I thought I'd give some insights to my personal projects. After making an effort to update and add more projects, I've been getting a steady flow of traffic.
I think it's important for devs with web projects to know how well they are doing, what works, and what doesn't using traffic data.
New projects: 1
Updates: 1
- 🆕 Rock, Paper, Scissors Battle Simulator - Watch RPS battle it out and watch other variations play out as well!
- ➕ Meta Tag Generator 0.4 update - New Randomify Button.
Something I didn't expect is how my first two projects: Meta Tag Generator and Math Homework Generator (MHG) are my most successful projects. I haven't been able to build anything as successful yet. Then again, SEO and teaching math to my kids have been a passion for me. I studied SEO on my own because I wanted to help promote my religion, Tenrikyo using blogs and a wiki. Well at least be sure that if anyone was looking for information about Tenrikyo, they can find it through SEO.
Another unexpected result (maybe not surprising😅), was that the Math Homework Generator is very popular in Asian countries, especially Taiwan. People in Taiwan are sharing this app and I'm getting lots of views from there.
Traffic over the month
Only July 27th, I had a massive uptick in traffic from Facebook and I'm now realizing that my daughter was born that day. I wasn't even promoting my app, but I guess since my profile was getting a lot of traffic, perhaps the algorithms favored my posts.
I don't know what posts on Facebook linked to MHG, but it seems most of that traffic was from Taiwan. I'm starting to have faith in Facebook for promoting my apps. It feels impossible to really kick start a Facebook page (Kaimutechie). If anything, my personal profile is somewhat of a good source of traffic being that I have a lot of friends and I have been using Facebook almost since it came out.
In moments like this, I should try to capitalize on it. Perhaps I'll look into providing a Taiwanese language version of MHG.
Page Views
Over 2k in views for MGH, which is crazy. I've never seen anything like it. I might consider monetizing on this app. Since my daughters are back in school, I stopped giving them worksheets and working on the project. Apparently, this is proven useful to others. Currently, everything about it is free and open source.
Late in the month, I published Rock, Paper, Scissors Battle Simulator which was a fun project, which I updated last weekend. This is my attempt to appease the Twitter crowd and my tiny-code hobby, which seems to be a place that thrives on small entertaining projects that can be turned into videos.
Twitter is yet to be a big factor in gaining traffic. I think I just need to build something more impressive. There is the JS13K game jam coming next week, which I'm hoping to compete in. I'm still building up my game dev skills.
The Ofudesaki Browser is a Tenrikyo-based project, where users can quickly search, browse, and favorite the scriptures. I don't expect massive traffic given that the Tenrikyo English-speaking community is very small. But it's great to see traffic.
Traffic Sources
Facebook is a blackbox but apparently a popular post on Facebook for MHG went a little viral.
Twitter is giving steady traffic, so I guess that's pretty good. I hardly get likes and new followers, so I think I just need to produce more quality content. I'm a little annoyed by how some inane tweets get lots of attention, but that's just how it is. At the same time, I need to work on my quality too. Perhaps sarcasm and word play as well😁.
Users by Country & Languages
Again, just so much traffic from Taiwan and users that read/write Chinese. I'm a Japanese-American born and raised in Hawaii and I don't think I can effectively communicate with this audience. I would sure love feedback, I just don't know if they would approach me for it.
Operating System
I'm not a big fan of iOS and Apple products, but if my users use it, I'll support if needed. However, I'm glad to be just focused on web projects which does not require me to run xcode which requires the purchase of a macOS device. But it's interesting know the general make-up of my audience.
Conclusion
For a while, I felt like I wasn't really getting anywhere, but looking back at the stats, I'm relieved to find some progress, steady activity, and a bonus boost of virality. If there's anything I got out of this is to publish often. Get things out there on social media and then improve them when you get motivation. When it's out there, good products things spread on their own as you rest for another burst of productivity.
If you made it this far, thank you very much! It feels like I'm talking to the void, but I suppose that's how we all start.