Early 2018 Hidden Dominion Update Article

It’s been awhile since my last status check update for the Hidden Dominion. So I wanted to give a brief article to talk about some recent changes and how things are progressing.

Hidden Dominion Principle Changes/Updates

1) Two of my articles (50 Reasons Cali Sucks & Differences Between AK Variants) have absolutely exploded. Most of the activity stemmed from Twitter/Facebook and has brought both of them to the front page of search engine results. Those two articles pretty much single-handedly boost my website visitors by 200 per day. If that doesn’t show you the importance of search engine optimization and controversial article appeal, I don’t know what else would. Big thanks to everyone who has shared them.

2) I added in a new social media easy-share called Social Warfare. Sadly, it can’t collect any previous shares on social media, so most of them are pretty empty, but going forward I think it will be a pretty interesting tool to see which articles everyone enjoys.

3) I noticed an uptick in the number of people using the search function at the bottom right footer. So I updated that to include the ability to filter and find specifically relevant searches and optimized it for speed. Previously no one used it so I didn’t really change it from the base version (which was terrible), but now that even just a few readers may use it I wanted to make sure it was function-able.

4) Newsletter is still seeing solid growth. Pretty stable growth over the previous months, usually 5-20 sign-ups a month. New newsletter design is still in use and seems to be a solid option as it has practically eliminated my “spam” rate and has made my click rate much more stable as well.

5) Added a “Reviews” section to the top of the floating header, which directly links to all of my product review articles. This one is relatively new so I don’t have adequate data on it yet, but in the next update I’ll post some data in regard to if it was a successful idea.

6) I’m considering changing the comments section to a more sustainable format (IE: Approval only). Right now, moderating comments is getting a tad ridiculous. I don’t want to do this though, as that’s counter-productive to the original idea of this website. Instead, I have implemented spam-fighting systems and auto-delete for certain keywords that generally relate to spam, product plugs, or just losers in general. Hopefully, it fixes the problem.

7) Brand new mobile version of the website, now with fewer nuisances and easier readability.

8) My Amazon affiliate click rates are now finally going up. While conversion is still low, I’m just happy I’m getting clicks. It’s a promising trend and one that I didn’t fully expect to see this early. I don’t know how long I will keep it, but it’s helping to pay the bills for now while I have little money to put toward this website.

9) Since I have centralized my social media platforms it has given me a lot more time to focus on this website instead of constantly updating social media. That’s the biggest blessing I could ask for because social media is cancerous for the soul.

10) I have an E-book deal coming out soon with a fellow blogger. He’s going to let me pass the E-book onto my newsletter subscribers for free. It’s a really interesting book and I’m super happy to be able to share it.

Toward the Future

For the next month, article postings will be low. I’m ridiculously busy with my real life commitments, so articles will continue to only be about once a week until things settle down mid-May.

Hopefully, I’ll keep up with the newsletter. But there may be a missed week in there at some point. If so, my apologies to anyone that looks forward to it.

Luckily, after this month winds down, I’ll have a lot more free for the foreseeable future. Job changes and everything else aside, It looks like smooth sailing coming soon. Which means I’ll be able to start focusing significantly more time writing articles and doing data research about how to improve The Hidden Dominion.

New HD related merch are still in the beginning stages and will probably be available starting late 2018. Our current ones are still available here.

As always, any thoughts/comments/ideas about the website please send to my email located here.