One year on…
Well it’s a year ago now since I started Fab Swingers, although it’s less than I year since the site launched. I thought it would be good to review progress.
Well, my initial target was 1,000,000 members in the first year — we’re actually finishing with 10,000 members. Now, I actually think that 10,000 members in a year is great and it makes us the largest free swingers site in the UK. Even better, half of the new members joined in the last few months so the sign-up rate has been accelerating.
The original target was of course based on getting some search engine coverage. So far we’ve only had decent search engine results for about 2 weeks; I’m confident that eventually Google will place us ahead of all the irrelevant/low traffic sites that are currently ahead of us (I believe in their algorithm!) so although it may take months I’m sure it will happen.
I also now understand that there is no way that we could have handled 1 million members in the first year anyway; our business processes and technical infrastructure would have failed. As I write this we’re still not quite there but at least we understand what needs to be done and are much closer to having the processes/infrastructure in place.
So what for the next year? If we simply maintained the present growth we would finish with 25,000 members. But I would like to see Fab Swingers finally get some search engine traffic and we’ve also got the affiliate program, increased word of mouth, newspaper advertising and leaflets at swingers clubs/fetish clubs/sex events. So on that basis I’m going to target 100,000 for the next 12 months.
The great thing about Fab Swingers though is that it is a profitable business with no external pressure so even if it takes much longer to meet these targets than planned then it really doesn’t matter.