| Facts and Figures on the SEO Clubs First 6 Months |
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| Tuesday, 15 April 2008 | |
Wow - its been six months since we launched our Joomla SEO Club. Back then I promised that one day, when enough time had passed to provide reliable data, we would post a detailed overview of our experience. Today, is that day.
Some BackgroundLast year when Joomla made the decision to encourage Joomla developers to move towards the GPL license we posted a lot about the topic. For those of you not up on the GPL, essentially it asks developers to move away from locking customers into products with licensing and encoding. Instead the aim is to make money from providing support, documentation and custom coding to the software's users. In short, software as a service rather than software as a product. Back then, I discussed the pros, cons and impact of a GPL business model. I also interviewed 5 people who were using the GPL: David Deutsch from AEC, Rob Clayburn from Fabrik, Andrew Eddie from the Joomla core team, Achim Fischer from Primezilla and Ryan Demmer from JCE. Those five people reflected my own thoughts. Between them they expressed enthusiasm, nervousness, optimism and pessimism. No-one had enough experience to know if it was possible for an individual developer or small webdesign team to pay the mortgage via a GPL business model.
About two months later, we decided to stop selling our Joomla SEO Book as a PDF download and change to a membership model where customers could also get consultation in our forum. We switched from selling a product to a service. Other SEO companies have made similar moves - SEOmoz before us, Aaron Wall and Brian Clark afterwards.
Thursday will be the six-month anniversary of our SEO Club. Did we make a wise decision?
Total Number of MembersMembership has grown at an steady pace. An organic growth rate is not to be sniffed at but nothing we've been able to do has created a significant growth spurt.
Plans Chosen by Registering People
Total Number of Unique VisitorsOur daily visitor numbers continue to grow...
But the rate of growth really hasn't changed compared to the 6 months before the club's launch:
Total Number of New VisitorsTheres been no change when it comes to unique vs. returning visitors:
Pages Per Visit
On average, visitors aren't browsing any more of the site than they did before:
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Wow - its been six months since we launched our Joomla SEO Club. Back then I promised that one day, when enough time had passed to provide reliable data, we would post a detailed overview of our experience. Today, is that day.





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and still is, but it's been fun.
) support staff and we see the difference in our customer experience.

It makes an interesting read.
I guess the key question is how do you intend increasing your 0.1% conversion rate Steve?