What’s up? I’m Connor Gillivan. Your friendly EcomBalance and AccountsBalance CMO and Founder.
This is a content series that we release each month sharing insights, updates, and metrics on how EcomBalance is progressing.
We share the wins, the roadblocks, and the frustrations that we’re having as we scale EcomBalance towards our ultimate vision of helping 1,000+ companies within the first 3 years in business.
If you’re reading this series for the first time, EcomBalance officially launched in January of 2022 and we’ve been growing quickly.
If you’re interested, you can read about how we decided to start EcomBalance here: We interviewed 100+ business owners about bookkeeping and here’s what we found.
Also, if you’re interested in past month’s updates, check out the EcomBalance News section of our blog.
In this month’s January edition, we’ll cover the following…
(1) Slowing Down to Speed Up
(2) Improving Internal Procedures
(3) Our SEO marketing results
(4) 6 new clients
We view every month as an opportunity to learn and grow. We understand that to build a great business, it takes time, mistakes, and hurdles. These updates are a part of sharing that journey with you.
Thanks for being a part of what we’re building at EcomBalance. If there’s something else you’d like to see in these monthly updates, let us know and we’ll consider adding it.
Best,
Connor Gillivan
CMO, Co-founder
Overall Updates
It’s crazy to think that we’re almost halfway through February! Time is flying by.
Here are the key updates from January:
Update #1: We’re Slowing Down to Speed Up Later
Sometimes you need to slow down to reflect, optimize, and make changes so that you can keep growing faster in the future.
That’s exactly what we’ve been doing since the start of 2023.
We’re slowing down, assessing the current situation, and making improvements:
- How can we improve the client experience?
- How can we get a better understanding of our costs?
- How can we make sure our team is happy and low stress?
- How can we improve our systems today so they’ll handle our growth to 200+ clients?
We’re asking these questions and taking action steps to improve before we go on another growth run in 2023.
Update #2: We’re Improving Our Internal Processes
Your marketing and growth is only as strong as your internal processes.
Without the right systems and processes, your operations will never support your growth.
We’ve learned this lesson in the past and we’re taking time to really improve our processes:
- Our Clean Up and Catch Up processes
- Our Monthly Bookkeeping processes
- Our Client Communication standards
- Our time management
- Our overall organization as a company and team
We’re excited about the progress that we’re making with the team.
While we don’t love slowing down, it’s necessary so that we can take the next step without breaking everything.
Update #3: SEO Continues to Drive New Visitors and Clients
Our SEO efforts continue to drive new traffic, leads, and clients.
We’re on a mission to create high value content that really speaks to our ideal customers.
And we’re publishing 20+ articles every single month.
Here’s some key highlights that it’s bringing:
- 1,068 website visitors from Search (all time high)
- Search traffic converting into paying clients.
- We’re ranking in the top 50 results for 150+ keywords on Google.
- We’re reaching 50,000+ people each month through search result impressions.
- We’re ranking #1 and #2 for top keywords in the industry.
If you want to learn more about our SEO strategies, follow me on LinkedIn for daily SEO, marketing, and entrepreneurship tips.
Update #4: We Added 6 New Clients
Our goal for 2023 is to reach 200+ clients.
While continuing to provide a high level service to all of our clients.
We’re excited to welcome 6 new clients in January and we’re looking forward to more in the coming months.
If you know anyone that would be a good fit for EcomBalance or AccountsBalance, please let them know about us or make a direct email introduction to [email protected].
Team Growth
January was a stagnant month in terms of adding new team members.
We are working with our current team to make our operations as efficient as possible before we add more Bookkeepers to the team.
Here’s where our Org Chart continues to stand:
Client Growth
We added 6 new clients in November 2022.
Here are stats on how those 6 clients came to be through our lead pipeline:
| # of Visitors to Sign Up Page | 221 |
| # of New Software Sign Ups | 72 |
| # of New Clients Added | 6 |
| Conversion Rate on Software Sign Up | 8.33% |
| Conversion Rate on Sign Up Page Visitors | 2.71% |
| Conversion Rate on Total Traffic | 0.25% |
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Traffic Stats
Website traffic stayed consistent with overall traffic that we were seeing in November and December of 2022.
Below are all of the stats from our Google Analytics account for the month of January:
| Total Users | 2,361 |
| Pages/Session | 1.86 |
| Pageviews | 5,929 |
| Bounce Rate | 68.05% |
| Avg Session Duration | 1.35 |
| Direct | 886 (36.2%) |
| Search | 1068 (43.6%) – All Time High |
| Social | 237 (9.7%) |
| Referral | 255 (10.4%) |
| 1 (0.1%) |
Our current goal for website traffic is 3,000+ unique visitors per month. We’re working hard to make it happen in Q1 of 2023.
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SEO Stats
Our SEO stats saw another small jump in January. Below is data pulled from Moz.com.
| Domain Rating | 31 |
| Linking Domains | 234 |
| Inbound Links | 1,100 |
| Ranking Keywords | 117 |
Our Search Performance stats continued to stay the course. The data below is from Google Search Console and Ahrefs:
| Total clicks | 818 |
| Total Impressions | 52,000 |
| Average CTR | 1.6% |
| Average Position | 45.6 |
| Top Query 1 | ecombalance |
| Top Query 2 |
ecommerce bookkeeping
|
| Top Query 3 | ecommerce bookkeeping services |
| Top Query 4 | monthly finance meeting agenda |
| Top Query 5 | finance department meeting agenda |
| Ecommerce bookkeeping | #5 |
|
Ecommerce bookkeeping services
|
#1 |
| Ecommerce bookkeeper | #3 |
| Ecommerce accounting services | #17 |
| Catch up bookkeeping | #9 |
| Shopify bookkeeping | #19 |
| Amazon bookkeeping | #39 |
| Amazon bookkeeper | #28 |
| Ecommerce accountant | Not ranking |
| Shopify accountant | #56 |
| Amazon accountant | Not ranking |
| Virtual bookkeeping services | Not ranking |
| Remote bookkeeping services | #25 |
| Online bookkeeping services | Not ranking |
|
Bookkeeping services for small business
|
Not ranking |
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Content Marketing
We continue to publish 20+ new articles every month on the EcomBalance Blog.
Here’s the content that we published in January:
| Amazon Repricer Overview: The Fundamentals of Repricing, How It Works, and the Various Types of Repricers |
| Top 5 Amazon Marketing Strategies to Take Your Brand to the Next Level |
| 8 Ways to Protect E-commerce Transactions from Online Fraud |
| The Ultimate Guide to Using Bulk Operations for Weekly Amazon PPC Optimization |
| Partner Spotlight Interview: Upgrade Your SEO for Success with Damon Burton from SEO National |
| Partner Spotlight: Create a Great Exit Strategy and Let It Compound in Value Over Time with Mac Lackey from ExitDNA |
| What Is Accounts Receivable? Definition & Examples |
| What Is Accounts Payable? Definition & Examples |
| Amazon Seller Fees 2023 | What It Costs to Sell On Amazon |
| Shopify Fees 2023 | What Does It Cost to Sell on Shopify? |
| S Corp v C Corp | Definition, Comparison, & Examples |
| Quickbooks Online Pricing 2023 | What It Costs & Plan Comparisons |
| 7 Best Payroll Services for Online Businesses in 2023 |
| 15 Must Ask Interview Questions for Bookkeepers |
| 9 Trusted Tips to Finding a Bookkeeper in 2023 |
| What is an Owner Distribution? Definition and Examples |
| How EcomBalance Grew to 100 Clients and $50,000 MRR in 12 Months |
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Social Media Stats
Facebook and LinkedIn are our two main channels that we’re growing and utilizing to communicate with our audience. If you haven’t followed us yet, please give us a like and a follow!
Follow Us on LinkedIn & Like Us on Facebook
The following data is from Facebook and LinkedIn Analytics:
| Facebook – Total Page Likes | 501 |
| Facebook – New Page Likes | 29 |
| Facebook – Post Reach | 387 |
| Facebook – Post Engagement | 36 |
| LinkedIn – Impressions | 1457 |
| LinkedIn – Reactions | 41 |
| LinkedIn – Comments | 3 |
| LinkedIn – Shares | 11 |
| LinkedIn – Total Followers | 816 |
| LinkedIn – New Followers | 74 |
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Email Marketing Stats
Email marketing continued to be a growing channel for us at EcomBalance. Open rates stayed above 45% and we added 100+ new subscribers in the month again. The following data is from ActiveCampaign:
| # of subscribers | 1,656 |
| # of new subscribers | 100 |
| avg open rate | 45.38% |
| avg click rate | 2.02% |
| conversion rate on site traffic | 4.24% |
Want to be featured in one of our newsletters? Reach out to me at [email protected] and let’s have a chat! We feature one of our partners each week and are always looking to bring value-adding services and tools to our audience’s forefront.
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What’s Next?
Q1 is all about getting our operations in order so that we can continue growing at the pace that we were in 2022.
Short term slow down so we can grow further in the future.
Thank you for all of your support since we started EcomBalance and AccountsBalance. We publish these updates each month in an effort to be as transparent as possible and to help other businesses grow in similar ways.
If there’s anything that piqued your interest, reach out to me at [email protected] and let’s have a chat. Always happy to share marketing and growth hacks that are working for us.
If you’ve enjoyed this update and want to get them every month, subscribe to our newsletter and follow us on Facebook and LinkedIn.
