Things have been going a little better as far as allocating time toward Snip goes.

Last Friday I fired a 20 hr/wk consulting client for being disrespectful. What’s funny is that at first I thought, “Yes! I just freed up 20 hours a week!” but then I realized I have another client that I also need to do work for this week, and so I’m nearly as busy as I was last week. PLUS I just received a signed contract from one of my very most prized clients so far, and I can’t afford not to do a really good job with that one, so at least as over-committed as I was before if not more. But at least I’m putting away some money.

In 2015 I plan to subcontract more of my consulting work and keep my own billable hours down to a maximum of about 30, but hopefully usually more like 20. I now have one really good “base” client that’s 20 hours a week that extends into the indefinite future, so that allows me to be someone selective and patient when it comes to other client work.

As far as recent activity goes: on Monday I did a video interview with Neil Ducoff, CEO of Strategies consulting, and that was great. I had a few high-urgency feature request/bug fix type things to take care of, and I fixed one of those things last night (Tuesday). Tomorrow I have another video interview for the Snip blog.

Activity on Olark has been pretty crazy lately. On Thursday night some guy chatted with me and then signed up for a trial. On Saturday I had the same thing happen again, and then immediately after that another person chatted with me and started a trial. This morning I got an email saying yet another person signed up for a trial. I’ve been getting a lot more search traffic lately and I’m on the first page now for “hair salon software”, so maybe that’s why I’ve seen an uptick in activity.

Just anecdotally it feels like I’m at about the level of activity now that I was at in December 2013, right before I switched from sniphq.com to snipsalonsoftware.com and plunged myself down to the 4th of 5th page of search rankings after having reached first-page status for a few important terms. This January I of course don’t plan to switch domains again, so I can expect my search traffic to keep improving (especially since I’m doing more SEO activities now than then).