Brace yourselves, it’s that time of the year again! As usual, Christmas holidays are a time for recaps and good deeds and MisterLocation makes no exception. So, without hesitating, let’s dive in what 2018 brought to our community and what news to expect in 2019.
A better user experience
On the first half of 2018 we have been focused on restyling and adding new functionalities pretty much to every sections of our site. We did this to offer a better user experience to our website’s visitors and to registered user and we immediately received lot of positive feedback about it. A lot of the work concerned our landing pages (“Home page”, “How it works”) and the functionality to make easier for unregistered users to send messages to photo studio owners. Moreover, we did have a number of minor fixes as well, e.g. to ease the navigation between categories. It’s been a very intense project for our developers but it did paid off since it resulted in a dramatic increase in interactions, meaning that location owners have been receiving more booking requests and photographers and agencies have been able to find the right photo studio for their needs more easily.
Climbing SERPs
One of the advantages that MisterLocation subscriptions currently offer is being on a platform that ranks well on Google. At the moment of writing we are in the TOP 5 position for many keywords between which, for instance, “photo studio barcelona”. That did not came for free. Since the beginning of the year we started setting up a SEO strategy to fix the flaws we found in the framework we are currentyl using (Sharetribe) and to improve our presence online through networking. That helped a lot in growing our community and resulted in even more interactions and contacts between photo and video professionals.
We pay our bills too
We live in an time where we expect that everything we find online is free and the coming of the startup era definitely did not help. Useful advices in form of blog articles, education, music, videos, connections: as users we rarely pay for these services. MisterLocation started as well as a free service, later this year we decided to switch to a freemium version. Why? It is simple: things like publishing articles, maintaining infrastructures, researching for innovation, etc. have a cost in time, energy and money and MisterLocation is no exception to this rule. We pay our bills too and for this reason in September we went live with our pricing page. Most of our users clearly understood our choice but we needed to put a bit more effort in communicating the dynamic above to a few website visitors that expected our platform to be free forever.
Next steps
There is still a lot in the MisterLocation’s pipeline to be launched and developed. For instance, during this year we added two new currencies for transactions: USD and GBP. That allowed us to put a foot in USA, where we are mainly present with photo studios in New York and Los Angeles, and to start exploring UK with still a few locations. We are definitely going to expand our presence in those directions during the course of 2019.
