Transparency Report of October 2022

Overview

This is the 42nd monthly report for Print My Blog (PMB) WordPress plugin, documenting my journey to be fairly compensated for my time and reach 10,000 active installs.

💰 $7,018.49/$36,435.28 (fairly compensated for time)

🖥5,????/10,000 active installs (on-par with other print button plugins)

What Happened This Month

Downloads

I was previously tracking active install growth here, but that was removed unilaterally at the end of September 2022.

Highest spikes yet after some releases. So I’m left guessing if that’s because there are more users. Feeling jaded that the active installs growth chart was removed.

Mailing List Stats

Stats from my MailChimp mailing list.

About 100 new subscribers in October again, like most months.

Website Visits

Stats from my site’s Koko analytics (don’t need no Google Analytics, thank you!)

Total visitors down a little, but pageviews up a little. I suppose that means fewer casual readers, more folks browsing around the site.

Freemius Stats

Freemius gathers other stats about sales and sites using the plugin.

Sales about half of last month’s. There was an extra $50 donation so it’s slightly not so bad. But this seems to be about average of the last couple years.

I think this means there have been 101 new sites but 90 uninstalls, so probably just a net increase of 11 sites. I just sent a message off to Freemius support to get clarification on this.

Finances and More Plugin Stats

The Details

Most of my work this last month centered around releasing, documenting, announcing, demo’ing, and promoting a new design. (There were plenty of minor bugfixes and support offered via email and WordPress.org, but none of that’s been too noteworthy.)

“Haller Tabloid” Design Released

The big feature this month was a new design called “Haller Tabloid”, named after Craig Haller who suggested and helped develop it.

The first two pages of a sample project using the “Haller Tabloid” design.

I also took the time to make a blog post announcing the new design, documented its features in the user manual, and made a video showing how to use it to create a print and online newspaper.

A tutorial using Haller Tabloid, showing how to create a print and online newspaper.

The gist of it is this though: this design has a look that’s pretty typical of small print newspapers or tabloids. Some features include:

prevalent front page with a big title and optional sidebar call-outs
multi-column layout where wide and full-page images can span multiple columns
duplex top margin that repeats the papers name, issue number, and date

@RealNealDeal on Twitter said “Reminds me of the fanzines in the 80’s and 90’s”, which I’ll take as a compliment.

I’m excited to see what people make with it, or what other ideas it spawns. So if you’re using it, or have suggestions for it, please get in touch.

Thinking Out Loud

Will Do More Content Marketing

I want to write more tutorials (e.g., how to publish a blog to Amazon). I feel like PMB needs more exposure. Very often I release new features that take quite a lot of time but don’t really visibly translate into new users.

In contrast, getting a good post out seems to generate a good deal new views (like 10 times more page views for a couple days) which more-or-less translate into more inquiries into the software and more sales.

Notice the two big spikes in page visitors, corresponding to new blog posts were released and announced via my email list and wpmail.me.

What’s Next?

Probably mostly more posts, and a few small features (like optionally showing sub-headings in the table of contents). The big feature is rewriting Quick Print to use Pro Print under the hood because Quick Print has quite a lot more support issues and fewer features. But as with most big projects, it’s a bit harder to get started on it because I haven’t totally figured out how I want it to work.

If there’s any feature or compatibility you’d like to see in PMB, please contact me as usual.