I deleted my Facebook account back in 2019 or so, and have not regretted the decision at all. The feed was always full of crap I didn’t care about, I never posted and any connection with my “friends” wasn’t actually meaningful.

But, in order to try to push BTTR along, I set up a new account last week and created a page for BTTR.

Because I had no interest in using Facebook for personal reasons, I did the bare minimum to fill it. But I spent a bit of time trying to build out the BTTR page, and connected it to an auto-posting plugin to share my content automatically.

Within a week, I was temporarily disabled. Apparently I didn’t “follow the community guidelines”, though I can’t see how - I used my real name at least. I didn’t provide a huge amount of extra info voluntarily, but I supplied everything I was required to accurately.

In order to unlock the account, I had to provide my mobile number. So I did, begrudgingly.

Things seemed to be travelling ok until today, when my account was disabled again. Again, no reason given aside from a general “community guidelines” excuse.

This time I had to upload a selfie, which I did. Apparently though, that’s not enough. The account has been permanently disabled, and I have no idea why. There is apparently no recourse to appeal again, and not even a way to find out what was wrong in the first place.

Now realistically, I couldn’t give a shit about my personal account. But it also means I’ve lost the BTTR account too. And that’s frustrating.

So from the bottom of my heart, fuck you Facebook. You’re a blight on the world, and I hate you.

There’s this one PR agency with a few big tech clients that I’ve been chasing to get on the media lists since the start of the year. Different people, different clients, but I am yet to receive a release without having to chase them.

They promise they have added my details (again, different people, multiple times), but I still don’t receive the information.

I can’t decide if they just don’t want to send me the info, or if they are just truly and utterly incompetent.

If it was the former, I’d understand. BTTR is a young brand without significant traffic or reach yet. They could just straight up say that they’ll add me when I hit a certain size, and I’d respect that (wouldn’t like it though…)

But ultimately, I think it’s the latter. It’s just pure incompetence.

I had my first big setback on BTTR over the weekend. Amazon decided to close my Associates account.

There were a couple of reasons given. The first was that my links weren’t clear, which I disagree with and am not sure what they meant.

The second was that they saw purchases from family, friends and employees, which isn’t allowed. That one was true, I admit… but I still feel cancelling the entire account over $10 worth of toothpaste (about 50c in affiliate revenue) was probably overkill.

It stressed me out all day Saturday. I tried to appeal but got a generic response that didn’t offer any help whatsoever, which stressed me out some more.

In the end I slept on it, and woke up feeling better It’s still a massive pain, but I can manage.

Because my account was closed, I lost about $90 in revenue. It’s not that much in the scheme of things. I can reapply (or so I was told), so I’ve done that, but I need to swap over links. It would be easy if I had API access, but that was closed off as well, and I have to wait until I get it reapproved before doing it that way.

But it’s also highlighted some errors in my setup. I had manually synced my product database with Amazon for most products, which means things are broken when I switched off Amazon. If I hadn’t done that manual connection, things would have been okay.

So fixing that is my day today.

It also forced me to prioritise other partners like ebay.

So hopefully what was a stressful weekend will turn out to be better for me in the long run.

And so, it is that at 5pm on Wednesday afternoon I pick myself up, dust myself off, and try to remember the week that was.

School holidays really take it out of me. Even though the kids typically take care of themselves for the most part, finding motivation for anything is tough.

But, all things considered, last week was a pretty good week. I got out to an event (for the first time in probably 5 years). I knocked over a few reviews. It was a short week thanks to Easter, too.

Traffic was good (not a record but close), revenue was weak (can’t wait for that to change) but my traffic from Search is definitely on the way up. I achieved the 600 and 700 clicks achievements last week.

Content highlights from last week

• Updated the best Bluetooth headphones guide – It’s still Sony
• Updated the best mobile phones guide – It’s still Samsung
• Updated the best Android phones guide – Pixel 6a sits on top right now.
• Updated the best earphones guide – It’s also still Sony
• I reviewed the Belkin Soundform Immerse earbuds. They won’t make the best list any time soon.
• Updated the best cheap phones guide – Looks like this is one of my best pages so far from a performance standpoint.
• Updated the best gaming headphones guide – I really need a new pair of these.
• Updated best Bluetooth speakers – Not a huge amount of movement in this category either.
• Spotted this epic deal on the Galaxy Z Flip 4 on Amazon. It’s over now, but it was epic.

By the end of last week I was just about cooked, I have to be honest with you. I ended up spending Friday playing video games to reset my brain a bit.

It worked, though. This week has been much better for me, despite some illness floating around the house.

A couple of noteworthy developments over the past week are that I created a LinkedIn page for BTTR. I am currently the only follower. I haven’t pushed it to my LinkedIn because I want to add more content before I do, so if I know you on LinkedIn, forgive the future spam message.

The other is that last week I hit the 200 clicks from Search milestone in Search console. I was so happy I shared it on LinkedIn.

I checked this morning, and I’m currently at 396 clicks in the past 28 days. I really wanted to share the “400 clicks” achievement here to highlight the rapid growth of search performance, but it obviously wasn’t meant to be.

Last week’s content highlights

Last week, I was focused on the categories highlighted as opportunities through the previous week’s keyword research.

• Like the best dehumidifiers. Did you know you can use them to dry your laundry inside? I do now!
• While my best electric toothbrush page has been kicking on quite well, there’s demand for best Oral-B electric toothbrushes as well. So I wrote that.
• I feel like I need to spend a lot more time in the kitchen. Last week I wrote about the best blenders in Australia. Plus the best stick blenders. Plus, just for good measure, the best blenders for smoothies. (FWIW, that last one always did remarkably well at Finder for some reason.
• I also got around to writing up my review of the Pixel Buds Pro. TLDR: Sounds fine, but really hard to get a good fit.

So, last week was a bit of a struggle. After having a bit of an existential crisis around the decision to work on BTTR, I took a step back and decided I needed to reprioritise.

The catalyst was revenue, unsurprisingly. I was halfway through prepping a page on the best projectors in Australia, when I realised that I wouldn’t be able to earn any money from the page.

One day, maybe, but not now. And I kind of need a bit of cash flow at the moment.

And so, I decided: I needed to go back to what I’m good at.

I dove into some keyword research and spreadsheets to identify the areas I could focus on that would (hopefully) lead to a sharper upturn of revenue.

It meant a couple of days of not much writing, unfortunately. It was an epic spreadsheet.

Stay tuned over the coming weeks to see if it makes much of a difference to my wallet…

Last week’s content highlights

• Best gaming keyboards. There’s lots to understand in this little category, but it’s definitely worth it if you enjoy gaming. Or typing.
• I updated the guide to the Best Samsung smartphones. I was a little surprised that the S23 Ultra didn’t go straight to the top.
• I admit it felt a little weird to write the best Wi-Fi extenders page before doing the best routers page, but that’s what the keyword research told me to do!
• I watched a lot of dash cam footage while preparing the guide to the best dash cams in Australia. Some of the stuff they capture is crazy!

I have to tell you, I was struggling at the start of this week.

I’ve been pumping out pages for this site for about 2 months now, and while I’m starting to get into the swing of publishing content, I’m also conscious that things aren’t moving very fast.

I knew it would take time.

I knew it would be hard work.

But the results (while really encouraging) have also been minimal. Particularly on the revenue front.

Again — I knew this before I started. But this week it hit me, and I was feeling rather discouraged.

Working it out, I’m less than 10% of the way through my target number of evergreen guides. And the whole business plan relies on me making little bits of money from many guides, not the other way around.

Then, in my hour of need, someone bought a phone through the site.

It was a small action. It wasn’t enough money to pay for a year of hosting, even.

But it showed me that the idea is sound. Small amounts of revenue over plenty of pages.

And so, I am kicking on. I still have hundreds of guides to write, after all.

Last week’s content highlights

• Updated the guide to the best true wireless earbuds
• Updated our page on the best noise-cancelling headphones
• I reviewed the Kindle Scribe. It’s really interesting!! The pencil works well, and it’s great as a journal or notebook, but it doesn’t do sharing or productivity overly well. The kids are obsessed with it, though, and I keep finding them drawing on it or doing their maths homework on it.
• A brief look at where you can pre-order the Velocity Green Xbox wireless controller (hint, it’s Microsoft directly)
• I updated the list of the best smartwatches in Australia
• I gave the best cheap phones in Australia page a bit of a refresh as well.
• And I ran down the list of the best VR headsets you can buy in Australia

I’m definitely running late on publishing the weekly update this week. It’s been a crazy few days, including my daughter getting prepped for high school and a realisation of a major challenge with the site’s setup that I’ll detail in another post.

As for last week… well, it was okay. I got thrown out of whack with Jury Duty on Monday last week, and I think that set the tone for my (month) week.

From a stats' perspective, traffic was down week on week for the second consecutive week. Rev was about the same, though (which is to say nowhere near enough).

Last week’s highlights

• I kicked off the week reviewing the LG CS OLED TV. It has since been collected, and I miss it now that it’s gone.
• I followed that up with a run down of the best TVs in Australia. Pretty stoked that this one landed at P13.
• I was getting hungry, so I wrote about the best air fryers. No such luck with the rankings, though.
• Best gaming mice – There’s a gap in reviews of these on the site, so I’ll have to fix that soon.
• Finally, I managed an update to both the best phones and best Android phones. I’m pretty happy with the improvements.

I hit a big milestone this past week on BTTR. For the first time, Search Console is telling me that it has indexed more pages than not.

Given you can’t get traffic from search to a page that Google hasn’t indexed, this is a pretty big deal. There are still more than 500 pages (mostly index pages) for the search giant to make its way through, though, so I won’t celebrate too hard. But it’s still an exciting milestone.

Another big milestone is my first clicks for Google Discover. I’m pretty excited by this, though I have no idea what pages are currently getting Discover traffic. Search console is showing me impressions and clicks, but has no info on what it was for. Yet.

On the weekly metrics, traffic was down, but revenue was up. Not that we’re talking big numbers at all, but having some revenue is reassuring.

Last week’s content highlights

• Last week, I spent a bit of time focused on reviewing the Google Pixel 6a and the Google Pixel 7. I liked both, a lot, but the bang for buck on the 6a is hard to beat. Probably why it’s on the list of best cheap phones.
• I also looked at the best air purifiers in Australia. There wasn’t as much consensus here as I would like, but it’s still good to know where there is agreement.
• I had a brief look at where you could buy the new PSVR2
• I also saw that Microsoft had stock of the Xbox One X again, so wrote up where you can buy the current-gen Xbox consoles.

BTTR enjoyed its second record traffic week in a row last week. Over 600 pageviews for the week, which is still nowhere near where I want it to be, but also pretty good for how young the site is.

The downside was that there was almost no revenue. Obviously, that’s to be expected some days, but I’d gotten used to pulling in a handful of dollars at least, and last week just didn’t make cents.

Boom-tish.

Still, pretty happy. I managed to sign up for a few more affiliate programs, and have been slowly getting them implemented on the site.

It wasn’t all good news though. My best vacuum cleaners post dropped from P16 - which I was extremely happy with - to somewhere beyond P100. I’ll try and work out what caused that disaster soon.

Last week’s content highlights

• I looked at the best cheap phones in Australia. Interestingly, the common devices are all somewhere closer to mid-range devices in my opinion. Once I’ve tested more in this space for BTTR I’ll change methodology, but for now, this one is out there, currently ranking at P37. It needs some love.
• While I was pushing out phone content, I decided to push Best Samsung phones out the door as well. It landed at P56, which I think reflects the fact I haven’t gone hands on with any Samsung phones on the site yet. That, my friends, is on the Todo list.
• Breaking away from phones, I started looking at appliances again. Best coffee machines Australia went live, and while it’s not ranking yet, it’s definitely going to get better as I start testing out coffee machines. Which I am definitely going to be doing.
• On the reviews front, I reviewed the TCL NXTPAPER 10s tablet. It’s an interesting take on a budget tablet, and the screen is certainly unique. I probably wouldn’t buy now though.

Yesterday I went to see Apple PR to tell them all about the new website.

When I arrived, I was asked to sign in on a gorgeous 24-inch iMac. They have a custom screen with two big boxes so you can sign in as a guest or as a courier, and I walked over and obnoxiously tapped on the box that said “Guest” with my finger.

Nothing happened. So I did it again.

It was at this point that I realised I was using an iMac.

iMacs have never had a touchscreen.

Embarrassed, I used the mouse and entered my details. It told me I would get a badge when my contact came to officially sign me in.

So I waited, and eventually the Apple team member I was meeting came out, walked me over to the iMac, and then touched the same sign-in box on the screen I had pressed.

We laughed about it.

But yeah, the iMac should probably have a touchscreen.