My Five Year Plan

It’s always good to have a plan. A short term plan. A medium term plan. A long term plan. Plans are what help us achieve and see out our goals. They are good things to have.

When I first started this site 7+ years ago, there certainly was no plan. It began as a mouthpiece to vent my various thoughts and frustrations with this industry. And it grew from there. Grew into something rather serious and much bigger than I thought it ever would.

Then, a few years ago, I started to get some advertisers, which meant I had to knuckle down and start turning this thing into something fit for what it was evolving into.

Elon Musk did this a few years ago when he started out with Tesla. He wrote an open blog post stating openly to the world what he wanted to achieve in his first ten years. It was his phase 1 plan for the company. This isn’t that. I am no Elon Musk, and this is just a website about windows and doors.

But I do have a plan. And I don’t mind sharing this plan. If it works, it will help me reach some of the goals I want to achieve for this site.

The plan

So, here it is in a few bullet points:

to reach one million page views per year by the end of 2021
to fill each advertising slot available
to grow the DGB subscriber list to at least 5000
to expand the number of writers/contributors
to become the most read fenestration sector online publication

They’re the main five I guess. There could be others, but those I think are the most pressing objectives at this point in time.

One million page views

Page views are one of the most fundamental stats websites are measured for in performance. It’s easy, the more the better. And in the seven years that this site has been going, the number of page views have exploded, with one year just falling short of 250k page views.

There has been the odd year which has seen a small dip in the number of page views per year. But generally the trend has been strongly upwards. However, that trend is going to need a turbo boost if I am to reach one million page views by the end of 2021.

I’m going to need to not only boost the amount of visitors to the site, but to increase the number of page views per visit too. Boosting traffic is generally the easier of the two, with increasing page views per visit tending to be a bit more difficult.

There are though a number of things I can do which will help me get there…

Grow subscribers to 5000

One of the best ways to get a boost to traffic is to increase the number of subscribers to DGB. This is an important target for me. I also want to stress one very important point.

Subscribers are people that sign up to a website because they want to. It means they’re engaged in that site’s content and are far more likely to read the site’s content on a regular basis. I won’t resort to using databases. They have a very low open rate, and an even lower link click rate.

However, I am proud of the fact that my open rate from DGB subscribers is over 16% higher than the industry average, according to MailChimp anyway! It means that people who signed up to DGB are actually opening their weekly emails on a weekly basis. Perhaps something that cannot be said for a lot of mass mailers that go out in this industry.

It means that if I can get to 5000 DGB subscribers, then there is going to be a large number of industry professionals opening links to my content every week. That will certainly help. If I’m honest, I would hope that in 5 years time I will have already reached that. I am hoping to reach 1000 by the end of this year. I have around 350 more to go. If I end up with more than 5000 by 2021 I will be very happy.

Fill each advertising slot

DGB makes a few quid now, which I’m naturally pleased about. Especially seen as though I never set out to make any money from it in the first place.

However I have a few life goals which I would like to tick off my list. I’m getting married in a couple of years for a start. That costs a fair chunk of money! We would also like to build our own house in the future too. There’s a list as long as my arm of places in the world we want to travel to. Again, not cheap.

But importantly, as DGB becomes bigger and bigger, the more readers it brings. This means there is some very effective advertising options to be had on here. I already have quite a few. But there are still at least 8 more slots left to fill. I may add more over the next five years, it depends on how the market progresses and if more niches open up.

If I reach one million page views per year, those ad slots are going to be snapped up quickly…I hope!

Add more content writers/contributors

I do love writing a fresh post every day. It may seem a lot to many of you, 365+ of my own posts per year, plus the paid-for content as well. I reckon as many as 500+ posts per year go up on DGB. And that’s a lot, probably more than any other fenestration site. I do it to make sure that traffic remains high, and that as many different industry issues and topics are brought up as regularly as possible.

I would however like to expand the number of people writing for this site to more than just me. I don’t consider it hard work, but I do believe that if I got one or two more people to write for DGB, then the content could become even more varied, and take on subjects from angles I would have never thought to take.

This may take money to make this happen. I can’t see anyone else giving up as much of their spare time to do this for free like I do. So it puts even more importance on me filling those ad slots!

I’ll be honest, I’m not holding out much hope on this one. And in fairness I won’t be too devastated if it doesn’t come good. The silver lining will be that I remain in total content control and I will be happy with the direction it’s going in.

Most read industry site

The end result from all of the above is to make DGB the most read UK fenestration website. I’ll need to reach more of the industry, and create better content for home owners to read as well, as their portion of traffic on DGB is rising as well.

I want industry people to come to DGB first when they want to read about this industry. It will not be easy, and other websites will not make it easy for me. Whether by honest means or less-than-honest means.

I will work hard at it though. I’ll continue to work hard on expanding DGB’s ever growing reach on social media. I’ll ensure that the content I create remains relevant and worth spending a few minutes reading every day. I’ll make sure I get more companies on board so I can publish their content as well as my own.

One million page views per year is a lot for a website that talks about windows and doors. But I’m determined to get there!