The launch of Never Ending Voyage was one of our most successful website launches to date, receiving over 8,000 visits and over 5,000 unique visitors in its first three months. Our site was launched on February 19th 2010 and the image above is a picture of our Analytics account for those initial months (until May 18th 2010).
We launched with one post and a posting schedule of 3 a week (which we managed to keep to until we ran out of internet in Paraguay!) and we’ve been fortunate to have over 470 comments in the four and something months we’ve been live. We’ve also managed to earn some income through affiliate sales which has paid for the hosting costs for all of our sites for the year. Not bad for such a young site!
There are many possible reasons why it has been so successful, but I’d like to share what I think are some of the major contributing factors.
1) Unique Design
Design matters, it’s as simple as that. Well-designed does not have to mean lots of fancy graphics and crazy animations, but it does mean something that is easy to read and navigate and that stands out from the crowd.
We’ve had a lot of very nice things said about the design of the site. I’m sure it gives us an advantage over other travel sites that use free (or even premium) themes on their blogs in that it’s unique and recognisable.
2) Quality Content
My partner wrote a number of very in depth, high quality articles about selling all of our possessions and about saving money for travelling. She provided lots of details on how we did it and what worked and what didn’t and they proved to be very popular, getting shared around the web and ReTweeted on Twitter.
Of course, now the bar has been set we have to maintain that quality!
3) Regular Posting Schedule
We have been religious about updating the blog and I think that it does make a difference in keeping the site talking about – especially in the early days. Perhaps after a certain tipping point, the site will have enough momentum that regular updates are no longer as important, but in the beginning I think it’s important to show your commitment.
4) Social Media
My partner was incredibly active on Twitter from the outset, asking and answering questions and getting involved in the travel community. She has built up a following of nearly 600 people through her constant engagement and, as a result, Twitter remains one of our top 5 traffic sources.
Note that the important part here is engagement. You absolutely have to get involved and it has to be inolvement beyond the spammy ‘come and look at my site’. Chat to people, help them out, ask questions, make conversation – give freely of your time and effort and you’ll get it back in spades.
We also have a Facebook page, a Flickr account, a YouTube account and a Vimeo account to make sure that we’re in as many relevant places as we can actively keep up with.
5) Unique Story
Although I don’t think you need to sell all of your stuff and travel indefinitely to have a successful blog, I do think that having a unique story has helped. Many people go travelling for 6 months or a year, but the longer the travel period the less people there are blogging about it.
It’s been a great start and our visitor numbers continue to grow and there have been many lessons learned from this launch which I’ll be applying to all future launches.
