HoboTraveler.com Recession of 2009

HoboTraveler.com Recession of 2009

HoboTraveler.com Recession of 2009
HoboTraveler.com website is in a recession, there has been two quarters of receding growth on the whole site. I would guesstimate it is a 30-40 percent reduction in traffic and income.

It is difficult to pinpoint the exact reasons, and I would be hesitant to blame it on the economy of the world.

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Kisoro, Uganda
East Africa
Thursday, May 14, 2009
Hotels in Kisoro, Uganda
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Ever since Google.com went public, there has been a general trend for their algorithm to benefit the larger companies that buy clicks and the organic searches are suffering. It appears to be more about Brand and less about good SEO structure, while small Mom and Pop sites of less than 20,000 pages should fare well; however site larger than this seem to need stronger branding or offline presence, they need to seek paper…

While the general traffic has gone done, the Travel Journal Traffic has doubled since the removal of the RSS feed. Plus, leaving both the Blogger.com and Wordpress systems and creating our own proprietary system has also helped traffic.

We will proceed to Brand the Travel Journal and leverage this to create and offline presence in the paper media.

HoboTraveler.com was named as one of the top Ten Travel Blogs in the world by National Geographic a couple of months ago. This is online, I am not sure why, however there are few list of this that reach magazine or newspapers.

I have taken a stronger lead in management of HoboTraveler.com and HoboHideOut.com. Having presently went to a system of giving Boy Genius from India daily priority task. This I believe will turn around the traffic as I can focus him on jobs that create higher traffic. Techs left to their own tend to focus on challenging projects, that are too complicated and not clearly for marketing and SEO purposes. Generally bogging down in layers of ineffective confusion whereby there is no measurable progress. I feel that we need to make easily defined changes to the sites that can be completed in components that take no more than two days.

If you have noticed, I am generally adding at least one photo or graphic to each post, generally making the travel journal more like articles and less like a diary. I have completed given up on the idea that the travel journal is my personal diary. I have a goal of 40,000 daily readers.

COST REDUCTION

Airfare:
For the next couple of years, I will try to limit my long haul airplane flights to about two times per year and discontinue the short flights when possible.

Room Cost:
The Verizon BlackBerry Storm has been a great money saver because I now can live in cheaper hotels and can avoid the expensive larger cities. In the past I needed to find Hotels with WIFI in the rooms so I could update pages, this doubles the prices of room, the Global Data service has allowed me to cut the budget for rooms in half. Generally, this is achieved because there is no need to visit the large and boring cities. I have avoided Nairobi, Kenya, and Kampala, Uganda, and plan on skipping Kigali, Rwanda, just a few days in larger metropolitan areas will double the budget, with no true cultural or tourist benefits.

I can again cut the room cost in half if I decide needed by choosing rooms with shared showers if needed.

If you read closely, the traffic on the Travel Journal has doubled, and I believe this will again double in the next three months, and in the next year, it will be bigger than the whole site has been for the last five years.

HoboHideOut.com has 1000 Hotels on it, and when it reaches 15,000 Hotel, the critical mass needed for rapid expansion will be achieved. There is a need of at least 15,000 Hotels to be of functional value to user looking for Hotels, while as of present is already of value to the Hotels.

I am receiving about one donation per month of about 30 US Dollars.
Generally, I do not expect readers to understand this or care, however for the extreme minority who wish to understand the internet business this may be valuable. I did not try to make this incredibly clear; the confusion I believe facilitates understanding more than clarity in this instance.

HoboTraveler.com Recession of 2009