Survey Results 2014

In today’s post, I wanted to take a few minutes and share the results of the reader survey we ran a couple of weeks ago. We received over 75 responses, which is not too shabby. If you took a few minutes to take the survey, THANK YOU! Your opinions are important and will help shape the direction of this blog going forward.

Let’s start with our readers.

We have a very large number of male readers compared to most home improvement blogs at 58%. You also told me that 86% of you own your homes instead of renting. I probably should’ve asked you what your ages were, but that’s probably more relevant to outside marketers and sponsored posts, which is not a large part of our blog income strategy. Besides, if you like working on your house, who cares how old you are.

The next question was about your level of interest. Basically, are you a casual reader that simply enjoys seeing what we’re up to or are you reading with the intent of improving your home improvement skills. Here’s what you said.

In case you were wondering about that math, this is one of those questions where you were allowed to select both! Otherwise, I need to go back to grade school.

Now we get into our content. I wanted to know what sort of posts you enjoy reading and what posts you would like to see more often. Not surprisingly, you said Carpentry was your first pick, followed by General Home Improvement, Cabinet Building, Design (which is surprising), and Adding Home Value. I can tell you with some degree of confidence that this isn’t anything terribly different than what we’re already doing, so this post lineup shouldn’t change too much. I’m a bit surprised by the Design category getting some attention, so I’ll make sure I put more emphasis on those posts when we get to them.

The next big change to the site that I’ve been thinking about is a adding a forum where readers can post their own questions and projects. I know you all have projects of your own and by offering a place to talk about them I think we’ll all get a ton of value out of it. Since I knew everyone may not end up using the forum, I still wanted to gauge the general interest in the concept.

Here’s what you told me.

Um, yeah. I think this is probably a good idea. I’ll be working on adding the forum, just as soon as I finish up our home office.

Another aspect of our blog that I’ve been exploring is adding a purchasable product. If you’re a frequent reader of home improvement blogs, then this whole idea may sound strange and could potentially be a turn-off. However, there could be a large enough percentage of readers that are interested in some sort of ebook or online course that it would be worth the effort.

Here’s the situation. I could write 200 posts on the ins and outs of kitchen remodeling, home improvement, trim work, cabinets, built-ins, or whatever. I could write this blog for ten years and if you took the time to sift through all those posts, you may read everything you would ever want on those topics.

OR

I could write an ebook where I put together a few hundred pages of my thoughts on how to remodel your next kitchen or build your own kitchen cabinet. It would be in one package of text, one resource for you to hold onto. Being able to read posts is great. Being able to have a guide in your hands or on your tablet is valuable.

If you don’t like it. You don’t have to buy it. No problem.

Still. I wanted to be sure there was enough interest upfront before I started something. Around 2/3’s of you indicated that you’d be interested (the graph says 75%, but you get the idea).

Ok, cool. I’ll get started.

I’d also like to find out what topic you think would be worth developing into a product. Not surprisingly, Cabinet Construction was your first choice with Kitchen Renovation right behind it. A number of you also gave me some helpful suggested topics. Thanks for those! If I don’t incorporate them into a product, then you can be sure I’ll try to cover them in a future post.

The final question of the survey was an open invitation to write me a comment. What do you like? What do you hate? What needs to get better? Anything you wanted to say.

The most common response I got was regarding the look of the website. Either the images aren’t big enough or the layout is awkward. Some people have even emailed me to tell me they don’t think it looks good on a mobile device. While I was considering a refresh at some point down the road, your feedback has convinced me that I need to make those updates sooner rather than later.

I also need to post more often. I realize that once a week kind of comes across as lazy on my part. I’m going to make an effort to post twice a week, but I’m still going to approach each post as an opportunity to deliver some sort of value to you. If I don’t have anything worth saying, then I’m not going to hit publish. I just don’t want to waste your time.

There are a couple other side projects I’m developing that have been consuming some of my free time. I’m really looking forward to telling you about them when the time is right. That extra time investment has eaten up some of my post writing time. The biggest time consumer right now is the home office project. Once that’s done I’ll be able to breathe a sigh of relief.

Thanks for your help in making this a blog worth reading!

R,

John

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