Inside Look at Running Travel Website: Part 3 (Feb-April 2015)

It’s that time again for an update about our site. Things have been a little quiet the past month because….well, quite honestly, we’ve been swamped. Our team members are all working at least one or two other jobs, and this is the busy season for all of us.

The craziest update is…we got hacked. There was a nationwide massive hack on some compromised WordPress plugins, and it was a pretty sophisticated hack.  So we ended up working around the clock with programmers to try to get the ridiculous stuff off of our site. It set us back about a week, but we are happy to report we got it fixed. Whew.

But we’ve still been able to test out a few things that we talked about on the last inside look blog. Here is what we’ve been up to the past three months.

Use this medicine to get back your pride by attaining and staying strong throughout love-making activity.DOSE :As per the manufacturer it is recommended to take the dosage of the medication. tadalafil 5mg india 6. They are not viagra buy in usa only expensive but also might not be of any help at all. Blood Vessel Diseases- Vascular Diseases can sildenafil price block the blood vessels, which slows the activity of blood flow to the male sex organ. Make the use of discount pfizer viagra a pill So many pills are available in the market to help you with the suitable results.
Total Traffic on Blog

First of all, let’s talk about the web traffic. As I mentioned, we’ve kind of let the website coast for the past month. The upside is that although traffic leveled off a bit, it didn’t drop. We held steady at around 30,000 to 35,000 visits per month.

We attribute this to building most of our traffic through Pinterest and Google.  This is because people keep searching on Google and re-pinning our content, even if we are away for a bit.  However, if you step away from the site, Facebook takes a nosedive. Have we mentioned that we love Pinterest? We do.

 

Testing Out Google Adsense

One thing we did try this time around was Google Adsense. For those of you unfamiliar, those are the little ads at the side of the screen that Google places. Most of the time Google sources the ad depending on where you have visited…and NOT based on what our site topic is about. For instance, I visited a printing company website a few times to order postcards, and the next time I came to Travel Chicks, I saw a postcard ad at the side.

To be clear, you are allowed to forbid certain types of ads or fine-tune the types of ads. But still, you lose some control over what is shown on  your site.

These ads make money based on click-throughs. This means we only make money if someone clicks the ad. (But unlike affiliate links, no one has to buy anything…only click through the ad).

We were excited to try these, as so many people have recommended or suggested them.

Our results on ads

Honestly, we were pretty underwhelmed by running Google ads. We weren’t happy with not being able to choose the ads in the first place, but we were hopeful about an extra revenue source. However, we made very little. After running the ad for a month, we only received a few click-throughs and pocketed fifteen bucks or so. We attribute this to people being bombarded with ads. They see a million ads on blogs, and they’re not that eager to click yet another one.

After looking at all of the numbers, we didn’t think this was a good future revenue strategy. We sometimes make more money with one affiliate link sale than the entire month of running Google ads. In our minds, it wasn’t worth it for the page clutter.

 

Affiliate Link Updates

All in all, we like affiliate links much better for our site than Google Adsense. It fits our site more, and we can recommend what we like. We didn’t make a ton of money off of affiliate links this month, but we only have a few affiliate links on the site so far.

One interesting note is we’re still getting most of our revenue off of people using our Priceline Bidding Tutorial and clicking through the affiliate link there. We have had almost no revenue from the hostels that we’ve recommended. But we’re guessing those hostel links are much more specific and will gain fewer clicks per link at first.

We also added an AirBnB link and custom picture at the sidebar on our page (look to the right —>). We offered a free $25 credit for signing up on AirBnB, a company that we often use. It’s been fairly successful and gained us some credit with AirBnB. It at least gives us a new excuse to travel :D.

Takeaways and Upcoming Strategy

Successes

• We like affiliate links. We just need them to be about ten times more successful.
• Travel Chicks Ambassadors. We’ve had great responses from girls creating city guides for us. We need to continue to expand this program.

Upcoming Strategy for Affiliate Links

• Make it easier to find affiliate links. Perhaps make an entire page with all of the places and companies that we recommend. This would make it easier to plan and make it easier for us to see a return on our site.
• Find more affiliate programs for companies we love. We often recommend companies that we get no profit from…because we love their products and services. We will continue to do this because it gives the most benefit to our readers. However, it would be great to recommend them and it help support our website.

Other Crazy-Fun Ideas

• Test-run t-shirt sales. We’ve already designed travel shirts and gotten great feedback. Maybe people would love to buy them? We should find out.
• Create and sell a planning e-book. People have requested this for a year now. We should do it. Soon.
• Launch our online travel forum. We have this created – we just need to launch it.

That’s where we stand now. We’re excited about the blog traffic, and we’re hoping to make it more profitable soon. We’d love to hear your thoughts or feedback!