PlusOne – Marketing Musings

Time to head downunder for our latest webmaster interview. Laurie has a passion for photography and is exploring ways of mixing this love with earning some money from the internet. It is worth visiting Lauries sites if nothing else that to see his photos.

If you run more than one website. what is the name and URL of your primary website

Wilderness Landscape Photography

The internet provides access to global audiences and markets. Where are you located and is your market influenced by your location?

I’m an Australian, living on the Far South Coast of New South Wales. This is more or less the south eastern corner of the Australian mainland. I’m about half way between Australia’s two major cities: Sydney one way and Melbourne the other. It’s about a day’s drive to either.

Traffic volome to my site is modest. Search engine traffic comes internationally. Articles I’ve distributed also bring international traffic. When I post to an Australian adventure forum I get a flood of Australian traffic.

What were the circumstances that led you to start your site?

Well, I’m an amateur photographer. With a personal need to publish my work at an affordable price, I started a website. I soon found that there was more to it than just the publishing.

If you could see my first site, you’d agree that I’ve come a long way.

What does the site do?

On my Wilderness Landscape Photography site I display photographic images of places without the mark of man. Some are from quite handy to home while others are from the Australian alps and still others from the arid desert in outback South Australia; three entirely different environments: the coast, the mountains and the desert.

Is this your only site?

No. I have three other sites, none of which is finished. They’ve evolved from my photography and the pleasure I find in the landscape and the people. At first I tried to incorporate this material in the wilderness site, but it became clear that it didn’t fit from the search and content relevency viewpoint or for SEO purposes.

Now that I’ve got the hang of creating subdomains, it’s become a simple matter to narowly focus my content.

On the wilderness site there’s a fair bit of information about the ATV. That’s the four wheel motorbike I use to get about the desert. When I get to it, I’ll create another subdomain for that information. I reckon there may be some well paying Google ads associated with the term ATV.

ATV is a very high competition term with lots of big dollar sites. Maybe I can get some worthwhile ranking for such terms such as ATV camp, ATV trailer, ATV trip and ATV ride.

My other three websites are: www.southimage.net/sapphireholiday/, http://www.southimage.net/surfclub/ and http://www.southimage.net/skiing/. With Google ads on these sites I hope to make a quid.

Are you a full time web business person or do you have other income?

My full time job is far removed from photography, computers and the web.

I spend more time at the computer than at work. Too much time! A good proportion of this time is spent on learning and experimenting. Intersperced with this I can get on with the business of web building.

Of course, I’ve still got to find time for photography and the massive amount of preparation required for my upcomming photography trip to the desert. It’s country that will kill you just for being there if you don’t look out.

All this stuff is in the background behind the website.

There are many methods of website promotion. What do you do and which do you think are the most effective?

First up there’s search engine traffic. I’ve got a good enough handle on SEO to get up there, nipping at the heals of the big dollar sites. It’s refreshing to find that there is opportunity for the little person to compete with the big boys despite their hundreds and thousands of backlinks, either purchaced or earned. I compete using focused, relevent, unique content. As time goes on, I’m becoming more firm in my beliefe that although backlinks are a significant factor in SERPs ranking in the big three, a site with many backlinks and diverse content has a battle to keep in front of a small site with focused content and few backlinks.

Then there’s posting to a relevent forum, even a not so relevent forum.

Article writing has worked well for me. It not only gives good backlinks for SEO purposes but traffic directly from the links in the articles. Reproduced articles also provide extra listings in the SERPs which lead indirectly to me via the link in the article.

Where do you see yourself in a few years time?

Well, in a year or two, I’d like to be retired. I’m old enough, you know. Only just old enough, mind you!

Tripping around inhospitable country, photographing, publishing on the web. It would be good to comercialize the venture.

With the learning that’s behind me, I’m within reach of comercial web building of no frills sites for small business.

If you could give two pieces of advice to aspiring or new webmasters/internet business owners, what would they be?

Firstly: Get into a good website building and web business forum. I’ve joined SiteReference. There’s no way known I’d have come where I have without support.

Secondly: Keep your site and your information focused. When people search for information, it’s that information they want, and now. You’re only one click away from oblivion.

For help on keeping focused, see my article on Planning a Website

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If you’d like to ask Laurie a question, or comment on his experiences, feel free to drop him a question via comments.

If you would like to be interviewed, please drop me an email with a bit of background.
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