i write

In this series of indie hacking recaps I’ll give an overview of what I was able to contribute to my side hustles throughout the previous month and the impact that it has had on the websites. As of right now I have two projects live, a skin care aging tool and a token calculator for OpenAI API.

Skin Care Aging Tool & Resource Center

This project is the one I’m putting more effort into as I think there is a better opportunity to monetize it through a skincare newsletter and through affiliate sales when recommending skincare products in the associated blog content. If the site’s traffic grows enough I could also add some non-invasive ads.

For the month of December, I focused heavily on blog content adding 6 pieces of content. I want to target adding 1-2 posts to the blog each week in an effort to gain some organic traffic.

Key Stats:

• Blog Posts: 6 (+6 for the month)
• Email Signups: 0
• User Interactions: 88

For the 88 users that submitted to the tool, 0 of them signed up for the newsletter. Some quick research shows that newsletter signups are typically around 2% so I will let this ride for a little bit longer before looking into it further.

From a search perspective, I’ve been having issues with Bing Webmasters indexing my website. For some reason it’s looking at the http version of the site and excluding it from the index even though I’ve submitted a sitemap and single URL indexing with the https version. I’ll continue to battle with Bing so I can start diversifying my traffic sources. On the Google search side, I’m starting to gain some momentum as the month of December went on and I’d like to continue the growth moving into January.

Looking forward into January the key tasks I want to complete are: fix the Bing indexing issue and 4-6 new blog posts.

File Token Calculator for OpenAI

This site I don’t plan on building out long term as I really don’t have an interest in it. However it will give a good representation on how a single page website performs over time. You can already see Google may have axed it from it’s algorithm or maybe it was a holiday lull as I don’t see non-working professionals using this tool in their off hours.

Fortunately, this site indexed fine into Bing which is odd since I took the same steps on my other website. I think I may use this site as a banner / footer ads place holder for my other website in an effort to build some backlinks for it.

Indie Hacking New Year’s Resolution

In previous years, I’ve always set multiple goals for myself and never really followed through with any. I’m not sure if this year will be any different since I have a history of giving up, but this year I have a singular goal. That goal is to build a legitimate side hustle and dedicate at a minimum of 30-60 minutes a day towards it.

That project I’ve already decided on and will show up in next month’s recap.