A few weeks ago I wrote about LoveHomeSwap, a webstie/service I signed up in order to swap homes with people around the world when traveling instead of going to hotels.
Well, this past weekend I completed my first swap and everything went amazingly well. It wasn’t a regular swap were someone came to my home and I went to theirs, instead a couple from Iceland came to my home while I was in London and for that I earned points that I can now spend in staying at someone else’s home while they are away like I was.
The couple in their mid-fifties from Iceland who stayed in my apartment were wonderful guests. When I showed them in the day they arrived they took their shoes off before entering the apartment without me telling them to do so (I didn’t do so myself) and they asked if it was ok to invite a family friend over for dinner next day. I told them it was definitely ok and offered them a good bottle of white wine to share with their friend.
When I came back from London they were already gone and I found the apartment just as I left it, everything was organized just like I left it, everything was clean, and they even left some flowers, a DVD about the northern lights which they told me were something I should definitely see if I ever visit their country and a thank you note.
What else could one ask for?
Now I’m looking to complete the second part of the experience and spend my points staying at someone else’s home next time I travel, I’ll let you know how that works out! ;)
Every day I see plenty of blogs all publishing the same stuff, mostly press releases, and I couldn’t help to wonder… is it worth it? I mean, is it possible that ten different websites publish the same exact thing and all ten of them are getting enough traffic to generate any decent revenue through advertising?
Since no decent website would make their stats public, much less their revenue, I decided to run a little experiment myself. It’s been a month since I started a curated Architecture blog called ARCHADDICT and here is what I’ve found.
First of all I set up ARCHADDICT to be as automated as possible. Running on Word Press I basically combined a series of plugins that will crawl the most relevant architectural blogs out there and import all their posts (just an image, excerpt and backlink of course), leave them pending for me to review and then broadcast them to Twitter and Facebook once I approved them.
Over the last 30 days my blog has imported a little over 2K posts from which I’ve only actually published 290. The ones I dint publish were either related to design instead of architecture, repeated (like all said, most of this blogs are already publishing the same things) or I simply didn’t like the projects.
Before we dive into numbers let me say that even though I set the blog up to be as automated as possible it did take me roughly 30 minutes to an hour a day to go through all the posts the crawler found publishing or deleting the ones I liked and didn’t like. So even though this was supposed to be an automated blog it does require some work… I guess I could just have set it up to auto publish everything that came in, but it just didn’t feel right, even if I was just publishing a picture, excerpt and backlink.
And now what you’ve been waiting for… the numbers!
Blog stats for the last (and first) 30 days:
- 409 Sessions
- 327 Users
- 2.180 Pageviews
- 2:49 Avg. Session Duration
- 66,50% Bounce Rate
Acquisition
- 44,63% Organic
- 26,83% Direct
- 16,83% Referal
- 11,71% Social
I wasn’t running any ads on the blog, so I can’t give you any revenue numbers, but I can tell based on my other websites that Google Adsense pays an average of $2 RPM on this topic in English language, so do the math and ARCHADDICT could’ve potentially generated $4 in revenue during its first 30 days.
I’ll leave it up to each of you to decide if this numbers are good or bad, and if managing a curated blog is worth the time or not. As for myself I’m not sure if I’m going to keep adding new content to ARCHADDICT or I’ll consider the experiment to be over and spend my time on something else.