Friday, January 04, 2008

Dear Tim - I have a content start up, what do I need to do to succeed?

Have been using the post new year break period to clear the BOOT email inbox. The hardest part about running the blog is keeping up with the email I receive. F0llowing from my "too much information" post I have found that I receive a constant trickle of email from travel content/community sites asking me for a review and comment. I touched on my thoughts in this area back in April 2007 when I talked about how to "Build and maintain scale in Travel 2.0". Thought I take this time to add to that post with four quick rules on how to succeed as a travel start up:
1. Content - lots of it
2. Index - a fantastic Google friendly index and expertise in search optimisation
3. Access methods - varying ways and means for consumers to access the content
4. Patience - time (and money) to wait for the traffic to build
Very easy to write much harder to do. What do you think?

Want a little more detail - follow this link.

6 comments:

Gareth Pearce said...

Most comments hat you have commented on are correct but Point 4, patience, that is very true! Rewards will come thereafter. Happy Holidays Tim - Gareth Pearce, Director, Ezibed.com.

Anonymous said...

Tim, that's it in a nutshell and exactly how I've been doing it since late 2005.

I've been really good at points 1 and 4 but have room for improvements on points 2 and 3.

Going into 2008 I haven't reached phase 2 of the project yet, so quite excited at the prospects ahead and to build on all the hard work I've put in these last couple of years with the release of some new services leveraged by Holiday Pad.

Anonymous said...

Hi Tim,

I have created 11 more rules and published them here

11 more rules for success

Thanks for starting this thread off!

Thanks and Happy new year, Alex

Anonymous said...

Those are all good points. Some other things I'd add to this list though.

* Find a way to let your visitors add content as well. Nothing like User Generated Content to build lots of information fast!
* Research what people are interested in reading. Your stats are helpful, but also tracking which articles are successful on Stumbleupon or Reddit for instance will give you some great ideas for articles. And don't forget to promote your articles on social media sites - they can drive good spikes of traffic.
* Use lots of pictures and make sure they're good ones.

Anonymous said...

Hi Tim,

Its a while since I wrote here, but this post caught my eye. So in agreement with your four points:

1. Content - fresh, relevant content. Also goes towards your search engine optimisation comment
2. If you are going to talk about SEO, you'd better also talk about paid search marketing. Too many people assume that SEO is "free" - its not. Well not until your SEO advisors and technical people are free as well. Paid search marketing has a place at the top of every commercial marketing plan.
3. Yup
4. As long as patience means hard working patience (build it and they won't come unless you're interesting enough)

I have a fifth one though - measure EVERYTHING. Numbers, metrics, KPI's, MI, analysis and action should be at the centre of all businesses, especially online. Content sites are no different here.

Happy New Year all

Tim Hughes said...

Potts

Happy new year to you also. Would be great to get a Spain/Southern Europe update post from you

best
Tim