Categories
Blogging

Why I’m Here

I’ve had a website at this domain name since 1998. I was blogging before there were blogs. I was blogging before blogging was cool.

This site is an adjunct to my primary website, Everything-Everywhere.com. I don’t want to keep that site on topic with my photography and my trip. I especially don’t want to bother people by talking about the website on the website.

So, I figured the best approach was to revive this site.

In 2008, I want to start making inroads towards covering the costs for my trip. To that extent, I’m going to start to try and monetize my photography. In the next month, I’m going to launch the following advertising based sites:

  • A website for travel themed wallpapers.
  • A website for travel MySpace themes
  • A website for travel iPhone wallpapers
  • A site to sell high quality prints of my photos

The first three sites are really the same thing populated with slightly different content.

The print sales site I’ll probably run through SumgMug or something like that.

Based on similar sites I’ve seen, I’m shooting to make $5,000 from online ads in 2008. Most of the traffic I’m expecting to be driven from Google.

I am also going to be paying for a custom WordPress theme or my main site. There are several design elements which I think are unique to a site like mine I want to integrate:

  • I’d like to put my Google Map front and center in the site header. The best example I’ve seen of that is on Hitch50.com. The rest of the site sort of sucks, but the map integration is sort of clever. I think using a map in the header not only neat graphically, but it is functional as well.
  • I want to integrate the photo of the day more prominently. I don’t know how, but it has become one of the most popular features on the site
  • The country navigation is getting to long and unwieldy. I’d like to make the country lists collapsable by continent.
  • I’d eventually like to integrate advertising into the site, but I want to be very subtle about how I do it. I really don’t want to turn it into a NASCAR page. The photo download pages can go full blown NASCAR, but the main site I’d rather focus on increasing traffic.

Those are my goals for the next 30 days.

Next post I’ll go over my traffic history for Everything-Everywhere, my strategy for increasing traffic, and my goals for the next 3-6 months.