This month marks the start of my eighth year travel blogging, and in the last seven years I've launched just over ten blogs. Out of those ten, only the first, this site, remains.
I could come up with many reasons for why the other blogs didn't succeed, from the market not being ready to the ideas not being good enough, but for the most part I simply did not give them the time, effort, and money needed to make them thrive. I didn't really do that for Living the Dream either, but this site is more a lesson in endurance and the long game than it is about instant success.
When launching our newest site, Discover the Burgh- a city blog for our home of Pittsburgh, PA, I knew that I was finally in a position to do something different than in all of those failed attempts. I was going to make this one a success, and I was going to do it quickly. With a well thought-out plan, a market in need of a new site, and a modest bankroll to get the project going, I started the site roughly 100 days ago.
Now there is only one question that remains, how are we doing so far? To really answer that, we have to highlight our three main priorities in getting the site running.
Priority Number One - Grow the Lists
One of my biggest regrets on Living the Dream is not building my lists as early as possible. It took me several years to get serious about social media, and a few years past that to start building a newsletter. We may have 40,000+ social media followers and pick up a handful of new newsletter subscribers every day, but if I would have started on Day One those numbers would be significantly higher.
Naturally, this is one priority I'm putting serious effort into getting right from the start for Discover the Burgh as list building is most successful when played over a very long period of time. To start, I'm trying to keep my priorities minimized and am only focusing on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest, and our newsletter. The other fluffy social networks that may or may not be around 6 months, 12 months, or 3 years from now do not interest me in the slightest.
On the social media front we started out strong with the following tasks:
- Daily updates on each channel through live updates, advanced scheduling, and automated sharing.
- We want at least one update going out on each social media channel per day, every day, without fail.
- Advertising on Facebook to grow our community with spending on the order of $3-$5 per day.
- Our optimized ads now result in a tolerable cost of 10-20 cents per highly targeted follower within 25 miles of our city. Boost advertising (~25% of our spending) is not calculated in that figure.
- Manual targeting of users on the other networks through following and interaction.
- Personally, I do not find advertising on the other networks to provide nearly as good of results as Facebook does.
- Utilizing our existing community on Pinterest to expose about 2,000 travel fans there to our new content.
- There is no point reinventing the wheel when we have a community there already, even if it isn't our primary market.
Our newsletter is taking a front-and-center priority on our website and social media channels, and one of our biggest pushes for it revolves around our recent purchase of a global license for OptinMonster to promote our newsletters on both Living the Dream and Discover the Burgh.
We only have about 35 subscribers so far, but considering our traffic is quite low for being a new site, our conversion rate is very good. Once we start generating more traffic and optimizing our ads I suspect this list will grow rather rapidly.
On the surface it is hard to keep all of this in perspective, so let's look at it another way:
- Our newsletter for Discover the Burgh is growing at a similar rate to how Living the Dream's newsletter was in January 2015- a site that had 1,900% more traffic and was already 6 1/2 years old.
- Our social media for Discover the Burgh is at a combined 3,000 or so targeted followers in 100 days- a point Living the Dream took several years to reach (ignoring Pinterest's additional 2,000).
That is the power of proper list building even when in its infant stages, and quite frankly I never did that before until now.
Priority Number Two - Build the Content
I'm thoroughly convinced that a blog goes from being a random collection of articles to a good resource at around 100 targeted articles. This changes with different niches, but at around 100 articles most sites have an abundance of information that likely needs to be organized, classified, and will entertain (or help) most of those who stumble upon your site through generic searches.
More importantly, with a proper navigation menu and abundance of content you will not turn anyone off from any false perceptions of your site being new or "not good enough." If you're not giving the impression of being a value at 100 articles, you probably need to take a moment to reflect, figure out what is not working, and re-evaluate the plan moving forward.
After 100 days we're at around 50 articles on Discover the Burgh. I'm starting to see things come together and have already performed some organizational tasks like expanding our menu and navigation pages, but I still view the site as a work in progress. The framework is there and we've done the outside work to get to 100 articles, but we've been having trouble cranking out more than three articles per week with our current work load. Other bloggers may utilize the first hundred days to churn out as many SEO friendly articles as humanly possible to get around this, and I would be all about that too, but we're just around capacity and are more than okay with our current speed.
Give it another 100 days and well eclipse our 100 article threshold easily and then will be able to start feeling like the resource we want to be.
Priority Number Three - Page Views Come Later
As you can imagine by the above work, we're not incredibly concerned with page views at this time. Sure, we'll share an article on Twitter every day via Revive Old Posts and share a new article on Facebook when it comes out, but we're not aggressively pursuing conversion to our website at this time. If they come, great, if they don't that is fine too as we're not officially going to call the site "ready" until we get to that 100 article threshold mentioned above.
With that being said, our page views for the brand new site vary from as low as 1 page view per day to 65 page views per day, and a significant portion of that comes directly via search engines. Over the first 100 days our traffic has increased 60% month over month, is approaching 1,000 page views per month, and nearly all of our visitors are within our targeted market. It took Living the Dream nearly a year-and-a-half to get that far, with no context of our market (I'm still trying to figure that one out), so to do it in a fraction of the time gives me encouragement on what the future will hold.
Ignoring the fact that we were not running Living the Dream professionally in those days, we are doing a number of things differently on Discover the Burgh right out of the gate. Most of which came about from our recent migration of this site from Blogger to WordPress. (Those articles are available here and here if you want to read all of the details). By having a standard to go from that worked in the past, it really helped us jump start the new site in ways we had direct control over.
Overall, I'm pretty impressed with the results we're getting so far. Having a few blog posts indexed in search engines, a rapid growth in social media followers, a small list surge, and a beginning conversion of page views to subscribers is exactly what we were hoping to see within the first three months. If we continue at this pace, well, the first year is going to be a big one.
What About That Money?
Ah, yes, the money- I almost forgot. If the ten or so failed blogs I have under my belt have taught me one thing, it is that the only way to experience growth on a website is: a) have an incredible personality or writing ability (or, if all else fails, be gorgeous and post tons of photos), b) hustle like crazy or c) pay for advertising.
Since I'm no good at hustling and have no time for it, and don't look great in a bikini, I opt for the latter and have spent a fair bit of money to solve some of the problems that I've come across in previous failed website launches.
Our first three months of expenditures for Discover the Burgh are approximately the following:
- Advertising: ~$500 (mainly Facebook)
- Domain and Host Fees: ~$200
- OptInMonster: $199 for a yearly license (split with Living the Dream)
- Other plug-ins: ~$50
- Business Cards: ~$50
- Money Exploring Pittsburgh: ~$1,000
- Total: $1,000 on the site, and $1,000 on enjoying the city to create content.
