Turning A Vacation Into A Profit Machine

[SkyrocketSEO]

The majority of the things we saw were free as they were natural.

https://www.blackhatworld.com/seo/iceland-is-incredible-pic-heavy-thread.937914/

I am glad you had a wonderful time. Nice pics as well, great contribution to the money obsessed forum.

 

[Sherb]

I am glad you had a wonderful time. Nice pics as well, great contribution to the money obsessed forum.

Thanks a lot, Skyrocket! While money is a passion of mine, I try not to let it run my life.

UPDATE

Still way behind schedule. The past two weeks have been a blur of moving, unpacking, interviewing for some solid jobs, paperwork, and all the other shit that comes along with moving to a new state. Luckily, I'm going to have 12+ hours on Monday and Tuesday to get work done, and I'd like to dedicate at least four hours each of those two days to chipping away at this project.

I finally finalized which images I wanted to have on the website. That's right, it only took five weeks. I put a pin in that and sent the images to my Web Property Consultant. She uploaded them all to the website, and WP Smush Pro handled the image compression part of it for me.

I haven't done any social media work in a while, but am currently sitting at 885 targeted followers on Twitter and 406 followers on Instagram. I'll hit those two hard on Monday and Tuesday as well. I know I can follow something like 40 new people on Instagram every five minutes, so I'll be doing that to my heart's content. I'd like to have Instagram up to 1,500 followers by end of month, and Twitter at over 2,000.

I have put continued work into the home page content as well, and crossed 2,000 words yesterday. This page will probably close in at around 7,500 words or so when I am complete. Then I hit the inner pages. I've also been stabilizing the videos I've taken, and want to do a site introduction video montage, as well as upload individual waterfall snippets to YouTube in a "Waterfalls of Iceland" playlist. I've got ~15 or so of them. Most of the large ones on the Ring Road. Might be good for some AdSense income over time.

Still contributing to /r/visitingiceland on Reddit as well. Building a trust base there, and it's working pretty well. Once the site is complete and 100%, I will be dropping pages and media weekly leading to my site.

Expect a major update in the next 10 days or so!

 

[Floopa75]

Thanks a lot, Skyrocket! While money is a passion of mine, I try not to let it run my life.

UPDATE

Still way behind schedule. The past two weeks have been a blur of moving, unpacking, interviewing for some solid jobs, paperwork, and all the other shit that comes along with moving to a new state. Luckily, I'm going to have 12+ hours on Monday and Tuesday to get work done, and I'd like to dedicate at least four hours each of those two days to chipping away at this project.

What state did you move to?

 

[Deleted member 719276]

What state did you move to?

 

[Sherb]

UPDATE

The home page was turning into a monster. It was going to top out at over 8,000 words. That was no bueno. So I split each day out into its own page and linked to it on the home page. Currently on day three for the expanded versions. The home page I have decided on a final FINAL layout:

- Introduction
- How site navigation works
-- Links for each day
- Day 1 heading
-- Four main image thumbnails
-- Bulleted list for attractions, food, and lodging
(repeat the above three for days 2 through 8)
- Links to other pages, canvas prints, etc

I'm at Day Five for the home page now and the word count is hovering around 1800. I'd imagine it will end around 3,000 or so words total for the home page.

When I last posted eleven days ago my Twitter was at 885 and Instagram at 406. Since then I received a PM from a member stating that icelandin8days was available again on Instagram as a username. So I grabbed it, stupidly starting a new accounts instead of renaming the old one. So I started from zero. Now, the Twitter is around 1,200, and the new Instagram is already over 1,250 followers. I've posted several images on Instagram, and all have received between 100 and 200+ likes and several comments. People are tagging me in relevant images as well.

I am doing the follower churning method with relevant accounts to obtain followers on both social media accounts. Twitter I hit the 5,000 follow limit, so I started using ManageFlitter to unfollow those who were spammy, inactive, or not following back. Has worked out okay thus far, although I am going to put far more eggs in the Instagram basket.

I'm currently getting between 20 and 40 visitors a day. 60% through Instagram, 10% through Twitter, the rest via organic search or other methods.

Here is my new timeline:

• By end of day 6/28: Get home page completed
• 6/29: Finish Day 3 expanded
• 6/30: Finish Day 4 expanded
• 7/1: Finish Day 5 expanded
• 7/2: Finish Day 6 expanded
• 7/3: Finish Day 7 expanded
• 7/4: Finish Day 8 expanded
• 7/5: Do all necessary linking and formatting in those pages to consider them all 100% complete

I am researching additional income streams as well, including things such as Fine Art America and 500px. More to come on that later. Remember when I wanted this to be a simple one page site and be done in 30 days? Yeah, that's out the window. Call it scope creep or whatever. With 80 pages of deep information to go after the above are done, I'm going to stretch this goal out to the end of the year.

I'll check back in in a week to 10 days with another update.

 

[Sherb]

Just kidding, I'll check in now.

UPDATE

Finally meeting my own deadlines. The home page is complete! 4,100 words and 32 images with dozens of links and a solid how-to-use explanation. Minimal design, all that's needed are hyperlinks to some soon-to-be-created blog posts, and maybe a little better formatting with the bulleted list headings. Feel free to check it out and chop it up critique-wise:

http://icelandin8days.com/

Another 200+ new followers on Instagram since yesterday's update. That is here for those interested (https://www.instagram.com/icelandin8days/) Put an image up an hour ago and it's already crossed 100 likes from relevant accounts. It's a good feeling, knowing that people are enjoying images I took. I grabbed about 150 of the nicest pictures from the trip and placed them in a separate folder for posting on Instagram, so I've got daily images for another five months at least.

Spike in new website visitors as well, almost double the past highest day. Was between 20 and 30 visitors a day without any real promotions outside my Instagram and Twitter descriptions. Today it's already at over 55 visitors (before putting the link in this post here). Bounce rate is 73%... I need to work on lowering that. That will hopefully change with the finished home page, and will decrease as more content is added. Average session duration at over a minute.

Slow but steady growth. I like it.

 

[Sherb]

UPDATE

Going to be finishing the expanded day 3 article this evening. Did some responding to /r/visitingiceland questions. Posted three images to Instagram, and now utilizing hashtags better:

https://www.instagram.com/p/BV6vUr2hw17/?taken-by=icelandin8days 206 likes in 10 hours
https://www.instagram.com/p/BV69EZuhrKh/?taken-by=icelandin8days 203 likes in 8 hours
https://www.instagram.com/p/BV7rSCcBRPl/?taken-by=icelandin8days 99 likes in... 1 hour

Up to 1,718 followers, that's closing in on 300 for the day. Instagram is definitely performing better than Twitter, which is at 1,261 currently.

Bounce rate on the site down to ~70% and falling. Average session duration crept up eight seconds as well.

I finished stabilizing all the video clips I took while on the trip. I think I may create gifs from them, make an imgur album, and link to my site in the album description, then post to /r/travel and cross post to /r/visitingiceland. Before I do that, though, I'll pop a text ad block up on the home page to see how that works out. Just to test the waters.

So, current strategy:

• Continue organically growing Instagram account and posting, Twitter as well.
• Continue subreddit interaction.
• Add text AdSense block to home page.
• Finish the daily pages by end of day 7/5.
• Create gif album from trip... called "moving Iceland" or something. Link to site.
• Begin long process of extending articles for each spot stopped (there are over 70).

-SH

 

[Sherb]

UPDATE

Surely you were betting for me to have not written any content to the website yet again, and instead focused on increasing the "brand" and "engagement" of a site that is literally less than 10% complete content-wise?

That is correct. That's what I did.

Between working on my content writing service, publishing an ebook to Kindle Unlimited, hiring a new VA to handle Twitter automation, updating a few of my other project websites, handling my multiple reputation management clients, and going on several solid job interviews, as well as shit-talking https://www.blackhatworld.com/seo/fiverr-pro-is-horse-shit.952655/ and a member who thought poor people were selfish assholes... when the time came around to sit down and write on my Iceland site I wanted to smash my head into a wall.

That doesn't mean I didn't do the branding and engagement work though. That part is fun.

Twitter was at 1,261 on Thursday. It's sitting at 1,436 now. It's run through the Twitter automation gauntlet one time since then, so an increase of 160 or so is pretty phenomenal.

Instagram was at 1,718 on Thursday. I've been actively follow churning to the point where I capped out the 7,500 followings and hired a service to slowly unfollow over the course of a week everyone who wasn't following me back. So I took a couple days off from following, and now I'm back at it again.

What's my follower count up to? Glad you asked. 2,372.

Still posting three new posts per day. The least popular post this week has a little under 150 likes currently (https://www.instagram.com/p/BWFfILVBSsu/). The most popular? 366 (https://www.instagram.com/p/BWAx4g1B1hP/). Remember, these are all images taken by me, so it gets me in the feel goods when people actually appreciate my shit.

I took all my stabilized videos and uploaded them to YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCHTGjIclgoR5XlI9Iot9uFw. Rousing non-success, but I didn't do it for the views. I did it for the Imgur video to GIF feature, which I utilized. Then I took those gifs and plan to submit one every one to three days in the visitingiceland subreddit. Two are already done. They are two of the most upvoted posts this month (https://www.reddit.com/user/icelandin8days/submitted/). I also submitted some minimalist photography there, and two posts to EarthPorn that did subpar, but still brought some dripped in traffic.

What about that traffic?

Last time I updated, the seven day rolling average had the average session duration around 1 minute 10 seconds, and the bounce rate at 70%. Traffic has dropped slightly into the 40's, but the quality has skyrocketed. We are talking a 10% drop in bounce rate and doubling of average session duration to over two minutes.

So, goals for this week:

• Actually do some writing.
• Continue posting to Instagram, Reddit.
• Have my new VA properly handle the Twitter account growth, posting and automation.
• Whatever other brilliant ideas I have.

 

[Heiko]

UPDATE

Surely you were betting for me to have not written any content to the website yet again, and instead focused on increasing the "brand" and "engagement" of a site that is literally less than 10% complete content-wise?

That is correct. That's what I did.

Between working on my content writing service, publishing an ebook to Kindle Unlimited, hiring a new VA to handle Twitter automation, updating a few of my other project websites, handling my multiple reputation management clients, and going on several solid job interviews, as well as shit-talking Fiverr Pro and a member who thought poor people were selfish assholes... when the time came around to sit down and write on my Iceland site I wanted to smash my head into a wall.

That doesn't mean I didn't do the branding and engagement work though. That part is fun.

Twitter was at 1,261 on Thursday. It's sitting at 1,436 now. It's run through the Twitter automation gauntlet one time since then, so an increase of 160 or so is pretty phenomenal.

Instagram was at 1,718 on Thursday. I've been actively follow churning to the point where I capped out the 7,500 followings and hired a service to slowly unfollow over the course of a week everyone who wasn't following me back. So I took a couple days off from following, and now I'm back at it again.

What's my follower count up to? Glad you asked. 2,372.

Still posting three new posts per day. The least popular post this week has a little under 150 likes currently (https://www.instagram.com/p/BWFfILVBSsu/). The most popular? 366 (https://www.instagram.com/p/BWAx4g1B1hP/). Remember, these are all images taken by me, so it gets me in the feel goods when people actually appreciate my shit.

I took all my stabilized videos and uploaded them to YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCHTGjIclgoR5XlI9Iot9uFw. Rousing non-success, but I didn't do it for the views. I did it for the Imgur video to GIF feature, which I utilized. Then I took those gifs and plan to submit one every one to three days in the visitingiceland subreddit. Two are already done. They are two of the most upvoted posts this month (https://www.reddit.com/user/icelandin8days/submitted/). I also submitted some minimalist photography there, and two posts to EarthPorn that did subpar, but still brought some dripped in traffic.

What about that traffic?

Last time I updated, the seven day rolling average had the average session duration around 1 minute 10 seconds, and the bounce rate at 70%. Traffic has dropped slightly into the 40's, but the quality has skyrocketed. We are talking a 10% drop in bounce rate and doubling of average session duration to over two minutes.

So, goals for this week:

• Actually do some writing.
• Continue posting to Instagram, Reddit.
• Have my new VA properly handle the Twitter account growth, posting and automation.
• Whatever other brilliant ideas I have.

I'm not going to bring you in money, but i did subscribe to your Instagram, cause i love Iceland and these pictures are truly amazing. If your out of videos, then i guess its time to go back to Iceland, huh?

EDIT: If you are looking for some more social media traffic. Maybe Stumbleupon and WeHeartIt would appreciate these pictures. Especially Stumbleupon!

 

[hippo123]

Great work mate! Keep the updates going

 

[Minnehaha]

I just flew to Iceland on Iceland Air from minnesota. After alot of digging found a $100 ticket on skycanner (then 5 days later $90 ticket to frankfurt). Maybe cheap flights is something you talk about on your site.
I think alot of people don't realize it is cheapest place to fly to in Europe. They have a bunch of special stop-over deals to attract tourists, anyone going to europe should make a pit-stop in Iceland on the way. If you couch surf or stay in hostels dosen't add much cost

 

[Sherb]

UPDATE

Big update.

I realized how terrible the old theme looked, and that it was even worse on mobile, so I scrapped the theme and replaced it with a nice version of The Voux. It looks so much better.

Before:

After:

A little bit different, right? I don't know what I was thinking before. Even I, the most minimalist web designer I know, would turn away from a page that looked like a wall of text, especially if it was supposed to be a travel site.

Back to business.

FINALLY finished all eight days of expanded journey itinerary. Why did this take me so long? Here are the word counts:

• Daily summary: 4101
• Day 1: 973
• Day 2: 1343
• Day 3: 1421
• Day 4: 1751
• Day 5: 1896
• Day 6: 2010
• Day 7: 1688
• Day 8: 1750

That's 17,000 words of itinerary, with a few hundred pictures throughout those nine pages and links all throughout. I'm pretty happy with the end result. I also mapped out some ancillary posts, which are my next step to get written out before expanding even deeper into pages, monetizing, and beginning traffic generation and high-profile advertising.

Those posts include:

• Where to find fuel, and how to handle the PIN situation when traveling from the US
• Overrated places to avoid, and underrated attractions to not miss
• Understanding Icelandic currencies and how to pay for things (a highly cashless society)
• Navigating Keflavik International Airport, and how to get to the car rental area
• A list of some hidden gems in Reykjavik that some might overlook
• The most highly rated places to stay while traveling in Iceland (comparison, from our experiences)
• Itinerary comparison: Reykjavik as a base versus a Ring Road journey
• Blue Lagoon versus Myvatn Nature Baths: pros and cons
• The best gear for your Iceland trip is far less expensive than you’d think

And a few more that I'm sure I'll think up as I go. I want to have ten up before I "officially" launch the full site, and then do one every two weeks afterwards, with a solid methodology for how to promote these new posts after posting.

Still contributing to /r/visitingiceland relatively regularly. I handed over the reigns to the Twitter to a VA I've been using part-time. That following has slowed greatly due to account-related issues, but is still at 1637.

Instagram on the other hand. My god. Follower count crossed 4,000 earlier today and is still growing, so almost doubled in 17 days. I'm getting an average of 300-450 likes per post now, as well as comments and engagements. I'm also responding to DM's and liking posts people tag me in, which happens a couple times a day. Gotta keep that rapport going.

Traffic has slowed a bit. This is fine, as I'm not currently itching to really hit the traffic game until I'm all done developing.

Over the last 28 days, 775 users, 56.45% bounce rate, 2m 26s average site time.
Over the last 7 days, 125 users, 39.87% bounce rate (right in the "excellent" range), 4m 26s average site time. People are reading!

Next step goals:

• Get the Instagram to 5,000 followers in the next week or so
• Continuing daily posting to Instagram, keep up with VA on Twitter posting
• Work out some additional streams of income opportunities on the site (aiming for 10 unique but under-the-radar income streams besides AdSense)
• Get the formatting on the side down and solid
• Add those ten ancillary blog posts to the site, get them all imaged out and SEO'ed
• Look into some ecommerce opportunities for prints/canvases
• Make a list of at least 200 travel blog posts with comments enabled that are relevant, capture all stats for future commenting in longform (SEO+traffic hybrid, yo)

Expect another post in a week or so with an update.

 

[iwillnbd]

Great journey!
The photos are brilliant! What camera did you use to capture them ?

Is the Instagram account set on a proxy? and are you still manually following/unfollowing?

 

[Nic00B]

I just finished reading this amazing journey ...fell in love with iceland and you got +1 follower in instagram
hehe

 

[Sherb]

UPDATE

Yeah, I didn't do much this week. Between my current workload and working with a potential new client on a large-scale project, there wasn't much time for me to devote to the Iceland projects.

That being the case, I have been keeping up with the subreddit posting and Instagram haul, and the VA has been handling growing the Twitter account.

Instagram hit me with the "you can only follow 40 accounts at a time on mobile now". All good, I still am killing it. Up to 4,800+ followers already, about 40 days into growing the account. No complaints here. It still accounts for a good percentage of my traffic.

The Twitter is up at 2,000 followers now. starting to experience some more growth after a good bit of stalling.

There was a post on /r/earthporn from Vik, Iceland, and I capitalized on that opportunity, albeit a little too late. Ended up getting my URL out there though on a miniature level. With ~30 visits average per day over the past 28 days, the 23rd brought me 88 visitors. I'll take it. Slow and steady.

Last week's 28-day stats: 775 users, 56.45% bounce rate, 2m 26s average site time
This week's 28-day stats: 810 users, 51.91% bounce rate, 3m 4s average site time

My top visiting countries are: US, Canada, Australia, Germany, Iceland, UK, Italy, India, Spain, and France. No garbage traffic here.

 

[davids355]

Great idea for a site. Sounds like it's going well also.

 

[Only$$$]

Cool journey, your Instagram results are doing great with this niche. Goodluck , will follow this one

 

[Sherb]

UPDATE

As stated last week: I didn't do much this week. Between my current workload, content writing, and working with a potential new client on a large-scale project, there wasn't much time for me to devote to the Iceland projects.

I did add, edit, and format a solid post on the site, though (written in part by a fellow BHW member): http://icelandin8days.com/myvatn-nature-baths-vs-blue-lagoon/

I'm putting some good time into it today though. I carved out a couple hours solely for this project. I also tossed several projects I was throwing small chunks of time into on the backburner to make my priorities: Day job, current/potential client load, content writing, Iceland site.

That being said, I was at 4,800 Instagram followers last Sunday, and now I'm closing in on 6,300. I hired out the unfollowing process again about a week ago, so now I'm only following ~3,000 and dropping. I'll push that back up to 7,000 and then re-order the unfollowings.

A couple weeks ago I was thrilled that my images were getting 350-400 likes per post. Now I'm looking at between 450 and 650. Rocking 637 and growing on this one: https://www.instagram.com/p/BXXWYVehk9w/?taken-by=icelandin8days.

The Twitter is closing in on 2,200 followers. Again, I'm not focusing on that anywhere as much as the Instagram, and have actually completely outsourced the growth of that account (along with 10 other accounts) to one of @santhej's VA's, who is doing a stellar job.

Two weeks back's 28-day stats: 775 users, 56.45% bounce rate, 2m 26s average site time
Last week's 28-day stats: 810 users, 51.91% bounce rate, 3m 4s average site time
This week's 28-day stats: 766 users, 46.98% bounce rate, 3m 33s average site time

I like watching the bounce rate fall and time on site increase.

This week I'm adding more posts, working on the site profile, and incorporating a bit of advertising finally.

 

[daverawcus]

You sound like fun to go on holiday with.

 

[Only$$$]

UPDATE

As stated last week: I didn't do much this week. Between my current workload, content writing, and working with a potential new client on a large-scale project, there wasn't much time for me to devote to the Iceland projects.

I did add, edit, and format a solid post on the site, though (written in part by a fellow BHW member): http://icelandin8days.com/myvatn-nature-baths-vs-blue-lagoon/

I'm putting some good time into it today though. I carved out a couple hours solely for this project. I also tossed several projects I was throwing small chunks of time into on the backburner to make my priorities: Day job, current/potential client load, content writing, Iceland site.

That being said, I was at 4,800 Instagram followers last Sunday, and now I'm closing in on 6,300. I hired out the unfollowing process again about a week ago, so now I'm only following ~3,000 and dropping. I'll push that back up to 7,000 and then re-order the unfollowings.

A couple weeks ago I was thrilled that my images were getting 350-400 likes per post. Now I'm looking at between 450 and 650. Rocking 637 and growing on this one: https://www.instagram.com/p/BXXWYVehk9w/?taken-by=icelandin8days.

The Twitter is closing in on 2,200 followers. Again, I'm not focusing on that anywhere as much as the Instagram, and have actually completely outsourced the growth of that account (along with 10 other accounts) to one of @santhej's VA's, who is doing a stellar job.

Two weeks back's 28-day stats: 775 users, 56.45% bounce rate, 2m 26s average site time
Last week's 28-day stats: 810 users, 51.91% bounce rate, 3m 4s average site time
This week's 28-day stats: 766 users, 46.98% bounce rate, 3m 33s average site time

I like watching the bounce rate fall and time on site increase.

This week I'm adding more posts, working on the site profile, and incorporating a bit of advertising finally.

Hmm, it seems like you don't monetize your website yet, why not?