Since I launched Black Book Singles midway through 2008, the site has gradually increased in ad revenue to where I am earning about $300/month with virtually no effort. I have been distracted by working in the real world again at a full-time position where I had been working well over 40 hours/week, and as such, I have not had much free time to work on the site until recent months.

However, I ultimately decided to take a step back and put a lot more work into my website for three major reasons:

1. The fact that I am earning $300/month by doing nothing demonstrated to me that there is a lot of money-making potential.
2. There are a lot of ways I can improve the site to increase traffic while improving conversions — that is, getting visitors to sign up as users, and getting users to create profiles.
3. I’ve learned a lot over the past year on technical and professional fronts, and I’d like to make use of what I’ve learned.

In terms of improving the site, my primary goals in terms of improving visitor experience include (but is not limited to) the following.

1. Higher search engine placement. The prior version of Black Book Singles essentially had one landing page — the home page. By dynamically generating separate homepages for major cities, I hope to allow users a greater opportunity to find the site by searching for phrases like “free Philadelphia dating” or “Seattle singles”.
2. Utilizing a better geocoding database. My previous database was missing key locations, including Austin, the capital of Texas, which I didn’t even realize until I moved here. Also, because the database includes location that I never intend to use on my website, searching through it is more time-consuming than it should be. This slows down many page loads, hurting the end user experience.
3. Improved navigation. Navigating through the first version of Black Book Singles was very hands-on. With the exception of a few recent profile photos displayed on the home page, finding members required a minimum of manually providing a location name. To help make the site more user-friendly, my plan is to automatically look up profiles who are in the same location (determined by IP address as described in the prior point). If a user already created a profile, then the site will automatically use that location for searches. Users can still manually type a location name to find profiles in other areas, but it is an optional step that makes the site easier to navigate for those who would be turned away from a site that requires too much personal effort. Additionally, the dashboard displayed once logged in will provide an overview of what other users in the vicinity have done on the site recently (kind of like Facebook’s News Feed).
4. Administrator console. One of the problems with the first version of my website is that it was very difficult to manage. I never took the time to create a simple interface where I could control various aspects of the site, including the removal of forum spam and the deletion of non-human users. The new version of the site includes a preliminary effort at making these tasks much easier on me, and offer a good opportunity should I ever find myself paying someone to handle this bit of website overhead on my behalf.

Looking at the code behind Black Book Singles for the first time since launch made me realize how much I have learned in only a few months. I used the CakePHP framework, which I was learning in concurrency with developing the site. There are a lot of ways that I didn’t take advantage of the framework due to a lack of familiarity with it, and there are places in my code that can be considered workarounds that I have since been able to improve and optimize. Additionally, CakePHP has improved since I first started coding with it.

Since I will essentially be rebuilding certain pieces of the website from scratch, I decided to rebrand the service by purchasing a new logo along with a redesigned site layout. The logo has already been completed by The Logo Company for the low price of $150, which can be seen below.

In addition, I wanted to redesign the layout to give it a friendlier appearance, and make better use of available space. I originally designed the site for 800×600 pixel displays. However, the majority of web users are using a minimum of 1024×768 pixel displays today, which offers another 25% of space horizontally, as well as more content being visible before the fold. In terms of the general layout, I am not a graphics artist, and my original site design demonstrated that. It “worked” at best. Through eLance, I found a superb design team that provided me with Photoshop layouts for 5 pages, only costing me $750. An examples of the new layout can be seen below.

My supervisor at work challenged me to have my site generating $2,400/month in ad revenue by the end of the year. The challenge was originally set forth several months ago, and now that it is already November, I don’t anticipate that my site will reach these numbers by year end. The main reason I doubt my ability to reach these numbers in 2 months time is that I am relying on search engines to increase my traffic, and gaining traction in search engines takes time. Nonetheless, I think that integrating these changes will make this kind of income an attainable goal at some point in the near future.

I hope to update this blog again in the near future with some interesting (and positive) updates, but I welcome you to follow me on the online dating blog as well as my Twitter account @bbsingles for more frequent updates.