Path to Design Updates - May

Unforseen circumstances and the road ahead.

If you've been following along you would have noticed that I missed writing an update for the month of April. Unfortunately, I had to put Path to Design on hold since we were having issues with our house. It's a long story that I don't want to get into, but let's just say we came across a cowboy builder that not only ruined our house, but took a lot of money from us.

Because of this, I had to divert all my energy to fixing his mistakes, meaning Path to Design had to be put on hold. Although I wasn't able to actively spend time on the project, I noticed that users were still accessing the site every day. Which was great to see! Readers were taking part in the quiz and even signing up to the newsletter. All the while, I had a hammer in my hand banging away.

Even though the site still had traffic, in order for Path to Design to be where I want it to be, it'll require me to be actively working on it daily. Thankfully, I can see the light at the end of the tunnel and it's looking like I'll be able to get my time back. Time that I can put back into Path to Design.

Blogs

Suprisingly, I've noticed that one of my evergreen blogs have started to gain traction. Although the bounce rate is significantly high, it's great to see that something I worked on a few months ago has started to pay off. It gets me thinking of continuing to target evergreen content that would be relevant to the site.

Automating the outreach process

In my previous post, I wrote about the idea of automating the outreach process. After experimenting with building my own outreach agent, I soon realised that this step required a human touch. Automating this process meant that I had to rely on an agent to decide who was a good lead. In my few attempts, I could tell that I had to spend more time training the agent then finding good leads myself. Perhaps, in the future I can spend more time on this. As for now, I will keep this step as a manual process.

Next steps

I need to continue reaching out to designers and ask them to submit their stories. This is something that I should be doing daily, every new designer that submits their story could be an influx of traffic and new readers to the site.

Previously, I mentioned the idea of increasing my social presence. Marketing is an important element that I cannot overlook. After reading Derek Sivers post about being considerate, it got me thinking that I need to start distributing Path to Design across the top channels. Instead of hoping for readers to come to me, I need to go out and share my posts across the internet.

Let's hope in my next update I would have been officially done with the house and have diverted all my attention back to Path to Design.