Lenguajero Blog

I swear I was just writing the Month Two Report a couple of days ago. Where the heck did month three go?

Despite month three vanishing before my eyes, looking back at the Month Two Report and our notes from month three, I realize that quite a lot has happened this month. Here’s month three in review.

• Month three started with a big burst of publicity when Ben and Marina from Notes In Spanish decided to tell all their followers about us in their monthly newsletter. “Long-time listeners Natalie Gordon and August Flanagan have started an entire Spanish learning empire that could be a lot of use to you!” This led to our biggest day ever (both in traffic and revenue generation).

• Shortly after this great publicity the pirates attacked. Over the course of a couple of days spammers from Somalia and Senegal spent time creating accounts and manually sending spam messages to many of our users. It was an annoying couple of days having to deal with spam attacks as opposed to working on feature development. We were able to quickly implement some easy safeguards to prevent (or at least marginalize) similar attacks in the future.

• Site traffic increased 69% against month two’s traffic (which was a 61% increase against month one’s traffic).

• Our average daily ad revenue increased from $1.94 (previous month) to $2.95 (this month).

• We continued to receive positive publicity from the online language learning and travel communities.

http://elblogdelingles.blogspot.com/2009/10/hablar-ingles.html
http://globalmaverick.org/archives/467-interview-with-august-flanagan

• We built and launched a Question and Anwer Forum. Members can ask our community questions about learning Spanish or English, traveling, culture, or anything else related to our site. (Note: The forum is in an experimental stage right now. If it proves popular we will provide category listings, automatic email updates when people add a response to a question, voting for best answers, and more.)

• We redesigned the homepage for members who are signed in. (I love the new clean layout!)

• We added a Resources page to the website containing a list of links to our favorite Learn Spanish or Learn English resources.

• Natalie, who is awesome, hammered out innumberable bug fixes and feature improvements.

• Finally, on a personal note, we took a week off to travel to the Oaxacan coast with August’s parents. We found a beautiful, laid back beach and decided to get married on that beach with our friends and family in March, 2010.