A Bright Spot - Performer Leads

Just got back from a week’s vacation in Nantucket. This is my third summer going there and I think I enjoy it more each year. It’s such a different world – no highways, no billboards, no shopping malls. Don’t get more wrong, there are a LOT of people there in the summer, and way too many with cars in my opinion. But even with the hustle and bustle, its still far more serene than ‘the mainland.’ I did a lot of jogging and biking as well as equal amounts of eating ice cream and sitting on the beach. One of my highlights was hearing an acoustic guitarist named P.J Pacifico (http://www.pjpacifico.com/) play at Jetties – one of our restaurants located right on the beach (http://www.thejetties.com/). P.J Pacifico is actually based out of Norwalk, Connecticut – not far from GigMasters home base in Redding. Apparently he plays every Sunday night at the Burger Bar in Norwalk, so definitely check him out if you’re in the area.

Returning from a really good vacation is always a little tough. It requires a major shifting of gears to resume your regular routine. I’m doing my best. That being said, my return to GigMasters was met with some encouraging news – we are seeing a record number of leads generated for our performers – despite the dismal economic climate. This past month (July 2009) there were over 84,000 leads generated for our performers. With a performer database of just over 6,000, that’s approximately 13.8 leads per performer per month. Compare this to July of 2008, where we generated just over 48,000 leads on a performer database of just over 4,800 (9.9 leads per performer). That’s a 39% increase in leads per performer. Now this is by no means time to crack the champagne, because as any of our performers will tell you, the economy is driving down the average booking amount. But nevertheless it was a little bright spot to return to for me.

So what’s the main priority for me right now? Two things:

1) SEO – As a company we really need to keep the SEO pedal on the metal. We’ve done a number of things recently which seem to be helping increase the number of our pages Google is crawling and indexing. Yesterday for example, GoogleBot crawled over 200,000 of our pages. Our focus is now turning to Bing which is for some reason only crawling a relatively measly 19,000 pages. With the new Yahoo/Microsoft search deal, Bing will become an important component -- although still nowhere close to Google.

2) SERVER SPEED – I’ve been a little unhappy with the speed at which search results pages are being returned to our users over the last few months. Granted our traffic has increased, but that’s still no excuse. So we have hired a consultant (who is a Microsoft MVP) to take a more in depth look at our database server to discover any potential bottlenecks. I firmly believe that increasing the speed at which our search results pages render will have a significantly positive impact on gig requests.

There are many other things to focus on – the category overhaul, the new performer signup process, the new ‘About Us’ section and downloadable contracts – just to name of a few. A lot different then watching the sun set on a beach in Nantucket. But there’s still no other job I’d rather come back from vacation to.