I haven’t put much time into Snip this week due to a) having a shitload of client work to do, b) working on my BFL lead magnet (hopefully) site AngularOnRails.com, and c) having networking meetings and prospecting meetings for BFL.

Last week I was in a pretty dark place with Snip. I’m feeling better about it now. Not sure exactly why I was feeling so bad then or why I’m feeling better now. I guess everybody has occasional slumps.

One thing I did do with Snip this week was to improve the marketing site a little bit. It now looks like this:

The color of the theme now matches the color of my business cards. I’m also planning to put my logo in the site but I didn’t get to that in this round.

On the BFL side, I struck an agreement with my client that we’d work solidly through the end of October, which would put me in a pretty good place financially.

At one point in the past I had hired article writers to write a couple articles (two, exactly) for Snip. These articles seem to be bringing me a little bit of traffic so I decided to get the article-writing thing going again. (The only reason I ever stopped was because my income situation became uncertain.)

In the spirit of jumping around all over the place in this post, I feel like I should explain AngularOnRails.com. The reason I created that site is because I wanted to have a lead magnet for Ben Franklin Labs – a permanent marketing asset that would continually bring me leads without me having to actively “do marketing” all the time. Things like networking meetings require my active involvement, but if I have an authoritative website out there helping people 24/7 and I’m perceived as the internet’s go-to Angular/Rails guy, I will presumably get inquiries about my availability for such projects. That’s the hope. So far I did get featured on the front page of Hacker News with it (with my first post!) and so my hopes are high that the site will be popular. One thing there’s no question about is that the world needs it.

An unexpected benefit of AngularOnRails.com is that it shows me that I can attract substantial traffic in a short amount of time. It’s possible. It’s not me that’s the problem with attracting traffic, it’s the “me + beauty industry” combo, which is a lot weaker than the “me + software engineering” combo. So hopefully the long tail strategy I’m using with content creation will pan out for me, and then when I have more revenue I can afford to do things like drive traffic via trade magazine ads, mail campaigns, etc.

I also have some good suggestions from one of my mentors on how to improve my opt-in conversion rate, so I’ll be implementing that as well.