022: SovSpot monthly update
V2 just launched
This is the first of our monthly platform update. For more details on the idea and the roadmap, we recommend you read The Road to the SovSpot Mobility Platform if you haven’t already.
What’s new? V2 just launched
It turned out to be a bit of a challenge taking care of our new born and trying to launch v2 (the membership / subscription part) of the SovSpot platform, so I switched to rolling out v3 (Q&A forum) instead.
As of today, this is now live:
The community Q&A platform is a place where anyone can ask questions around mobility assets, residency and citizenships to receive answers from the community. Most of the initial responses here will be managed by me and my team, in order to start ranking and create the community from scratch.
As you can see the header is totally dedicated to the Q&A part of the website, clicking on “Home” will take you back to the main page. The idea came from a mix of the eb5investors.com “Ask a Question” section, combined with some forums like the nomadgate community.
Registration requires less personal data than most of the existing options out there and posting a question is always free. Unless you want to pin the question at the top, then it’s $5 USTT for 7 days.
Technical details of this rollout
This sections is for those interested in the technical details. The idea is that it might help others that are working on development projects. If you’re not interested in the coding rabbit hole, we recommend you skip this section.
Two WP installs
This platform is a separate Wordpress install in a subfolder (/qa/), which comes with a whole set of problems that need to be solved. The reason for doing this is that I needed additional functionality similar to Quora that would be too much work to include in the existing theme.
I know this is far from ideal and not “pretty” versus having everything in 1 WP install, but the goal here is to push out mvps quickly, start ranking and if needed, consolidate or merge to different technologies afterwards once we are around the 100-200k/month visit mark.
Login options / sync
Now with a member based site like SovSpot.com is, you will run into an issue in terms of logged in users when you have a separate WP install that also works with user logins.
People are too lazy (and they should be) to create a profile twice, so the ideal solution is to have the logins sync on both installs through an API.
Luckily for me (I am as technical on APIs in the sense that I know how to connect payment gateways and connect multiple apps on Zapier, but that is about it), there is this neat plugin that does just that, called Share Logins.
Took me a while to find, but it’s a huge help. It syncs login / logged out status between multiple WP installs, so users only need to create a profile once and will be logged in automatically once they arrive at the other install.
There are still some tweaks to do here as I’ve been playing around with it (username must match exactly, otherwise it will fail even with the same email).
Platform Analytics - July 2022
Launch date: July 9th
Unique page views: 459
Total sessions: 226
Total unique users: 173
Organic sessions: 14
Social users: 101
Substack sessions: 14
User accounts created: 11
Development/Software costs: $307 (not including dev time)
Income: $0
Google is slow to index, which is normal. It will probably take around 3-6 months for organic traffic to start picking up. So far, these are the stats:
Bing has indexed a lot more, but it also is also a search engine used by less than 5% of the internet, so it’s not that relevant. That said, I do like Bing’s metrics better (and overall they’re more transparent about their indexing algorithm).
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
Jasper
Rytr
SEO Surfer
There were still spots available in our existing agency accounts, so the site was just added to those plans.
Content created
This is an overview of all the content that has been created last month:
Content will be the backbone of this site in order for it to be an authority site in this niche. The plan was to create 1 post per day, but since some of the articles are a bit more in depth we decided to focus on quality and research versus more output.
Bear in mind that the SEO optimization for the Q&A platform is not done yet, so still some tweaks to do here and there.
Future Rollout Stages
The upcoming rollout stages will be as follows:
v3 - Immigration Attorney listings (30,000+ collected so far)
v4 - Immigration Consultants, Professionals & Agencies (200+)
v5 - 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
Other remarks
As you can imagine, all this is taking up about 80% of my time, since I’m doing most of the coding myself. For data collection and content ideas / optimization, I do have my VA helping me. In terms of SEO optimization most of that comes back to me doing most of it.
As we scale, this will be outsourced to other team members. I don’t want to fall into the “my baby” trap, but having worked on multiple startups over the years next to my agency work it is clear to me now that full control from the start gives you more room for quick changes and pivots, and less discussions.
Another platform?
While working on SovSpot, there is another idea I started to pursue:
This has lower priority though, but initial setup is completed and now it’s a matter of populating the initial content on the site. This has lower priority though, and my main focus is still on the mobility platform.
One important thing to keep in mind is that I’m able to work on these startups thanks to my regular WiFi income through the digital agency work (SEO, Google Ads etc) and still manage a portfolio of clients with my team there. Some smaller content site startups also provide some ad revenue but that is negligible. This is why having a steady income stream is so important, it allows you to focus on the stuff you really want to work on, even if those will take time to generate revenue.
Comments are open, let me know what you think. Any input is welcome, also on the data side if you happen to see numbers / stats that are off.
Autist note: country inflation data is still 2021, and has not been updated yet. Additional article in the works about the Yacyreta hydro project, focusing on the history around it and it significance for power generation for Argentina, Paraguay and Brazil.