EcomBalance Monthly Update – July 2022

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Hello and thanks for tuning in to another EcomBalance Monthly Update.

This is a content series that we’ll be running each month to share how EcomBalance is growing.

We’ll share the good, the bad, and the in between as we strive to grow to 1,000+ clients before the end of 2024.

For those of you that are tuning in for the first time, EcomBalance officially launched in January of 2022 and we’ve been growing quickly each month.

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.

In this month’s edition, we’ll cover the following…

(1) how our team has grown and shrank in July
(2) how we’ve set up our Org Chart with Team Leads and Bookkeeping Teams
(3) how we published 21 new pieces of content in July
(4) how our leads are converting to paying clients
(5) what we’re aiming towards in August

Every month is a stepping stone towards our long term goals of building an 8 figure bookkeeping and accounting business.

For the past 7 months, we’ve been figuring out how to run this business while spreading the EcomBalance brand throughout the eCommerce industry.

From talking with 500+ eCommerce business owners, we’re confident that there is real need for a monthly bookkeeping service that is reliable, on-time, communicative, and truly understands the eCommerce landscape.

Being entrepreneurs, we’re excited about what the future holds for EcomBalance and we’re working hard every single day to improve our internal systems and processes so that the client experience gets better each month as well.

We don’t want to be just another bookkeeping firm…we want to be one that clients truly enjoy working with and that they find value through.

We want our clients to understand their numbers at a different level so that it benefits their ability to grow faster, manage their cash flow, pay more profits, and eventually get acquired if that’s what they want.

Thanks for being a part of our mission. If there’s something else you’d like to see in these monthly updates, let us know and we’ll seriously consider adding it.

Best,

Connor Gillivan
CMO, Co-founder

Overall Updates

It feels like everyone and their brother went on vacation and holiday during July 🙂

While that may or may not be true, EcomBalance continued to move forward in major ways.

First, we doubled down on our commitment to SEO and content marketing. Being an SEO myself, I know the true value comes from SEO 6-12 months after you put in the consistent effort for 3-6 months.

Going forward, we’ll be producing 30+ new pieces of content per month targeting industry keywords in an effort to drive more organic search traffic to the website.

Second, we further bolstered our team by adding 2 new team members with killer experience running books for eCommerce businesses.

Third, we’ve been working internally to improve our Pricing process. We want to make it easier for business owners to get a custom pricing quote.

In August, we’ll be releasing a new Pricing process that should drastically decrease the friction to getting a pricing quote. Our goal is to make this experience better so that it’s easier for clients to get started working with us.

Fourth, we’ve continued to develop our internal systems and processes. As a company, we use ClickUp for managing all of our bookkeeping clients and in the past month, we’ve tapped into new features.

We’re time tracking for our clients to see how long it’s taking bookkeepers to complete books for our clients. And we’re using new dashboards to see Due Dates more clearly so that we create less stress for the team and we hit due dates earlier than what we share with clients. We want to overdeliver with our promises and make sure our clients are happy each month.

Team Growth

Here’s some key things that happened for the team in July:

(1) 2 New Hires

2 Full time Staff Bookkeepers: As we approached the end of July, we realized that it was time to add 2 more full time Staff Bookkeepers to the team. One came through a referral from 2 of our current team members and the other came through our Recruitment system. They both have experience working with eCommerce companies and they bring a wealth of knowledge and experience to the team. We’re excited to see them blossom and take on their first clients in August.

(2) The Org Chart Continues to Develop

If you read our June Monthly Update, you probably remember me talking about setting up our Org Chart and promoting our first Team Leaders within the company.

In the past month, we’ve been working closely with our 3 Team Leaders to teach them the ropes on how to be a great manager and leader for their team.

Today, the Org Chart has evolved and we have our Financial Controller with 3 Team Leads under her and each of those 3 Team Leads have 2 Staff Bookkeepers on their team.

Here’s what it looks like now:

(3) We’re Getting Time Back for our Financial Controller

The main goal with creating our Org Chart was to create more time for our Financial Controller so she could continue working on building the business and training the Team Leads.

We’re not 100% happy with the progress yet, but we’re making steps towards where we want it to be.

By the end of Q3, she should be in a great position where the Team Leads are running the majority of the team and she is there to support and make final reviews on clients before books are submitted on the 15th of each month.

Client Growth

We added 8 new clients in July 2022. We now have 55 total clients.

Here are stats on how those 8 clients came to be through our lead pipeline:

# of Visitors to Sign Up Page	290
# of New Software Sign Ups	56
# of Pricing Forms Viewed	110
# of Pricing Forms Started	71
# of Pricing Forms Filled	32
Pricing Form Completion Rate	45.10%
# of New Clients Added	8
Conversion Rate on Forms Filled	25.00%
Conversion Rate on Sign Up Page Visitors	2.76%
Conversion Rate on Total Traffic	0.54%

This month, we converted a much higher percentage of leads that filled out the Pricing form. Overall, we’re seeing 2.76% of users that visit the Sign Up page convert to paying clients and 0.54% of Total Traffic to the website.

If we can increase traffic by 2x and keep our conversion rates around a similar level, we should start to see more clients signing up each month.

Then it’s just a matter of making sure our team can handle the workload. It’s always a balance!

Traffic Stats

Website traffic stayed around the same level as June for July, but we saw an improvement in Pages/Session and Bounce Rate meaning that users are staying on the site for longer and browsing more content. Below are stats from our Google Analytics account for the month of June.

Total Users	1,482
Pages/Session	2.18
Pageviews	5,172
Bounce Rate	59.51%
Avg Session Duration	2:48
Direct	658 (42.4%)
Search	474 (30.5%)
Social	214 (13.8%)
Referral	175 (11.3%)
Email	28 (1.8%)

SEO Stats

Our SEO stats stayed similar as well in July. However, we did see an increase in Linking Domains from 69 up to 119. This is a result of our Partnership efforts to build high quality, reputable backlinks to the website. Below is data pulled from Moz.com.

Domain Rating	24
Linking Domains	119
Inbound Links	297
Ranking Keywords	48

Our Search Performance stats continued to increase. Towards the end of July, Google started ranking us for more keywords and our Total Impressions popped. They went from 24,900 in June to 35,700 in July. The data below is from Google Search Console:

Total clicks	471
Total Impressions	35,700
Average CTR	1.30%
Average Position	47.1
Top Query 1	ecombalance
Top Query 2	ecommerce bookkeeping
Top Query 3	ecommerce bookkeeping services
Top Query 4	ecommerce bookkeeper
Top Query 5	bookkeeping services

Content Marketing

July marked the first month that we went all in on our new Content Marketing strategy. As some of you may have seen in my LinkedIn and Facebook posts, we’re running a new SEO test I’m calling the Quality Quantity Effect.

The hypothesis is that we will see a significant increase in organic traffic within 6-9 months if we consistently publish 30+ new pieces of content targeted at industry keywords that have low competition and high monthly search volumes…without focusing on building any backlinks.

This month, we doubled down on content creation and published 21 new articles on the EcomBalance Blog.

Here’s the content that we published this month:

What Is a Profit and Loss Statement?

What Is a Chart of Accounts? Examples, How Tos, and Tips

What is a General Ledger? Definition and Examples

What is a Cash Flow Statement? How to Read It and Examples

What Is Double Entry Accounting and Bookkeeping?

What is the Accrual Accounting Method and When Should It Be Used?

Accrual vs Cash Basis Accounting

7 Traits to Look for In a Bookkeeping Service in 2022

30 Most Common Expenses for a Business in 2022

Partner Spotlight: Educating Individuals on the Value of a Business with Ryan Hutchins from Peak Business Valuation

Partner Spotlight: Growing Businesses in All Facets, Holistically, and for the Long-Term with Max Hertan from Megaphone Marketing

Partner Spotlight: Removing the Main Blocker for Brands to Expand on Amazon and Shopify with Nick Penev from hellotax

Partner Spotlight

3 Tips to Boost Social Media Marketing for Your Amazon Brand

The Top 5 Order Management Systems for Ecommerce Sellers in 2022 from Rachel Go

What Is A Fractional CFO? from Ben Donovan

EcomBalance Monthly Update – June 2022

How to Outsource Your Bookkeeping and Accounting Without Headaches

6 Traits of a Stellar Amazon Accountant and Bookkeeper

What Is the Cost of a Bookkeeper in 2022?

Social Media Stats

Facebook and LinkedIn continue to be our two channels that we’re focused on growing. In July, we saw an increase in the number of impressions from our posts and our Marketing Assistant has gotten into a smooth groove for scheduling content each day.

The following data is from Facebook and LinkedIn Analytics:

Facebook – Total Page Likes	351
Facebook – New Page Likes	76
Facebook – Post Reach	1064
Facebook – Post Engagement	94
LinkedIn – Impressions	2200
LinkedIn – Reactions	27
LinkedIn – Comments	5
LinkedIn – Shares	8
LinkedIn – Total Followers	319
LinkedIn – New Followers	72

Email Marketing Stats

Our email marketing continued to thrive in July. We added another record number of new subscribers to the email list and we’re quickly approaching 1,000 email subscribers. The following data is from ActiveCampaign: