An Adventure in Creating a Successful Backpacking Website

Update

2008-05-25T01:01:00.003-04:00

Just a quick update. I've been slowly but surely adding more links. Real life has kept me from adding any content but I've been raking in revenue from various sources, which is pretty sweet.

Sucess

2008-03-15T13:33:00.002-04:00

So I have finally broken even with my first site. My goal was to at least earn enough to pay for hosting and lately I did just that. Lately I've been getting around twice my hosting costs a month, but it averages out to a little over hosting so far.

Hopefully if the current levels of earning remain constant I'll be able to pull a profit before the 1 year mark.

Goal: Break Even
Time Taken: 8 months

Advertising

2008-02-11T17:29:00.000-05:00

So far I've only been using Adsense as a means of advertising. Which on one hand is nice, since it's very easy, relatively unobtrusive and so far has been delivering a decent level of return.

However, after doing some research and seeing how much it is to get a simple text link on some sites, that other means might be much more lucrative. Since even for PR3 or 4 sites, a link can cost anywhere from $5-50 a month, that can easily beat out adsense revenue if you don't have a ton of traffic. Even $5 a month would considerably increase my revenues for the site.

I'll continue to do research and see what I find.

Losing Battle

2008-02-09T17:16:00.001-05:00

Sometimes is seems like this whole SEO business is losing battle. If you don't keep trying to get inlinks than you're quite likely to see yourself dropping in rankings. After getting up to a good position, I've seen myself dropping for the past couple weeks. Now I'm off the first page of rankings for my major keyword, despite adding some more links.

Now I must throw myself back into the battle and get that good ranking back!

Hmm

2008-02-03T12:25:00.000-05:00

So after sinking at bit in my google listing (to #8 or 9), I've seen a significant drop in revenues, which is frustrating. I still send out some cold-call link exchange requests to try and up my rankings, but they haven't been as successful as they had been. I'm trying to research some other methods/means of getting backlinks. We'll see how it goes.

I've picked up a few new domains and are slowly populating them with content. Other life things keep me from devoting a large section of time to them, but they'll get there eventually.

No more chapters

2008-01-25T16:49:00.000-05:00

After apparently getting out of the sandbox, I've had much better results with my ranking and traffic. Of course, it's never settled and it bounces around plenty, but I'm relatively happy with it. At this rate the site should at least cover my hosting and other input costs, make even make a tiny profit.

Now that I've tasted a bit of success, perhaps its time to try my luck again. Since my hosting is already paid for (and that's the majority of my costs), adding more sites is a no brainer. Even if they don't reach the same level as my primary site, whatever they make will essentially be profit, plus I can use them to link back to my primary site and increase it's PR.

So I'm in the process of picking up some more domain names and building sites around them. We'll see how it goes.

Chapter 8: Some Success

2008-01-08T17:43:00.000-05:00

So after taking some time off from the site to do things like, oh you know, not fail out of college I have some success. All of a sudden, I'm on the first page of my main keyword, up from around page 15. What did I do? Nothing. So it seems that once my site got old enough it got out of the sandbox and up on the listings.

We'll see how plays out.

Chapter 7: Stalling Out

2007-10-29T14:25:00.000-04:00

It's been quite some time since I've been able to do anything with the site, with the rest of my life taking up most of my time. Since then it's been hard getting back into the swing of promoting my site, trying to get more links.

Especially now that I'm stalled, I'm having trouble getting motivated to write more articles, expand content, spam more link exchange emails.

At least my disappearing problem seems to have gone away, now I'm well situated on the 14th and 17th pages of my main keywords. Guess I just need to spend more time sending out link exchange emails.

But that's the life of a web developer I guess.

Chapter 6: Heming and Hawing

2007-09-26T14:10:00.000-04:00

Back and forth. The site shows up for the keyword, 15 minutes later, it's gone. This has happened a couple times now, and it's quite frustrating. I've continued to add links, even getting a DMOZ listing for the site, and yet I still can't seem to keep my site listed for any targeted keywords.

However, some subpages are listed for that keyword, though way way back in the listings. But comparing the amount of links to them, there's no way it could actually be better link, so for some reason my index page is getting artificially bumped off.

More investigation must be done.

Chapter 5: Frustration

2007-09-19T14:39:00.000-04:00

I began sifting through the pages and pages of results for my keyword in order to find my site, eventually finding it around page 28. At the time, I didn't feel that upset, it was a new site with only a few links of course it wasn't going to just pop up on the first page.

So I started watching, checking every day or so what page it was one. Slowly it began creeping forward, up 10 or so pages in about a week. This had me pretty excited, I thought that with some more time and some more work getting links, I would be on my way to getting a decent ranking.

However, then my listing completely disappeared off the ranking. In fact, after checking site:www.euro-backpacker.com in Google, I noticed that my index page wasn't listed at all, even though all my subpages were. I had no idea what had happened.

Was I black listed? Did my site go down? Do the Google gods hate me? So I decided I would give it a week or so and see if it popped back up. Eventually it did, but back around page 28. I figured it would slowly creep back as it did before, as I've continued to add links to my site.

But then my site disappeared off my keyword, but not the index. So now I'm left wondering why my site isn't ranking for that keyword anymore.

Chapter 4: The SEO blitz begins

2007-09-17T14:26:00.000-04:00

After getting the site up and running, next came the task of getting listed. I thought, once I had the content I would just have to put it up and the search engine spiders would pop through it and I would be well on my way.

Google often talks this strategy up, just write info that people want and the links will flow in, which will raise your relevence, which cause your site to rank better, which will bring more links, repeat ad nauseum.

I quickly found that the toughest part is getting those first few readers. Especially now, when almost all keywords are deeply entrenched.

So in order to start getting links, one must embark on a large campaign of link exchanges with other sites to build that important PR. So I started emailing other sites that had to do with backpacking asking for link exchanges. However, naturally sites that have better PR are also generally aren't as interested as sites that are on the lower end.

I was lucky to have a couple sites exchange links with me, which was enough to at least get my sites indexed. But I would say I must have sent out at least 50 emails to related sites and have gotten at most 10 responses. I've read that some people set a goal of getting 50 or so links a week. I am really skeptical how they get that without paying for them.

But so I started plugging, cold-calling to try and get links, submitting to every directory I could find. And I finally got indexed, and ranked on the 28th page or some for my keyword. Whoa boy, looks like I have some work.

Chapter 3: Getting Hosted

2007-09-10T14:23:00.001-04:00

Once I had a my code mostly put together and a good chunk of content written, I started looking around for a web host. Vast is the world of internet hosting, just google web hosting and you'll see what I mean.

The net is cluttered with different hosts all trying to collect your dollar, and on top of that, the amount of money they're willing to spend to get you as a customer is huge. Many hosts offer $100+ bounties for new customers, so along with hosts, you'll find a glut of sites "reviewing" web hosts. Don't be surprised if they don't have anything bad to say, or point you towards a service that benefits them the most.

One to get a feel for a host is to Google the hosts name + "sucks". Many hosts, especially cheap ones have a huge following of people who hate them. So perhaps finding one that has fewer people seething with rage might be wise.

Being the hasty person that I am, stupidly chose a host that has a large array of horror stories attached. However, I had 30 days to get my money back, so I decided to give it a chance. So far it hasn't been awful, but the site is also barely visited, so it's not like it's a huge strain on them.

Chapter 2: Creating the Site

2007-09-07T14:36:00.000-04:00

I had actually begun playing around with a couple designs in Winter 2006 for the project. Though at the time, my web skills were mainly limited to just HTML and CSS. I had a couple ideas floating around in my head, but over the spring and summer I expanded my knowledge of javascript and php so I had a few more design options.

My idea was that this was to be an experiment in putting together quick, simple, content-rich pages, rather than flexing my coding skills. I also didn't want to sink a whole lot of time into the design side of it.

Thus I put together a simple HTML/CSS template that had the headers, navigation and footers with a blank content div that I could fill for each page. This would let me just copy and paste the template for each page and then just add content.

While this allowed me to enter much of my initial content in one weekend, the trade off was flexibility. As my menu is built into each page, and indeed, into the template, any changes I that I made (changes in page names, new sections, different organization etc.) would have to be manually changed on each page.

So with my template basic code template created, I started adding the design and content elements.

Chapter 1: The Backstory

2007-09-07T13:42:00.000-04:00

Earlier this summer I set out on a quest to see if I could create a successful website related to backpacking in Europe. Having spent the spring in Europe, I thought I could add some worthwhile information about a subject that isn't too overly crowded.

Educationally, I thought it would be both a good way to test my coding, design and writing skills as well as get some experience in the business side of running a website.

Plus, I might be able to score a few bucks out of it.

So off I began in late June of 2007: My goal, to create a backpacking website and make it at least break even with hosting costs.