Name of your website?Jerusalem Insider's Guide
Your name?
Myriam
Your Location (city, etc)
Jerusalem
Please give us a short summary of your website?
This is a travel guide to Jerusalem, with reviews of hotels and restaurants, and tips for sightseeing. I also include a lot about Jerusalem history.
What inspired you to launch your own website?
I'm a freelance writer and I love Jerusalem. I was looking for a way to write articles on what I actually enjoy writing about and still possibly make some income from my work. I had also spend a lot of time showing off the city to visiting friends and family, so I thought - why not share this with even more people?
When did you launch your first website, and what was it?
This was my first website. It went live in March 2008.
How did you decide on a name for your website?
The "insider's guide" seemed to encapsulate what I wanted the website to be - the view of a real person who lives in Jerusalem and loves it, and not a slick commercial or official portal.
What makes your website different from other, similar offerings?
As its name implies, this is an "inside" view, from a local. The official portals are by nature somewhat impersonal. My site is based on personal experiences - when I give tips for visiting a holy site or review a Jerusalem restaurant, I'm writing about actual excursions or restaurant meals with my children, for example.
I also have great reverence for the city's religious and historic importance and cultural diversity - I'm not trying to be slick, hip or cool just to attract tourists. Jerusalem is a spiritual place where people come to let their souls shine. It's a place that really matters to almost everyone, and it's tremendously important and sensitive because of it. It's what makes Jerusalem special and I respect that and I think that feeling comes through in my site.
What is your eventual goal? (To sell it, keep it for income, secure a book or other mainstream media deal?)
My goal is to grow the site - there is so much more to this wonderful city. Of course, I'd like traffic and income to grow, too!
How does your investment of time and money balance against your success?
It's a simple equation: more time invested, more success. Honestly, once you've covered the basic costs of a professional running site, it's more a matter of time, than money, invested that correlates to success.
If you had an unlimited development budget for development, how would you change your site?
An unlimited budget? I'd translated money into time: more human hours spent on maintaining the site.
If your site got really big, really quickly, would you be able to keep up with the demand?
Not a problem there!
What unexpected costs and headaches have you had to deal with?
No unexpected costs - I had a clear business plan going in, and I've stuck to it. Headaches? Only the frustration of not enough hours in the day to get everything done!
What has been your biggest challenge?
Prioritizing. There are so many different tasks that are all important when you are first starting out that it is difficult to prioritize them and not get overwhelmed.
What method has been most successful for promoting your website?
The most successful method I've used - meaning the one that consistently generates the biggest payoff for time invested - has actually been the low-tech, old-fashioned way of contacting highly rated sites related to my niche and exchanging links or reviewing each other in our blogs. It isn't fancy, but it is real: I'm providing my viewers with real value when I review a site that might help them and when I get a review on a highly rated blog, or a link back from a PR6 site, the traffic jump is always huge and almost immediate. Plus - I've made a lot of online friends this way.
How has running your website differed from your expectations?
I thought it would be a solitary enterprise. Instead, I've found there's a whole community of webmasters and bloggers out there who on the most part are very generous when it comes to lending each other a helping hand or sharing advice.
How long have you run the site already, and how long will you continue to keep it up if you don't enjoy big gains in traffic, income or popularity?
I'm keeping this up as long as I can. It's so much fun!
What is your website address?
Jerusalem Insider's Guide
