February Wrap-Up + March Sneak Peek

Hello, Patrons of all levels, shapes, sizes, and colors!

It has been another incredibly eventful month at CK thanks in large part to your support and I want to recap where things stand.

First I'll do it in a series of easy-to-swallow bullet points. Then, for those of you who love to sweat the details, I'll recap everything in a long-form essay.

Hero we go!

February Wrap-Up:

• The Patreon campaign grew 12% and hit the $66/month pledge goal!
• CK's Mobile-friendly redesign deployed!
• 8 new comic guides launched to Crushing Comics Club!
• 3 comic guides made available to the public!
• Added plugins to create CK member logins for Crushing Comics Club
• Return of New Collected Editions Releases posts
• Deployed money-saving improvements to link internationalization
• Revealed many upcoming guides on the DC master page
• Debuted a song by my favorite local band on the blog today!
• Dyed my hair purple (again)
• I've been to the gym at least once a week!

Wow. I have more to say about that below, but first - a sneak peek at March!

March Sneak Peak:

• Deliver the $66 pledge goal: revised and expanded edition of the Guide to Marvel Omnibuses!
• 5+ new comic guides planned for launch to Crushing Comics Club (more on my choices tomorrow)
• "Patrons' Choice" poll to pick a new guide
• 5 comic guides will be made available to the public
• Release of CK member logins to the Pledgeonauts along w/new perks
• Return of video content now that my gear is repaired and my hair is purple again ;)
• Hopefully going to the gym twice a week!

That might not be quite the blockbuster line-up of February, but it's still going to be a memorable month in CK's history.

Now, on to a more detailed look at where things stand and where they're headed in March!

Q1 Goal Completed: Mobile-Friendly Redesign!

I've already spoken at length about the redesign, but here's a new fact: we're now 10 days into the new design and CK's traffic has increased day-over-day nine out of ten of those days.

I couldn't quite believe that when I saw it, just moments ago. I've been doing some other promotion in that period, including the public launch of the first Batman guide. Yet, that's not more than I was doing November during the launch of this Patreon campaign, when I was bombarding every social network with new content every day. 

To check the seemingly amazing performance of the redesign, I compared February's traffic to November on the same days of the week.

The data spoke for itself: February's performance was neck-and-neck with November up until the redesign - then February broke away to the tune of a 26% improvement in sessions and page views.

Excuse my language, but: HOLY FUCK.

A period with three new blog posts and two new guides blew away the final two weeks of my insane "Blog of Tomorrow" campaign with 30+ new posts of content all because of a mobile-friendly redesign.

While the biggest boost is from organic search traffic (as predicted; Google is already improving my page rank), returning users are viewing more pages per session (a great sign of health).

There's no way to know how long this positive bounce will hold up, so I want to take full advantage of it by creating amazing content while Google is smiling down upon me.

Q1 Goal Completed: Guides Launched!

Speaking of content, another Q1 goal completed way ahead of schedule was launching more than 10 new comic guides and, again, the data has a lot to say.

• 8 guides launched in Feb (50hrs)
• 11 guides launched so far in 2017 (92hrs)
• 17 guides launched since the start of this campaign (210hrs)
• 17 guides launched in the prior 12 months

That means I have launched as many guides in the past four months as I did in the previous 12, which was already the 12-month period with the most launches of any period since the first day of "The Definitive Guide to X-Men" back in 2010. CK's guide content has grown by nearly 25% since I joined Patreon.

I'd really love it if I could get a new guide out to the public every week for this entire year, which would be a minimum of another 38 guides launched (and likely even more, so I have a cushion of guides queued up for release to the public). 

I'm not setting that weekly pace as an official goal, because it's a bit lofty. Yet, it's just a hair ahead of the pace I've set in the last few months. Plus, it would give readers a reason to check back every week for more new comics content.

Now that I'm beginning to build a lead in new guides, I added even more teases of what's to come on the DC master page.

Member Management Plugins + New Pledgeonaut Perks

With all of this guide-adding action, I realized that posting individual passwords for each new guide wasn't yielding a great experience for Patrons. 

To solve that problem, I rolled out a WP plugin called Members that manages access to posts based on the role of a logged in user. That means seeing exclusive content is as easy as logging in to CK when you visit. 

Despite some hiccups with the invitation emails getting lost, so far it seems to be working well. I'll be widening the availabilty of CK logins to the Pledgeonaut Patron level in March as those folks get in on a few pieces of exclusive content. 

The current thinking is that some ancillary guides will be permanently Patrons-Only, both as a thank you and as a enticement to future pledges. 

Also, since Pledgeonauts get to participate in the monthly poll for future guides, it only seems fair to let them have early access to the guide they pick!

New Releases Posts

On the public-facing front, the last two weeks have featured a pair of incredibly comprehensive New Collected Edition Releases posts . 

This is a kind of post I originally planned to introduce along with a higher pledge goal. Yet, just like with the redesign, I discovered there was a compelling reason to do it sooner than later.

These release posts used to be an intense time-suck. Once, one took me eight hours to compile, and that's not too far above the average. For all that effort, their traffic and affiliate links performance isn't as strong as a comic guide. 

Why spend so much time on disposable release posts when I could complete at least half of an evergreen guide in the same amount of time?!

The answer, as with many things in life, comes with economies of scale. 

As CK is comprised of increasingly more comic guides, it can take increasingly long to keep them all updated with new releases. However, the process for updating guides with new releases is only a hair different than the process of collating all new releases, especially now that I have DC guides as well as Marvel. 

As I keep adding guides, having a regular new releases posts actually simplifies keeping everything updated. Plus, knowing I plan to do the posts every week lets me chunk the effort behind them into batches. 

The first two took five hours and three hours, respectively - the next one should be even shorter. Plus, I now have new releases posts built out through November so that I only need to spend a few hours each week to ready the newest edition for posting. 

Helping me keep guides updated isn't the only benefit of these posts. They also fuel my advance solicits posts , which are monstrous performers when it comes to traffic. Over time, the release posts will have positive organic search benefits - plus, some folks might come to rely on CK to see what's out each week!

Today's song debut and non-comics content

Today's post is a first for CK: I'm debuting a new song from my favorite band in Philadelphia, along with a brief interview. 

It seriously might be my favorite post of all time. It makes me happy on so many different levels. 

Not only because I love this band and I love that they entrusted me with writing about their new song, but because this is the sort of stuff I really, really, really want to be doing with CK on the editorial side - journalistic posts about news and critique, but also with a helping of my personality.

I have another post like this one coming in April as I preview a new indie comic Anthology headed to Kickstarter. I'm hoping I can find a way to do at least one of these exclusives every month going forward.

With my recent focus on comics content, it's easy to lose sight of the fact that CK wasn't about comics for over a decade of its life and was never primarily about comics until the past year. If you look back at November's "blog of tomorrow" exercise, I don't really want it to be primarily about comics - music and books ought to be a big part of it, too! 

I'm hoping that once I'm through with this release posts exercise I can turn a few hours a week back to more regular blogging rather than just pounding out comic guides non-stop.

One big element of that is getting back to playing music. At the end of November I sent my recording gear out for repairs, and though it was back by January 1st I still need to do some set-up and tweaking before I'm really for live-streams again.

Also, I needed to re-dye my hair purple for the full-on rocker effect.

While I'm clearly going to miss my 90-posts-this-quarter goal (because I'm certainly not doing another 90-post month in March!), I think I can still close the quarter by slightly ramping up editorial content again to solidify what CK's regular content can and should be.

Hitting the $66 goal

Finally, I want to talk about the biggest news of February - the campaign grew 12% and hit the $66/month pledge goal!

This is fantastic and I am incredibly thankful both for my new patrons (hello!) and those of you who are sticking around for another month (you rock). 

The $66 a month goal is the half-way mark to what I consider to be "at-scale CK," a version of my blog that has all the tools it needs to be a success. It's also just $18 shy of paying for all of CK's critical "the plane will fall out of the sky without this stuff" costs for hosting, registration, and plugins.

Your support is more important to me than ever before due to major changes announced by Amazon last week. I won't bore you with the details, but the short version is that 100% of my affiliate earnings today will be just 56% tomorrow. due to changes in their fee schedule. Amazon made the announcement with less than a week of notice.

Yikes. This change has hit Amazon's tens (if not hundreds) of thousands of affiliate sites across the internet all at once and it's resulting in many sites cutting staff or even shutting down. I feel terrible about the situation they've been thrust into.

For me, it means the careful budget I set up for my time as a full-time parent is askew. If it wasn't for you all paying for CK's many expenses, I would be looking seriously at this part of my budget for potentially slashing considering CK's costs have grown while I've been at home. 

It would be so depressing for me to have to give up CK's growth after all the work of the past year that I cannot even convey it to you. 

Thanks to you, I don't have to convey it. CK's bells-and-whistles are now over 50% subsidized by you, and even if I had to strip some services away you're paying for 83% of what keeps this plane in the air. Plus, it was with your support that I added link internationalization, which is helping to further soften the blow of this 44% hit to my affiliate income.

Seriously: you are a lifesaver and you came along at just the right time. If I had been a month or two later in launching this campaign, or if you held off a month or two in pledging, I'd be having a very different conversation about CK's future right now.

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That's all I've got for now! If you made it to the bottom of this missive, I'd love to know what details are the most surprising or exciting to you.

Excelsior!