Trying to create an authority website.

10 years ago

Hi Dan,

I must say your site looks really great, the design is good and the content looks interesting. I would suggest to keep doing what you're doing considering this site

What i would suggest is to use social media too to promote this site. I'm sure you can target many people who love London too, so it won't be that hard to leverage social media to get more traffic.

Good luck!

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guitarizma

Banned 10 years ago

Originally Posted by danp142

Firstly, let me thank all you guys at the Warrior Forum. I've been posting and reading here for about 6 months and I've gone from earning $0 online to earning about $250 a month, whilst not ground breaking, is at least a start and I probably couldn't have done it without this forum.

I'm now looking to expand my ideas and hopefully create an authority website for my chosen niche, which is travelling/tourism in London.

I'm attempting to create an authority review website based around reviewing London tourist attractions and encouraging others to do so as well. In some of these posts I will have affiliate links which is where the money will come from.

This is more a labour of love than a money grabbing opportunity, I genuinely love London and love exploring it, there are so many things I want to do here and I want to share my excitement with others, but I'm just wondering if I'm going in the right direction with my website (which you can see here).

I've tried to make it a bit personal, show my face etc as I feel people trust a face more than just words. The site has been up for about a month and I haven't yet got any organic traffic which is where I think my traffic needs to come from to be successful, hopefully this will just take time to happen.

So I'm just asking you guys for your first impression, if you were coming to London and wondering what X or Y attraction was like, would you trust this website to give you some answers? I know there are countless review sites for things like this, but I was hoping the personal edge would make my site different enough, or is the niche too saturated?

Many thanks

Dan.

That's a nice site you got there Dan. I have a small suggestion here - make affiliate offers visible - I was expecting offers from Hotel.com and the likes on the front page itself which I couldn't find. It's not only about monetizing the site - such ads also give the site a bit more credibility. If a visitor sees car rental services advertised on the site he'd think the website is a "biggie" and something more than just a "personal blog". Just my 2 cents.

Thanks
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danp142 10 years ago

Thanks, I hadn't even thought of promoting hotels but maybe I'll do that!

Regarding social media, I'm struggling slightly. I've already got a couple of hundred followers on both pinterest and tumblr and I find it easy to get more followers on these networks, however I really struggle to get likes and follows on facebook/twitter which I think are far more important.
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blueclcl

10 years ago

I would trust the site..

Create some slides about London and submit them to slideshare..This will help you to get more traffic.

I can't really see your social buttons, so I would make them more visable, so visitors can follow you easier.

Thanks
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Steve B 10 years ago

Dan,

Most of the places (attractions) that you review will probably have a web site. They will appreciate your review. Ask them to reciprocate. See if you can get a link, a small banner, or a "mention" on their site. People who visit one site are likely candidates for visiting other sites in the city.

Steve
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jrigdon73

10 years ago

The site looks great, but personally -- I find the content less than compelling. The problem with London is that its been written about for literally 1,000 years -- especially the tourist attractions. I'd suggest trying to orient you content around your personal experiences and adventures in the capital. Keep in mind -- many tourists want to "do what the locals do."

Thanks
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danp142 10 years ago

I am trying to go for a personalised touch, but my main concern is that it isn't a redundant website and that it looks interesting enough to read the posts.

I'd really like people to interact with the website and leave their own reviews in the comments, unfortunately I haven't been able to find a decent plugin that allowed this...if anyone has any suggestions?

My other concern is actually getting visitors to the site, which is prooving difficult but I'm sure I'll get there.
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- RealEcon 10 years ago
  
  You need to go signup to Adwords, Adroll, or PerfectAudience, and create a retarget cooking and put it on your site. Then create a couple variations of cool branded banners, of the most popular banner sizes.
  
  Run your remarket campaign for a bit and see what sites your previous visitors are coming back to your site from, then do media buys on those sites if they are niche related, as there will probably be others from those sites interested. Also make sure to setup FBX in your retarget campaign.
  
  Create a FB page and do paid promotion for your best blog posts on your FB page. This will bring you traffic that will Like your FB page as well as click through to your blog post and then they like, follow, share, your blog post since you have the social buttons handy on the side.
  
  Before long you will have a nice traffic system/community going, that will also help you rank in google. Since google likes fresh content and pages that are alive and actively getting real traffic.
  
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DavidTile

10 years ago

The website definitely looks good and has an air of authority on your subject. Keep building and growing it!

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danp142 10 years ago

This thread has been moved 3 times now
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Ben Holmes

10 years ago

I'd ask, what are you offering? Is there any questions you could answer for me if I wanted to travel to London? As I can see, you're really just getting started, but I'd sure like to see far more text material than you have right now.

What's the best time of year to go to London?

What are the sights that everyone should see... and the sights that most people miss and shouldn't?

What should foreign visitors know about the food? The prices? Transport? Weather?

When I see a price on your site, is there any way to do a popup that translates that price into dollars, or yen, or whatever? (I don't know... it's just that this would be a useful feature)

If I were traveling tomorrow to London - I'd probably pass over your site as it is right now... it doesn't answer any of my questions.

But the layout is good, the photography is excellent. I'd suggest compressing your graphics, and using progressive jpgs.

I took a look at just one of your photos... it was 765kb in size, and 2304x1748px in size... but you were displaying it on the website as a 620x465px. I fired up my graphics program, and took that 2304x1748 and changed it to 620x465px, and it dropped down to just 42kb - which if my math is correct, is close to just 5% of what your one photo is now. Since a little over 70% of your site's load is just graphics, you'll dramatically speed up your site by paying closer attention to your graphics (which, I must admit, are stunning!)

I realize that you're allowing people to click on the photo for a larger version, but does anyone really need to see something at such an extreme size? It's killing your website speed. You also need a caching plugin.

Run your site through 'webpagetest.com' and see where you can make improvements.

Hope this helps..

P.S. Twice I saw "REIVEWS"... and that View Tube review is something you need a whole lot more of... (Got me hungry reading it...)

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kewkii

10 years ago

The site looks good and more importantly looks good on mobile which is important for a tourist / destination guide kind of site. I have to agree a lot more content is needed, but like you said there are tons of other review sites out there so competing with these may be difficult so maybe change the focus slightly?

I know when visiting a new city its good to see what paid attractions there are and what they offer but I also like to know what I can do for free and what I can do as a family on a budget. Maybe draw up some itineraries for visitors on a budget where they use public transport to visit 'the hidden London'. You could even try to get some of the attractions / businesses on that itinerary route to sponsor it. They'd get some exposure on your site and they could link to your site from theirs.

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savidge4

10 years ago

The site looks really good. The articles read nicely. I would have to agree that this is a site that I would trust with the information given. As someone has already stated the added benefit of having hotels or the like advertising on your site would give it that added boost.

You could easily integrate hotel listings to your site. I would suggest expedia.com for a few reasons, but the primary reason is they have staff that will one on one work with you to integrate their system to your site.

One of the advantages to your site having hotels, would be the ability for you to #1 review the hotel. and #2 specifically review the hotel in relation to the places and events that you are currently writing about. When I travel abroad, I prefer not to drive, and either be in the middle of it all, or 2 hours away at some secluded resort. People that visit London, want to be in the mix. They want to experience a pub, see the Queens Palace, go to Big Ben etc.

this page as an example London Walkabout: Stratford I would suggest is a little short in the text. You were walking around you took some images ( Nice images I might add ) as much as pictures speak 1000 words... Some information for at least some of them might be of interest. Where is the church located? how old is it? etc. University Square? what's that? is it a shopping center? or is it... oh its the College with freekin incredible architecture.

The idea is to connect with the reader.. to educate the reader.. to share your home through the image, and the words that you share. You want to develop an authority site that is great. Part of THAT is being an authority. Don't just show your audience London, take our hand and guide us. Tell me what it is I HAVE GOT TO SEE if I am there only for 2 days. or a week or what ever.

Think about planning out "Royal Tours" List off the must see royal locations. Sports is huge. Where is the best food trucks? Jamon Jamon, or Street Kitchen, or Bhangra Burger? Where do I go for a sip of tea?

you have to think of yourself as the GOTO Guy that everyone in the world is going to rely on.

You really are headed in the right direction! just keep it up. And remember the popularity of London's tourist industry is in your hands!

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danp142

10 years ago

Excellent suggestions everyone, I appreciate people taking their time to look at my site.

I have been meaning to sort out the images as some of them are massive, I'll get on it right away.

I think I've been thinking too much as a Londoner and not as someone who knows little about the city and has just got here for the first time. Saying that, I'm targeting UK visitors to London as well as foreign, so I don't want to be too basic in my approach.

I'm glad at least the consensus is that it looks pretty good, which is great to know.

I'm going to focus on getting as many Facebook likes as possible for my websites page, if I can get discussions on my posts then I'm hoping traffic will take off.

Thanks
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WPExpert

10 years ago

Originally Posted by danp142

Excellent suggestions everyone, I appreciate people taking their time to look at my site.

The thing you have to remember with affiliate marketing, your website is not the destination, its part of the journey. And, literally, its a never ending story.

Now let me throw something else into the ring for you to consider.

Latest Performance Report for: http://www.dayoutinlondon.com/ | GTmetrix

Your site speed metrics are not good. In fact they are well below average.

Website speed has a huge effect on SEO. ‪You need to speed-up your website so search engines will reward you by sending more visitors. Also, conversion rates are far higher for websites that load faster than their slower competitors.

And always remember ~ on your journey ~ follow the money!

Google's revenues are mostly transaction-based. So although their spidering and indexing algorithms change constantly, one thing they always do very well, and that is to avoid putting slow websites in their SERPs.

Because that means they (Google) will make less money.

Shock horror!

[sermon]Design for your visitor, but remember to feed the beast. You need to speed up your website. [/sermon]

Terence.

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kewkii

10 years ago

Originally Posted by WPExpert

Google's revenues are mostly transaction-based. So although their spidering and indexing algorithms change constantly, one thing they always do very well, and that is to avoid putting slow websites in their SERPs.

Because that means they (Google) will make less money.

Shock horror!

Good point! Most people think that the 'issue of speed' is one of losing users before the site loads i.e. people can't wait for more than 4 seconds before clicking on the back button to go back to the SERPs and click on the next entry

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danp142 10 years ago

OK, I'm going to get to work immediately to reduce my sites loading time.

Will I need to re-size and re-upload all my images to improve loading speed, or are there any plugins that help with optimisation? Thanks.
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- Ben Holmes 10 years ago
  
  Will you need to compress and then re-upload your images? As far as I know, yes. I could be wrong...
  
  I bought a graphics program probably a decade or two ago - Paintshop Pro, and it does everything I want... but you can get the open source GIMP - and compress your photos with that. In fact, there's even online sites that will compress your images for you. But I like the control of doing everything myself.
  
  Make sure you have a good caching plugin, perhaps WP Supercache... it'll make a difference.
  
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Carl Donovan

10 years ago

Yeah, it loaded pretty slow. If I were in London and trying to find something to do on my Smartphone, I'd click away in 4 seconds. Other than that, it's pretty darn good.

Thanks
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danp142 10 years ago

Thanks.

I've installed some plugins in order to improve speed (EWWW Image optimizer, WP Smush.it and a cache plugin which I can;t seem to get working) and manually reduce the size of the larger images, so hopefully that should improve things.

I'll keep an eye on website speed as I didn't know that had such an effect on SEO.
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morg2k2

9 years ago

Hi Dan,

As an authority website i think that you need to organize the content in the tourist prospective. So i think you need to build up a couple of categories/tabs/etc...

for example:

What a tourist like to know:

a) Where to stay >>>> a complete list of the top Hotels (lets say 10 hotels of 5 starts/4 stars/3stars/etc)
b) Where to eat >>>> the same about restaurants
c) Nightlife >>> best pubs and clubs
d) City attractions >>> probably you can split by the type of attractions (ex. Museums/Theatres/cinemas/etc)
e) Transports: Cabs/Trams/bus/Rent-a-car , etc

I believe if you can bring all this kind of information to your website you will have a really authority website, so you dont need to do it in a blast but if you achieve this goal i think you will succeed.

This kind of websites should be monetized by Affiliates because i think adsense can damage a bit the design and the user experience of the website. That my vision about it.

In terms of affiliates:

I think you can use:

Booking.com / Tripadvisor for hotels and maybe car rentals (i dont know if they do car rentals)
Check if exist any good affiliate network for restaurants , pubs and nightclubs

another source of monetization maybe 1 banner (big one) when you have a decent traffic from an Hotel, Pub, etc...

I think that should be the roadmap.

Morg

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darkvard

9 years ago

To be honest you should create customized theme for your site like other website have it but again it's suitable for you when you can spend money and also make site more interactive like some deal news and offers .

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Trying to create an authority website.

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