First 6 months

It’s now 6 months since I launched the site so I thought it would be good to review where we are. So here’s some positives:

1. The software platform is doing pretty well and the features are popular. The move to the dedicated server has really sorted out the speed problems. The chatroom is still a bit broken I can see the way forward to scale that to any size now.

2. The business model has worked, I’m currently in profit and I’m sure that revenues will scale faster than costs as the site grows.

3. The site has attracted about 3,000 email-verified members in its first 6 months which is prety good for a new site with no marketing budget. The sign-ups have accelerated dramatically but it’s below target.

When I first had the idea for the project I set myself a target of 1 million members in the first year. The big issue is that we are still not getting any traffic from Google (other than for seaches for “fab swingers”) and the original target was entirely based on getting a good share of the massive search engine traffic around swinging.

Everything I’ve read has said that a new site will take 6-9 months before it ranks on Google for competitive terms so hopefully in the next 3 months we will see traffic take off. In the meantime I’ll continue with my guerilla marketing and SEO.

I think that I will also now spend a bit of money on PPC advertising. I am now very comfortable that I can monetise my traffic so I think that I will make a profit but even I don’t I don’t really mind spending my profits on PPC because it will keep the site fresh for the members and will generate lots of content which will feed back to the search rankings.

On the personal side I’ve commited to working on another web project for probably about the next two years. This project will cover my living expenses quite nicely. So I’m quite happy for all of the Fab Swingers profits to be reinvested for the next couple of years which I think will take it to quite an exciting place.

I guess if I’m honest I think that the 1 million member target is not going to happen this year but I think it is quite possible to happen within 18 months, assuming we get some search engine coverage on Google!

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