Twelve Years Publishing a Website Has Brought Lessons
I have been publishing GoNOMAD since 2002, twelve years, and I continue to find new intriguing programs and new media to explore and to use to disseminate our travel stories around the web. The articles that are submitted have never been better, the quality of the writers who send in their stories is tremendous. Only a light touch is needed to publish their words, so often written with eloquence and with talent, abundant talent.
As the editor and publisher, you share people’s words but in most cases you never meet them. They remain just clicks on the end of your fingers on the computer. What I find the hardest thing is to keep up with the mountain of articles that are submitted, and to publish just a portion of the big well of content. It’s inspiring and like a kid in a candy store to be able to have so many great stories waiting to be published!
Our role is to provide the best travel articles we can publish, and find the best and brightest photographers and writers. We are succeeding in this regard very well.
In advertising realm, things are far, far different than they once were. Yet there are new ideas, new paths, that could prove just as profitable. Money that used to be easy to make, dried up. ( No link selling, no revenue from that) We have begun working with a company in Northern California who offer re-targeting. This is, sharing a cookie with sites where visitors go when they leave GoNOMAD, so that the customer is identified as a travel consumer. After all, he just left GoNOMAD, a travel site.
The man on the phone promised us a whole lot more money, and I was impressed. Maybe too impressed. But we got a little payment, and I do know that website advertising is a long slog, a steady, slow income, not a big blast, it’s like being paid in quarters, half dollars and silver dollars, instead of by check.
Some times I look back at a paper in a notebook that I wrote in 2004, or 2008, and think, wow, that was five years ago, damn! Five years….feels like a year. You and I and everyone else are flying through their lives. Rocketing too fast, too fast to aging and sagging and …No, think about living and enjoying the ride, think about those fantastic places you might go, or might go again.