For those of you starting companies and websites, we thought it might be helpful to give you a behind-the-scenes look at our site.
I….don’t know what to think of Pinterest. It’s that boyfriend who seems perfect and slick on the outside, and you’re just wondering if he’s too good to be true. Let me explain.
The Mindset of Building a Web-Based Business
From the start, we knew that it would take a while to build traffic on our site. We see cases of things going viral, but for most companies, growth is slow and built over months and years. The sites that go huge without capital funding have quietly built a platform of customers and readers for months or decades.
The reality is, you have to love what you do. You have to. Because if not, a year into the process and you’ll be heading for the door. You’ll start adding up hours versus revenues and you’ll throw in the towel.
Last week at an entrepreneurship meeting I said to my friend Scott, “I’ve never worked so hard for so little in my life.” And he nodded and chuckled, because it’s true for all of us. You have to start a content/travel website willing to be in it for the long-haul or not do it at all. The internet is cluttered with websites half-made and half-way tried.
We knew this. I’m also impatient.
This Month’s Successes
Last fall, one of our Pinterest pins started to go viral. I thought it was a temporary fluke, but it kept growing. Which brings us to now. We’re halfway through January and we’ve already broken our previous site record. Due 90% to Pinterest. We’ve had over 17,000 people on our site from Pinterest alone this month.
Top traffic sources for Travel Chicks for Jan 1-15
On building pageviews, Pinterest seems to be a beautiful option. But how predictable is it? Will it freak out one day like a crazy boyfriend and throw spaghetti against a wall? No idea. But we have to give the boyfriend a chance, just in case.
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So we’re taking it for what it is – a nice unexpected strategic surprise. And we’re continuing to build pages for google and facebook in the meantime. Facebook has been a nice place to build community, but it’s not great for driving traffic so far. It’s just what it is.
Traffic increase over the past year
So traffic has been increasing more quickly than we thought it would – and we’re thrilled about that. It’s surreal to think that over 1,000 people just looked at your site within the past 24 hours. So strange and exciting.
This Month’s Challenges
All in all though, our current challenge is still this: what is the best way to monetize the site? We put a lot of work into building Travel Chicks, and we hope to eventually be able to live off of it. We mentioned in our last “inside look” blog that we were focusing on affiliate links. Affiliate links make money when people click through your link and then purchase something.
However, people who come to the site off of Pinterest have a different behavioral pattern. They’re not actively looking for a product as much as someone coming to our site from Google. Actually, our Pinterest audience rarely purchases anything, so we rarely benefit monetarily from it. So maybe it’s time to tweak the revenue model and supplement our affiliate links with a different form of revenue – namely banner ads.
Perhaps if we place a non-obtrusive ad in the sidebar, it will help add to our revenue model and not take away from our branding.
It’s all a chess game, really. And as challenging as it is trying to figure out the right move, we wouldn’t have it any other way. So this month the focus is building Pinterest and looking at potential ad revenue.
What has your experience with sidebar ads been? Have you added them to your revenue model? And how do you feel when you visit a site with ads?
Firstly, I love your website! I am an avid reader and soon-to-be avid traveller!
2nd – I come to your website from several places: Your RSS feed I read via Feedly (then click through to read on the website), Pinterest when I’m looking up travel ideas, tips or inspiration and Pins to your site pop up. (I value your opinions as a travellers ‘brand’ so I’m likely to click on the Pin to read further on your site and rePin for others to see and for my own future reference.) I also have found you via Google searches.
3rd – I appreciate your inside look into your website as a business. Though I do not have much experience in creating revenue via my own website, as a reader, I would suggest selling block side ads. I read a lot of blogs who seem to have success selling ad space once their readership grows large enough.
Thanks for your posts! Love reading them!!!
Thanks so much for your feedback Kirsten! It means a lot to us that you would take the time to give us your insight. We’ve been back and forth about ads. Initially, it was our plan to grow to a point until we could have site sponsors. And until then use affiliate links. As you mentioned, selling block ads works best when readership has reached a critical mass. Pay per click or pay per impression ads don’t have a minimum critical mass usually, so they are something that we are now trying in the short term. (I plan to write about the success/non-success about that in a month).
Our site readership is growing quite a bit though, so we hope to be at a point to where we can simply have block ads/sponsors from companies in which we very much trust.
Thanks again for all of your feedback! It’s good to know from a reader where that we are being most useful to them.
Much appreciated 🙂
I’m am curious as to how you create your pins, as obviously you’re very good at it! I’ve tried to create a few pins (other than just plain ol’ photos), but it seemed like way too much work to try to create it on my ancient version of Photoshop, and once posted, they didn’t have the appeal I was expecting. Is there an app or something that helps make quality pins like yours?
Hey Jessica! Okay, honestly I get a little giddy answering this question. If the rest of my team were here, they would be giggling 🙂 Our Pinterest pins have come a long way. If you look at the beginning of our account, they’re quite horrible. And we all have the newest Photoshop editing tools.
We’ve switched over to a website called Canva.com for our simple pin creation. The learning curve is small, and if you know photoshop, then it’s a piece of cake. The main draw is not the editing capabilities, it’s that the stock photos are a DOLLAR EACH. A…..DOLLAR. I can’t explain how much this has helped. When you’re at start-up phase, you can’t drop fifteen or twenty bucks on every picture. If you take the stock photos, put a bit of an “artistic spin” on them, and add on the text and boxes and such, it’s an easy pin creation. We also use our own photos a lot on Canva, and that is free.
The only downside with Canva right now is that you can only save it in PNG compression/file type – with is lossless (it doesn’t lose quality) but has a large file size. This is fine for Pinterest, but if you want to use them on your WEBSITE, I would recommend re-saving them as medium-compression JPGs. (on photoshop or picmonkey). This will make them about five to seven times smaller and increase your page load speed…and help your search rankings.
I will say this on the side: it’s easy to get carried away with a lot of different fonts on those pins. We recently picked a few fonts and colors for us all to use, to standardize our look (branding). If you look through our latest pins, they tend to look more similar than our beginning ones.
Whew lots of info. Hope this helps!
Oh, one more thing, you can also pick up FREE stock photos at places like https://unsplash.com/ to use in pins. It just makes it look a lot more professional if you have high-quality pics. We use our own photos we’ve taken if we can. But if they’re grainy or low-resolution, we will go ahead and use someone else’s stock photos.