Category: Our Journey

DiscoveringCebu is growing! Having had big success with Dean’s profile in September, this month we tried boosting the blog post about extending a Philippines tourist visa in Cebu using Facebook Ads. You can see that from the first third of the month, where active users are consistently above 30. We spent about $10 and got thousands of views, but not much engagement, and not much through-clicks. That was not worth it, but, well, we tried. 🙂

To understand SEO better, we started exploring ahrefs, digged into Google search console and Analytics. We learnt about what you, our readers, are really searching for. A funny search phrase we never thought about: “how many calories does balut have.” And by improving Mimi’s article on Balut in this way, we could help you find the info you need faster.

Other articles improved, too: Habal-habal did particularly well, rising from the dark pits of the 5th page in search results to the first page on Google PH. The Airport article did well, too.

Luggage and the SM Travellers Lounge, our unexpected traffic drivers, keep bringing in happy visitors steadily.

On the content-side, we did not produce as much as we wanted. Only four blog posts—that’s not enough! That’s in part because we put in time to finally write more reviews on coworking spaces. It was so necessary and frankly embarrassing, because we started DiscoveringCebu to promote Cebu (with its coworking spaces) for online and remote workers. Well, the other reason we didn’t make enough progress is that we were simply busy with other parts of life—DiscoveringCebu is a profit-free side-project after all. Still, this makes it hard to reach our yearly goal of 4k visitors per month. (Such a nice number! We’ll get there!) 

Another thing we started to do is reach out to other pages to get links to our content. We also started linking more to other sites with good content. As we learnt about SEO and reflected on our goal, we realized we really need to promote every good piece of content about Cebu’s coworking space there is. That’s why we also started sharing such posts on Facebook.

One accomplishment this stands out, because we hope it will be SUPER USEFUL for remote workers: A map of all coworking spaces in Cebu! We’ve been wanting to do it for a long time. Finally, Rose found out how to do Google Custom Maps.  Super!

All in all we learnt that content marketing takes time, but when you’re methodically playing the long game it can yield good results. That’s heart-warming (char!), because it means a side-project such as this has a chance—over many, many months. Go DiscoveringCebu!

For the next month, we plan to blog more again, and to further improve old articles. We’ll also have a review for every coworking space in Cebu. (Unless life gets in the way hehe.) Two content areas we want to explore are renting/real estate in Cebu and maps. Both seem to have decent search demands.

Here is the total number of monthly active users for October:

0
(goal for December 2019: 4000. Still missing: 3295

How do sessions and page views look like?

We started this month with less than 10 daily active users per day. The trend goes up, yey! Thank you!

Noteworthy:

• We published 4 blog post for this month.
• We posted 23 times on IG, and the two best performing post were Vegan treats at Juiceria Juice Bar from Kitskitchenn and the map of all coworking spaces in Cebu.
•  Facebook page likes 161.

Plans for November:

Every month, we’ll share our visitor numbers, and any experiments we did, and how they turned out.

Why?

That’s basically the same question as…

Why are we doing DiscoveringCebu.com?

We started DiscoveringCebu.com, because it’s needed. For example, too many of our friends said: It’s so hard for vegetarians, there is only like one vegetarian restaurant in Cebu! And … it’s simply not true! Cebu can be an awesome place—if you know where to find it’s goodies. It’s true: If you don’t, then they are hard to find. And that gap is what we want to fill with DiscoveringCebu.com.

The second reason is: we want to learn. We want to build up our skills in content marketing, in SEO, in content managing and in writing. DiscoveringCebu.com is about learning and sharing that learning, so you can learn, too.

Finally—when we get good at it and DiscoveringCebu.com is useful to a lot of pople, we think it’s only fair that we get appreciated. Yes, that means earning money for our efforts.

So why the monthly reports?

The idea comes from sites such as RemoteOK and SmartPassiveIncome, both of which share (or did) how their business is doing. Obviously those guys are crazily successful and we’re nowhere near that, but we love this spirit of openness, so we’ll share our journey. (The guy behind SmartPassiveIncome is half Filipino btw!)

And again, it’s about learning. By sharing our journey, we think we might help and inspire others, like you, to start your own journey. To believe in yourself a bit more. To hopefully do much better than us.

Finally, money. We think, as we learn and succeed, the reports will be useful for potential advertisers or someone who want to collaborate to see how we’re doing openly—it builds trust.

So here we go.

The goal for 2019

Without a goal, it’s hard to know if you’re succeeding. We’ve no income yet, and not enough traffic to get any, so we’ll focus on website traffic for now. Our mid-term goal:

We will reach 4000 daily active users in December 2019.

At the moment we’re at ~300. Woah … is that a doable goal?? Well … we’ve no idea! Let’s find out. It’s going to be fun either way! 🙂

Let’s look at how we’ve been doing in August:

August 2019

We’ve no income that we could share, so for this year we’ll focus on website statistics.

Here is the total number of monthly active users for August:

0 (goal for December 2019: 4000. Still missing: 3650)

 

How do sessions and page views look like?

We started this month with less than 10 daily active users per day. The trend shows upwards:

Mention worthy:

• We found a great content writer to work with: Mimi from Leyte. You probably already enjoyed some of her writing, for example about benefits of coworking spaces!
• The spike around Aug 20 comes from our article on coworking space opening hours on Ninoy Aquino Day.
• The spike at the end comes from ads. We experimented with boosting two posts (National Heros Day and Habal2 101 on Facebook).

Summary:

12 Articles was published for the month of August.

Is this useful? Please share!

Do you think these monthly success reports are useful? If so, please share this post. 🙂

How can we improve it? Let us know on FB or per mail to hello@discoveringcebu.com