Outdoor Vancouver Turns 1

Well, its been a year since I started blogging and created Outdoor Vancouver. Here’s a look back at the beginning, the highlights, what I’ve learned, and what’s next!

Recap & Learnings

After searching the web for a Vancouver focused outdoors blog and not finding anything (besides one that hadn’t been updated in over a year), I thought it might be fun to start a website. I originally set the site up on Blogspot.com. I was learning to do everything as I went, and the site was pretty crude. I found that I was actually able to keep up with new posts frequently, and was not having any trouble finding stuff to write about. In fact, I don’t have enough time to write as much as I would like on Outdoor Vancouver. Seeing as I was enjoying running the site, and was actually getting a little traffic, I decided to fork out the money for web hosting and switched over to WordPress.org, and started the site as it exists today. There is still room for a lot of improvement, but gradually the site is growing.

Since April 30, 2008 I’ve written 256 posts or 0.7 / day.

I’ve learned a lot since starting Outdoor Vancouver. I find my subconscious mind is always thinking ‘hey, that would be a good thing to post about on the site’. Whether I’m hiking a new trail, going bungee jumping, or reading the newspaper, my mind seems to be taking notes about things to write about. Because of this, and the subsequent research on various topics, I’ve been able to learn quite a bit about different things going on around the city. I’ve also been inspired to try new activities, next on the list is rock climbing.

I’ve also learned that Vancouver has a pretty tight, friendly, & social blogging / social media community. This is one thing I had not considered at all when I started the blog, but has been one of the biggest highlights for me. I’ve ‘digitally’ met some really cool people, and discovered some cool blogs, that I otherwise probably wouldn’t have. People like @Tawcan, @Hummingbird604, @Seeking_balance, @VancityAllie, @TylerIngram, @Monicahamburg, and many more, who I’ve met by them commenting on this blog, me finding their blog, or via Twitter. I’ve also learned a lot from these people and their blogs, which has been great. They all have their own style, area of expertise and/ or quirkiness that makes reading their blogs both entertaining and a great learning experience.

I have yet to attend a Tweetup, Bloggers meetup, WordPress camp, Twestival, Northern Voice, Third Tuesday etc, etc, etc (I said they’re a social bunch) and I regret not having been more social myself. This is largely because I have just seen my son turn 1, and spending time with my family has been a priority over the last year. After work, I seldom have the chance to head out to these events, although I want to make more of an honest effort to get out in the future to some events and meet these people face to face.

Traffic

The picture is a snapshot of my daily traffic over the last year (since moving to WordPress in June). As you can see, things started off slow, but I’m now averaging about 100 – 130  visitors/ day. I have no idea if this is good or bad compared to other blogs, but I’m fairly happy with it (especially considered my theme is IE challenged, more on that to come).

Financials

When I started the site I was on Blogger.com but found it limited, and also read that self-hosting would help get traffic to the site because of a much higher Google search ranking. I ended up forking out $166.80 for 2 years of hosting with Dreamhost, and paid about $10 for the domain name = $93.40 for the first year (switched over in June) and that works out to $7.78/ month to run this site.

I do get a little bit of revenue from the Google Ads scattered around, and have also recently done 2 sponsored posts for $20 bucks (I know I’m a sell-out :) ). All told, in the first year I’ve earned $65 from Google Ads + $20 for the sponsored posts (I’ve also been mailed a few magazines, received a good discount on a camping knife, got a free survival kit and things like that), but earnings work out to $7.08 / month.

So I’m just below break-even in the first year. (Assuming my labor and many hours posting are worth nothing of course, but I obviously don’t do it for the large sums of money).

The Future

So why do I do it? Well, I guess because its fun. I enjoy it. It’s really cool when students in China have e-mailed me asking if they can use my snowboarding pictures for their school newspaper, when different groups ask if I will post about their upcoming event/ project, when people email me asking for hiking suggestions for their upcoming trip to Vancouver, and when people comment/ engage with my posts. It’s also great that I have a medium to get information I find interesting out to a receptive audience, for example posting about Holista foods (local company) ceasing to sell shark-cartilage capsules.

So I don’t have any big changes planned, just to keep plugging away. Getting back to the IE-challengedness of this site (alignment issues, not even working on certain versions) I plan to change themes at some point, but that is a big undertaking time-wise as I can’t remember all the mods I made to this one for various plugins and so forth. However, if I want the site to keep growing I figure I should stop alienating 39% of the people who visit the site. Switch to Firefox people!

Lastly (but not least), thanks to all the regular visitors, I appreciate all the comments and emails and hope you find this site useful!