Richeetech Is Officially 1 Year Old And This Is How Our 2018 Went Down…

I began Richeetech on January the 1st of 2018 with the vision of publishing interesting, viral tech content that Nigerian and African millennials would love, a haven away from the boring tech news we’re currently accustomed to.

Think of it like a Buzzfeed or OMGVoice, only this time, it’s tech and not general viral content. The closest resemblance to it is Misstechy (and even she lately has begun to join the boring crowd. No offence Tobi.).

Anyway, 2018 is over and I wanted to use this opportunity to recap on the year in review. I’ll be telling you guys about our successes and failures this past year as well as our plans for 2019.

Disclaimer: Please note that some of the links below are affiliate links and I will earn a commission if you purchase through those links at no cost to you. I have used all of the products listed below and recommend them because they are helpful and are companies that I trust.

Traffic

Richeetech brought in a total of 30,000+ visitors with pageviews of 56,000. Our average time on site was 1 minute 4 seconds while our bounce rate was good at 56%.

Of this 30k visitors, a little over 28,000 came directly to our site while 1,034 visitors came through search engines. I have our partnership deals with several international Domain registrars to thank for our massive direct visitors.

Engagements

We published a total of 101 posts in 2018. And while you may think this isn’t an impressive feat, remember that Richeetech publishes basically only evergreen content.

The fact that we don’t publish breaking tech news is reason for the number of articles. Plus when you combine blogging with keeping a full time job on the side, you pretty much start to see how little time one has to post tons of blog posts.

We have an average of 5,000 social shares per post so to get our total estimated shares for the entire year, multiplying that by our 100 posts put our social shares for the year at a little over 500k social shares, 70% of that from Facebook.

As for comments on posts, we got a total of 126 comments the entire year (if you want to leave out all the spam comments I had to flush down the toilet).

Earnings

Currently, Richeetech monetizes through sponsored content and most recently, AdSense ads. In total we earned approximately N165,000 predominantly from sponsored posts. And while our AdSense revenue is still growing, its nowhere close to being a stream of income just yet.

My lessons

Here’s what I learnt this past year while building this media tech company for the African millennial:

1. Keyword competition research:

I understood the importance of proper, in depth keyword competition research. Backlinks are great but I’ve seen sites pull in hundreds of thousands of search traffic from just a few hundred to thousands of backlinks.

How manage? Their keyword research was on point. The best tool to use for this is something called KWFinder.

2. AdSense

Its no use applying for an AdSense account if you don’t yet have traffic of at least 50,000 monthly visitors.

I see many newbie bloggers startup and are immediately hustling AdSense approval. I used to be that guy funny enough but in 2018 I took my time. In fact, I wouldn’t have applied for AdSense if It hadn’t been for that damned Google ad manager software I was trying to learn at work. This naturally brings me to my number 3 lesson learnt…

3. Blogging is not for ‘get rich quick’ people.

Except you have a ton of capital stashed somewhere to invest heavily in advertising (like Naij did when they started out), chances are you’re going to grow slowly. How slow or fast now depends on how much you know about SEO and other traffic generating strategies.

Blogging is not MMM. Blogging is not BabaIjebu.

This get rich quick thinking is the mentality behind that mindless drive for AdSense when your blog is just 30 days old with 5 posts you may or may not have copied and pasted.

If you’re not ready to stick to your blog over a long period of time and see it through, please go and just find a job. (or better still, go and steal a lady’s panties.).

It’s because I know how long it would take to turn a profit, talk more, make revenue that I added a side gig of sorts to the blogging business. I went into digital marketing. Revenue was easier to come buy. In fact, 90% of the 165k I made last year came from this side of the business. The idea was that the Digital marketing would fund the blog.

4. Diversify your traffic source

I see a lot of Nigerian bloggers over reliant on Search traffic and I cringe. If you think relying in Facebook traffic is volatile due to one algorithmic change or the other, apparently, you haven’t heard about the great SEO purge during the post Panda, Penguin and Hummingbird Google updates that tanked the SEO traffic of major players and wiped out their businesses over night.

I even saw first hand last year, a blog nosedive from 120k+ monthly visitors to 40k in 2 months after Google came knocking with a penalty.

Word for the wise? Diversify your traffic. Right now over 95% of Richeetech traffic is Direct and we plan to fix that this year. Throw in a few referral and social traffic in there.

Richeetech 2019 plans

1. Separate the companies.

First if all, the company will be split into two as originally founded. We’re going to keep the tech blog which you know very well to be located here as is and transplant the Digital marketing side of it elsewhere. I still haven’t figured out what to name it but you can offer your suggestions.

2. Change web hosting

I’m just going to put it out there – Nigerian web hosting companies are dead. Period. I’m switching from Whogohost to Bluehost  because i heard their services are excellent and they’re are currently doing a heavy price slash promo and selling their plans from just $2.75/month (down from a whole $8). In fact, I wrote a follow up article to this where I totally blasted Whogohost for the crappy service they gave me.

3. Facebook traffic

I talked about diversifying traffic sources earlier. This year we’re going to be paying for Facebook ads to drive social traffic to Richeetech.

4. Referral traffic

We’ll probably need to pay for sponsored posts on other tech sites to drive qualified traffic from their site to ours. I tried to do this without paying last year and it didn’t work.

Now your turn!

Do you have any opinions or questions about this post? Please feel free to comment below.

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