Done Waiting for the Big Day

I am learning this the hard way. To create a good travel website is one thing, to get people to go to it is quite another. I have read the books on Search Engine optimization, I have studied the tricks of the trade, and I only learned that attracting web traffic is a lot of work. I am only a pubescent newbie on this internet ship, but I now know that this project is perhaps the deepest black hole that I have jumped into yet. One question answered just leads me to ten more.

I love big projects.

Maintaining a website is an everyday task, and almost takes a certain degree of obsessiveness to keep up with it and the latest search engine standards, rules, and regulations. To slack for even a couple of days, is to watch your web traffic plummet. I am thinking now that a few month break from traveling so that I can get the Vagabond Journey.com site in good order could be extremely beneficial.

This is a real job. It is plain and simple. I need $400- $500 a month to continue this tramp around the world. That is not much money. If I could catch this from the websites, I would be flying high.

Even though I will still always be working. A website is not for the lazy. I figure that I generally put in 4-8 hour shifts a day creating, researching, and writing webpages. I do not mind working this much. I enjoy doing work for myself.

I love big projects.

I use to think that something would break and one day I would check my site meter to find that I am attracting 1,000 visitors to my site a day. This probably will not happen soon. But if I keep at it, I think that I will get close, and, someday, may even get beyond this number.

I have been getting more and more traffic regularly, but it has been an uphill battle all the way.

Mira figures that, under usual circumstances, you get around one visitor a day for ever five pages that you put up. This does not really go off of any mathematical principle, but it seems to be correct. Therefore, if you have fifty pages, you will get around 10 unique visitors, 500 pages gets you 100, 5000 attracts 1000, and 50,000 nets you 10,000 people. Like Chinese medicine, this is based off nothing other than observation. I am now getting between 100 and 140 unique visitors a day. This is nothing. Though it is more than what I was getting. I am doing something right; I am working hard; I enjoy this.

This is kind of like fishing. I design the tackle, bait the hook, toss it out into a good lily pond over a sink hole, and wait for the fish. Right now I am still waiting. I am now getting a few nibbles . . . soon, I think I will set the hook.

I think it is now about time to go on another link hunting campaign. Webpages are ranked and defined by the number, quality, and type of back-links that lead to them. It is a very annoying process trying to get people to link your site and something that I do not really like doing. Simply put, I feel like a schumuck asking people for links and leaving faux comments on blogs only to sign off with my URL. I have just about given up on the above two methods for getting links. If I leave a comment, I mean it.

Oh yeah, feel free to link www.VagabondJourney.com hehehe.

I have just began putting some posts and articles up for syndication on some other websites in order to spread my URL around a little. I realized that various sites are just taking this information without my approval anyway, so I may as well just give it away haha. I threw a few articles that I wrote in India and China over to Ezinearticles.com and I am just waiting to find out what will come of it. I just wonder what the effects search engine regulations against content duplication has on article syndication. It is my understanding that if you have pages with duplicate content on the same site, the search engines will recognize only one page and ignore the duplicates, but if the duplicate content is on different sites the search engines will pick and index them both. . . even though the content is the same. Therefore, it is fine to syndicate articles across the internet without fear that your site will be penalized by the search engines for using duplicate content.

But I have received contrary information to this by some pretty informed travelers, and I have yet to really figure it out. Does anybody really know about this? Does syndicating articles invite search engine penalties?

There is a lot to this stuff. Prior to diving into this pit, I though that I could just write, publish, and be read. It is not that simple. There is a lot to know, and I think I like learning about it.

Ultimately, I write these websites because I love doing it. If it pays off, then I will have the time and gravity to work on these sites some more. But if it doesn’t then I will still continue on with the same exuberance. If this was not fun, I would not do it.

Goals and ambitions are solely for the pure enjoyable jest of it anyway. This is all a joke, you know.

I love big projects.

I love big jokes.

And I am finished waiting for the big day.