Is It Keto continued its streak of growth, with a 72% jump in revenue to an all-time high of $389 for August. Given that Is It Keto is doing better than any of my other projects, I decided to stop ignoring it. I finally got a high-ranking domain to link to Is It Keto, but the experience soured me on guest posts. Zestful had its best month ever, earning $728 in revenue. At the start of each month, I declare what I’d like to accomplish. The article was a mostly-for-fun story about one of my early blunders with outsourcing. I like the way it came out, but it didn’t attract many readers. I find myself "chasing the high" in wanting another hit article, as none of my blog posts have garnered much of a response since, "My First Year as a Solo Developer," published 7 months ago. My next article will be about hiring a content writer, which I imagine will be fairly niche.

After that, I plan to write about how developers can improve their writing, and that may have broader appeal. Result: I abandoned this goal and focused instead on expanding Is It Keto. As I was writing my July retrospective, I questioned my decision to keep ignoring Is It Keto, given that it’s my only successful project. I ended up thinking that thought more and decided to postpone the new product in favor Supraketo for Ketosis.org of returning my focus to Is It Keto for a while. I’m still interested in pursuing the email tool idea, but I’ve deferred it to October at the earliest. Result: I’ve wrapped up the loose ends so it can run with minimal maintenance, but I still want to open source it. This took significantly longer than I expected. I underestimated how difficult it would be to implement CSRF mitigation given that What Got Done runs on a strange mix of Golang and Vue2, but that’s finally complete.

I also forgot how many little hacks I put in to facilitate development on my main machine, so it took some effort to get everything working again from a clean VM. Is It Keto continued to grow at a rapid rate. Amazon Affiliate earnings stayed flat, which is a bit worrying given that pageviews increased so rapidly, but Google AdSense bolstered revenues, as August was the first full month I ran AdSense ads. August was Zestful’s best month, though literally 99% of the revenue from a single customer who needed to bulk convert a huge dataset of ingredients, so I can’t expect similar revenue in the future. I recently discovered /r/juststart, a subreddit dedicated to affiliate revenue businesses. The challenge of taking advice from reddit is that it attracts both helpful experts and random lunatics who have no idea what they’re talking about, so it can be tricky for non-experts to figure out which is which.

I should focus on getting other sites to link to Is It Keto.- This is something I had heard before. I tried for a month to get links from other keto sites, but they weren’t interested. The reddit commenters suggested instead approaching non-keto sites that have some connection to health or lifestyle. Result: I got one new site to link to me (more on that below). Is It Keto should have dropdowns navigation menus so that it’s easier for users to browse different food categories.Result: I added dropdown menus to the navigation bar. I should promote Is It Keto on Pinterest.Result: I created a Pinterest page and added 14 pins, but it’s time-consuming to create the graphics, and my referrals from Pinterest remain at nearly zero. I need help from someone who understands Pinterest, Supraketo Official but I can’t afford a Pinterest consultant at the moment. I’ve known for a long time that Is It Keto would be much stronger if other sites linked to it.

I spent most of March unsuccessfully trying to get other keto blogs to link to me. In the /r/juststart thread, someone suggested approaching keto-adjacent sites like motherhood blogs or general fitness blogs and offering to write a post for them. This seemed sensible, Supraketo Official but I had a tough time approaching it. The well-known sites like Men’s Health probably wouldn’t be interested in guest posts from an unknown author. I needed to find sites that were big enough that they’d improve Is It Keto’s search ranking but small enough that they accept guest posts. But how do you find sites that are "middle-tier? With the assumption that local fitness bloggers might be more friendly to a nearby blogger, I used search terms like "fitness western massachusetts." One of the sites I found was the local blog for a gym chain called Fitness Together, with a 55/100 score from Ahrefs. Coincidentally, my sister had a contact there, so I reached out about writing a guest post for them.