Thank you for all the attention and fantastic suggestions. I have begun implementing most of the suggestions here and we are going on a revamp of the site based on these recommendations.
It is very easy to become disenfranchised with a project such as this, but it is good to know that there is support somewhere!
Will it work? Maybe. Will it fail? Possibly. But it is worth trying
I view the problem of too much information as a detractor. Let's say you go to Netflix Instant View and want to watch a comedy. Most of those are 1 or 2 stars and you needlessly flip through then until you get to something with some valuable rating.
Google fixes this issue with their algorithm based on popularity. Trip Advisor, in my opinion, is a garbage site, very confusing and cluttered. There is a reason people still buy travel guides and now ebook travel guides, because of the unreliability of search results.
A lot of times, especially when traveling, search engines change to local results, which might not be in the language you are looking for. Then you click on the English version and get different results. This is an attempt to standardize recommendations. Hopefully it will be like a living, breathing Lonely Planet guide accessible free of charge on the internet all the time.
Eventually, once the site grows, I will give incentives to the owners of the "recommendation" area access to update the contact information, but not the criticism, which will hopefully allow for more accurate data.
But yes, that is a concern.
I fully understand your concerns and I have wrestled with them over the years too. Yes, there are a bunch of travel blog sites, yes there are a bunch of review sites, but it isn't about who did it first, but who does it better.
Will I? I won't know unless I try. Can I fail? Probably, but that shouldn't stop me from trying.
I know people who made very lucrative businesses emulating existing companies with free data from the US census. On paper it should have failed, but it worked.
I see those websites as portals to information, but not aggregates. Think about Digg. What did they do? Nothing special, just post stuff you read from around the internet from the websites we all frequent. Reddit replaced it as king because it did that better (much, much better actually).
The idea is to improve on an existing niche. Give the people something your competition doesn't give them. Although many travelers use google for research, there is a bunch of garbage that needs to be filtered out. They do a good job, but not a great one. Do I want every hotel or restaurant listed? No, I prefer just the really good ones and provide quality control to steer people towards the must-not-miss for quality, value, or whatever.
One more note. When I started this project, my expectations where for every 100 people, 10 create blogs and 90 come for the information. Out of the 10 blog users, if 2 were consistently active, I would view that as a success. So, the blog section needs 2% active use for it to be a success because my reality is that most people:
1) don't write or care to share
2) view it as a hassle
I am a story teller and want to give other story tellers the ability to do so.
It's funny that you mention this, because this is what I did this last year. I spent Dec 09 - July 10 traveling all around Argentina, Uruguay, Brazil, and South Africa. I handed out well over 500 business cards and would spark up conversations all the time.
It worked, but then quickly died out. The problem is that unlike most other niches, people don't travel all the time and are too lazy to add content about their own home location.
I am trying to use the Wiki as much as I can to give a more graphic interpretation of their data, yes. And I can see what you mean on the titles. I was making them that way for organic searches, but realistically I can't compete with all the deal sites and shopping sites. Very good point.
You are 100% right on the FB connect. There is no escaping FB and the like buttons thrown around everywhere.
If you considered something similar in the past, do you like where I have ended up? Would you be interested in joining?
Ahh, I will look to see if there are any hostels around here. i'm sure there MUST be, but who really knows until you look. I know Boston has 1 or 2 for the entire city (not where I live)
It is in the works and your second suggestion is brilliant! Hadn't thought of that. Can also update on WiFi (which is what I was thinking about)
I think it is a little premature for a mobile app as there are a lot of kinks to still get through on the main page and investing time/$$ into a mobile app might be too soon, especially since funding is tight.
I get an average of 3000 visitors a month and have 148 registered users, of which 60 or so are family and friends.
Most of the traffic generated has come from Google Adwords and testing ads for the embassy section. Next up is google organic, again, mostly for the embassy section. The rest are referrals from blogs/forums mainly to the Travel News section.
The articles get a decent response. Activity usually lasts 2-3 days but the users only click on other articles from there and then bounce.
There isn't a lot of promotion as most people view this as something they might use while traveling as opposed to adding content in the city they already reside in. And, thus, there is very little word of mouth.
I have seen some people join from marketing efforts, especially people who are leaving for a trip, but end up not using the site. I have a rough idea as to why (usability) but it is not concrete enough for a radical change
True, but when you search for keywords on Embassies, you directly compete with .gov sites that will always outrank you.
My idea behind the embassy section was to ensure that contact information was available when the sites go under, as they usually do, or cloak their information to not be bothered. Believe it or not, I actually made that database of 8000+ myself.
So, I have a great section that is useful, but hard to market. I rank least in embassy keywords even though my data is more up-to-date than other older sites.
I created an adwords campaign and managed to get $0.08 a click on my keywords with an average of 3 min/user to the embassy section, so I know it is useful. But organics are very, very low.
Plus, I don't want to violate the site with a bunch of adsense nonsense and the widget, which provides very little $$/lead has had 946 clicks in 6 months with 0 conversion
Have you considered hosting your embassy section on another domain name with the keywords? It will take some time, but you could probably rank with some organic SEO for phrases like "how to apply for visa to france from london" by blogging.
I have, but, I would then have to make one completely no-follow to not get dilution from double content, right?
I can see how I can focus on that one niche and become profitable, but wouldn't that be spreading myself thin over two projects instead of one big one?
I'm not sure about the no-follow thing, but you are probably right. A simpler alternative to a new domain might be a more key-word rich url or sub-domain.
I can understand you don't want to spend too much time over this. Can't you automatically generate static pages listing the key information given the user's destination, origin and nationality? I'm guessing the embassy information doesn't change too often, so having static content will help with SEO and caching.
