Admin Dashboards is an open-source project, created to promote the work of freelancers and small agencies in front of big sharks, using content submitted by developers.

The motivation

If you are a freelancer or a small startup, and you have in your portfolio an admin dashboard product, trying to promote it and sell it, can be challenging without a serious budget. The first page in Google for the keyword “admin dashboards” is full of well-positioned companies like ColorLib, WrapBootstrap, and other companies at the same level.

The plan

To get Google’s attention, we need to pass this simple checklist:

  • A fast, well-structured website
  • Specific content
  • No bullshit or spam
  • Good referrals

Implementation

  • The domain name admin-dashboards.com, match 100% the keyword we are targeting. And it was free. This fact forced me to think ‘God is a hacker’

  • The speed. I was testing a few static website generators (Hugo, Gridsome, Jekkyl) but the winner was GatsbyJS. The result: this app scores more than 90 on Lighthouse and is a clone of this gatsby starter. There is no login, registration, the entire app is plain HTML, that follows best SEO, and usability practices. You may read here about Gatsby.

  • The website structure:

    • Categories are keywords related to the admin dashboard keyword. The winners (selected by the search volumes) are:
    • react dashboard - 2.9k mo searches
    • vue dashboard - 1k mo searches
    • angular dashboards - 2.9k mo searches
    • flask dashboard - 0.7k mo searches
    • Products. Each dashboard will be listed in two places: as an item in the mother category, and as a single page, in the root of the website. See the website files structure bellow, for more information

  • The content: the information for each product will be curated to provide only relevant information to the audience.

  • The referrals The Github repository was created to follow the domain signature. github.com/admin-dashboards. Also, the products, with a little bit of traction from the audience, will have a correspondent project on Github, on address github.com/admin-dashboards/killer-dashboard. Google loves this kind of s**t, and will rank the project better than others, because the information (keyword, content) is consistent, across multiple domains. 

## Site structure

<root>
   |
   |---/react-dashboards #category, with paginated items
   |---/vue-dashboards   #category, with paginated items
   |---/flask-dashboards #category, with paginated items
   |
   |   # bellow are products, listed directly in website root,
   |   # using a SEO friendly URL
   |   # If we have an admin dashboard named Killer Dashboard,
   |   # coded by Alien Agency in React, the URL is
   |   #
   |   # react-dashboard-killer-dashboard-by-alien-agency  
   |   #
   |
   /react-dashboard-killer-dashboard-by-alien-agency
   |
   /flask-dashboard-black-creative-tim
   |
   /react-dashboard-shards-lite
   |
   /flask-dashboard-black-creative-tim
   |
   | __________________________________