Gigworker

Gigworker.com is the result of thousands of hours of detailed research about the gig economy.

I found found that gig workers are looking for gigs, but don't know where to find them. I also found that they don't fully understand how to succeed in those roles once they are matched. So, I created a platform to solve both problems.

I also had done so much research, and had so many notes about the gig economy, that I ended up turning my findings into a book. The book, Gigworker: Independent Work and the State of the Gig Economy, is now published and available for purchase on Amazon.

I first kicked the project off by bringing on a team of designers and developers to build a website that helped achieve our goals. I worked hand-in-hand with them to refine our concept - helping gig workers find gigs and then providing the information needed to excel in those roles.

We structured the site to maximize the use of silos and sprinkled in sticky features that allowed users to easily browse content and click around. Overall, I was very pleased with how the site turned out:

Once we had our site structure in place, it was time to build. I sourced and managed multiple content teams to start writing posts and publishing them to the blog.

Our goal was initially 100 posts to launch publicly, which we achieved after just a few months of work. We made a hard push for launch and I'm really proud of the team for hitting our goals on time.

Once we publicly launched, the team executed on an aggressive link building campaign that included link outreach, interviews, and media interviews centered around my book.

As a result of our link building efforts, we gained links from hundreds of trusted media outlets like The New York Times, CNBC, and Forbes, just to name a few.

This positioned me as a leader in the gig economy and helped grow our site's domain authority, trust, and reputation rapidly. From there, it was time to wait and see what happened.

Within a matter of months after launch, Gigworker.com was receiving a steady stream of visitors.

Our website was growing naturally and organically up through the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, which set us back a bit due to the immense shift in search behavior.

Once the pandemic was over, the site naturally started bouncing back in early 2022. I'd expect no less, as the site was built with the long-term future in mind.

I figured that there would be speed bumps and setbacks along the way, but the content we created was top-tier, and the site was helpful to users, so I wasn't too worried about it.

So I hired content team with specialized experience in the gig economy to produce even more content for the site. Between February 2022 and July 2023, we consistently published content month over month.

The results were unreal. Just like what happened with the first content push, the second time around, the results were even more powerful. We grew our site traffic to be over 400,000 at the peak.

This was until September 2023 when Google came down hard on content-heavy sites as part of their Helpful Content Update. Despite being a trusted, high-authority site that was incredibly helpful to users, Google came down on the site hard, causing the site to lose a good amount of traffic.

However, I am a persistent individual and decided what better time than now to completely overhaul the site. So that is exactly what I did.

I built rebuilt the platform from the ground up to focus more on service-based features that users would find helpful, such as being able to browse a list of hundreds of side hustles, to them having the ability to list themselves in a directory of top-rated freelancers.

I also integrated a job board function, which is starting to see signs of heavy engagement. This is a great way to connect gig workers with companies looking to hire for specific tasks.

The site was helpful to users, but after the rebuild and shift in focus, it is now far more helpful than it has even been before.

I am starting to see positive signs that Google is once more starting to trust the site, recognizing the improvements that I made since last September.

While there have still been no widely-reported HCU recoveries (yet), I am confident that the improvements that I made to the site will help to remove the classifier that got applied when Google rolled out the Helpful Content Update.