Interview with CouchSurfingOri.com – “I learned to delegate more. Fighting a hacker is not the best return of my time!” » Blogger

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Interview with CouchSurfingOri.com – “I learned to delegate more. Fighting a hacker is not the best return of my time!”

Veröffentlicht am 30. Januar 2010
Tags: Englischsprachig

Please introduce yourself and your website.
My name is Ori Bengal, but I’m fairly well known as Couchsurfing Ori…. Just like my website, CouchSurfingOri.com which I use to share my adventures, artwork, and life.

Why did you start it?
I started my journey because my lease was running up on my Ft. Lauderdale highrise, and I get bored easily. Rather than renew my lease, I decided to travel around the country, completely based on “Who’s couch am I crashing on next?”. The website just seemed like a logical extension to the journey.

Where do you get the new content?
I have been the admin, blogger, graphic designer, video shooter/editor, SEO guy, copywriter, promoter. I just travel around, looking for great new people and adventures…. So, living an interesting life is how I get new content.

How do you promote your site, what works and what doesn’t?
I talk to people, I go places, I share what I study sometimes. I’m heavy into FB / Twitter usage.

I am known as “The most highly skilled hobo in history” because I do so many things for my clients (photography, videography, training, marketing strategies, copywriting, ppc, seo, graphic design, and much more) , and that’s how I pay for my journeys. I even hold an occasional workshop.

Any hints for our readers to get more traffic on their website?
If I had a tip for your readers to get results, it’s to be consistent. A good friend told me to blog at minimum 3 times a week. Once I started blogging more frequently, my traffic started growing. Also, make sure you check your analytics (Google analytics is great, but I’ve really been enjoying WordPress.com stats plugin)—this will tell you what people like, and you can give them more of it, or promote those things more heavily.

Build relationships… that’s what it’s really all about. Ask questions, provide value, and reply to the people that engage. Contests are also very powerful ways of getting eyeballs and interaction.

In retrospect, what would you do differently?
In retrospect, I would learn to delegate much more. Fighting a hacker, tweaking a theme, or customizing a script… those are things that I can do, but that are not the best return of my time. I would rather pay someone – after I find someone who’s qualified and reliable, to do the work that slows me down. I would also add video much sooner….

And I would have set up my radio show much sooner (http://CouchsurfingOri.com/Radio) – as that is a great way to engage experts, and that translates into wonderful opportunities as well.

Can you give us some facts and figures about your site?
Currently, there are 490 posts, 30 categories, 1296 tags, 706 comments. Over the last 30 days: 4,711 visits / 7,026 pageviews / 1.49 Pages per visit.

The site went live in 2006… but really on January 1, 2007, the 1^st day of my journey.

Any tips for people just starting out?
People starting out should definitely make time to create daily content… at least for the first 6 months. Include photos, make sure to use alt tags, description tags, and interact with the various forums and communities out there for your topic. That will help you find readers, will help generate traffic and backlinks to your site, and will prove to the search engines that you are legit.