AppSumo
We've had a trickle of more sales on AppSumo, still with no cancellations, but no reviews. We have asked people for reviews but haven't had any replies. We still haven't appeared on their home page or in their emails...
Because Twitter have started charging $42,000 per month for their API access (a bit outside our budget!), we have had to discontinue our Twitter services, so have removed mention of them from our listing.
Without telling us, AppSumo had moved our advert to the 'Lead Generation' category (which has several pages of offers), so we manually moved it back to the 'Email Marketing' category.
We started the month with 71 followers and are now at 76 – that's an increase of 7%. Using Publer's 'Recycle' function (combined with Spintax format), we have continued to add new posts that get repeated on a weekly/monthly basis.
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Discontinued our Products for Twitter Outreach
In March we added products for Twitter outreach. Because Twitter now charge $42,000/month for access to their API, we have had to discontinue our products. They are on the shelf, ready to be made public again if the Twitter API becomes more affordable.
Twitter do still allow some calls to their API for free, so we will continue to use our tools ourselves, as we have been getting engagement (and some sales) via this method.
Email Outreach
We have discontinued cold emailing (at 600 emails per day to a targeted audience), as it simply wasn't working for us. Open rates were high (over 85%) but engagement was low.
The issue may have been that we were targeting the wrong people or that our messages were not clear enough. Either way, it was taking up a lot of our time and costing £100/month, for no return; so we have stopped this for now so we can concentrate on other things.
SEO
We have used tools to identify areas where we can improve our SEO – and have updated meta data, titles, headings, etc. as a result. This is work in progress!
Blogs, Newsletters and Podcasts
Wrote a blog post and landing page to promote our free plan which is great for startups and small businesses on a budget
Wrote 7 blog posts based on keywords we are trying to rank for in search engines.
/meeting Redirect
Created a redirect from https://okzest.com/meeting (easy to remember) to our Calendly link https://calendly.com/okzest/30min
Email Configuration
Added SPF and DMARC values to the okzest.com DNS. We had already added these to the DNS's we use for cold emailing but hadn't added them to our main domain.
Added monitoring of email blacklisting to https://hetrixtools.com/ which we already use to monitor our website uptime.
Cleaned Our DNS Records
Deleted some DNS records that were no longer required.
Added notes to all the records – documentation is important!
Fixed High CPU Issue
One of our customers has created 80+ personalised images! That's great but caused an issue when they loaded their dashboard as that's quite resource expensive on our server. It caused the CPU on our server to run at 100% for a few minutes.
As a temporary measure, we have added paging (10 images per page) to the user dashboards. We will improve this soon, possibly by loading all images 'below the fold' in the background.