Author Archives: lytstephen

SEO case study – HK Christians

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Who They Are

HK Christians (hkchristians.net) is a dating network for Christians in Hong Kong. It has been running since 2006.

Their business model is providing a platform for single christians to meet each other. They do so through an online dating platform, along with some in-person events every few months, and with revenue being membership subscriptions and event attendance fee.

They were doing pretty well with the events, drawing 50-80 people for smaller events, and 100+ people for their bigger events.

Their online web app takes subscription fee, but has had very few subscriptions over the years.

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Digital Marketing Basics

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Many business and startup owners I talked with, they know in this digital age, they want to get business online. They think online marketing (or digital marketing) will help their business, but not sure where to start.

Here I’m going to give an overview of the basics, hopefully achieving these goals:

  • allow you to understand if digital marketing will really help your business
  • allow you to decide if you want to study further and actually do some of these yourself
  • if you want to hire help to do digital marketing, allow you to understand what you are looking for

If you are business/startup owner and want to increase traffic, revenue, and profit for your business, please read on!

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Ask Stephen

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I believe digital marketing can benefit just about any business in this digital age, and I want to help other business and start-up owners learn more about it.

I will be publishing some videos and posts to share my knowledge, but I want to know what YOU want to learn about.

So, send me any question(s), anything related to digital marketing, including how to get more traffic online, SEO, google, social media, content marketing, etc.

Leave it in the comment below, or send it to me at lytstephen@gmail.com. I will do my best to answer everything, and make some posts/video on questions that are popular.

Quarterly review – 04-06/2016

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Time for the quarterly review of previous set goals, progress, and plan for next quarter.

Goals beginning of quarter:

  • Mobile apps and push notifications all finished, for both HK Christians and EC Referral (after doing one, the other will be breeze)
  • all web and mobile apps tracking and analytics setup for HK Christians, tracking all important user events, conversion rates, the works.
  • have ~HK$2k/mo worth of ads setup and running, tracking precisely the ROI for all ad channels
  • Have A/B testing setup and automated well, so my semi-technical part-time assistant can help me setup at least 1-2 A/B tests per week

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Started my first real SEO project!

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Now that my HKC project really started slowing down, I’m finally really digging into digital marketing, with first stop being SEO.

With my internet-microentrepreneur dream, I thought being decent to pretty good at  SEO is quite important. Now that I’ve digged into it a bit, ‘quite important’ is an understatement. For anyone who wants to be an internet entrepreneur, some basic keyword research training skills is a MUSTTTT!! One of the biggest realizations I have about SEO is, other people/businesses are pretty terrible at it! Which is why I say SEO skills is a must. Some very basic SEO skills like basic keywords research, chasing after the ‘right’ keywords, setting basic meta and html tags … can already make a huge difference.

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Finally finished moving (kind of)

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Most of the end of May, and half of June until now, pretty much most of my time was used to take care of moving apartment. I had moved quite numerous times back when studying in the U.S., but moving as a family unit is whole other story!

Schedule moving company, renovation at new place, dealing with landlords, packing, unpacking, etc…. more work than actual work itself! Now that I’ve moved, and finished all the ‘basic’ unpacking, yesterday was the first day I got some work in!

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Calculated field with Meteor and MongoDB

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My dating app has this function where I rank user based on an algorithm which takes their last login date, and some other ‘factors’.

I thought this was gonna be easy. Well, it would’ve been if I wanted to take the entire collection to the client, the use JS to calculate the field, sort, and display to user.

Problem is, I can’t load the entire collection. That’s thousands of users. I have to sort BEFORE I return the result. Which means I have to sort at the database level before I return the results, which was quite challenging.

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Payments with PayPal IPN and Meteor

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First of all, if you need to do payment with Meteor, I’d highly recommend using Stripe or Braintree. Their API is much simpler, better UX, everything … so why am I using PayPal?

Well Stripe is not in my country, and Braintree beta rejected our application because it’s a dating website!!!! *face palm*

Anyways, without much other choice, I went with the PayPal basic payment HTML form, submit to pay on their site, and return data with IPN (Instant Payment Notifications). It’s friggin stone-age technology but heck it still works.

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image drag and drop upload to Amazon S3 with Meteor

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Image upload is one of those pretty daunting things for beginner programmer (myself before I finish this). Luckily good folks that use meteor has already done the bulk of the work for us.

However, it’s still no simple feat to put it all together. I used the dropzone.js package for the drag-and-drop client-side image handling, then use CollectionFS to handle storing image record in database and upload to Amazon S3 as well.

There’s also a great package someone wrote to compress and correct orientation, saved my life! : ccorcos:clientside-image-manipulation.

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