Business highlights and lowlights of PainScience.com in 2018

• Jan 2, 2019 • by Paul Ingraham
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Weekly nuggets of pain science news and insight, usually 100-300 words, with the occasional longer post. The blog is the “director’s commentary” on the core content of PainScience.com: a library of major articles and books about common painful problems and popular treatments. See the blog archives or updates for the whole site.

Ecom reboot and code fatigue

2018 was the year of my huge and painful ecommerce reboot, the transition from my shabby old barely-in-business payment processor (with all the olde) to a shiny modern one (with all the newe). It was not really a “success.” It works. It’s an improvement. It had to be done. But some major mission goals were missed, and it was an entrepreneurial ordeal that will haunt me with bad memories and loose ends for years! I’m sick of programming, and will probably never attempt another major DIY code project for this business. ⬅️ famous last words

Facebook sucks

I abandoned social media again, this time for realsies. Twitter isn’t important enough for my business, and Facebook is too toxic as a networking tool and too evil as a company. My last business act of 2018 was the removal of all Facebook like buttons from my domain.

1.5M is a lot of page views

Four years ago my bottom line was badly hurt by changing my domain name (from “SaveYourself.ca” to “PainScience.com”). The Google search result position of my content dropped by 30-60%, and my income roughly in proportion to that. Re-building has been very slow. This year my organic search rank finally more or less fully recovered (both in general, and in specific areas where it matters the most). PainScience.com now delivers about 1.5 million page views per month. That’s a lot of page views.

Generous readers

Early in 2018 I received a record-breaking donation of $1000 from an extremely supportive and generous reader. I suspect that record will stand for a long time. Thanks, NW! This business has been consistently “good” for several years, but has never come close to recouping my extensive investment or making me any kind of “rich.” Maybe in 2019? Meanwhile, it’s delightful to have any readers willing to donate anything, let alone a thousand bucks.

Which reminds me of one of those ecommerce programming loose ends: I really need a donate button sprinkled around the site! (Perhaps it can go where the Facebook like buttons used to be?) Meanwhile, there’s always PayPal.