Holidays 2 Menorca
Our Ideas Playground
This little site has been a useful tool over the years for trying out new things we didn't want to try on our main portfolio.
Holidays2Menorca.com was first started back in 2005 after we'd spent a couple of years living on the island. This allowed us to build a hub of high quality content and tourist information based on local knowledge.
Since then the site has been the platform for testing affiliate feed ideas, our first dabble with AdSense and some other online marketing techniques.
Important Lessons
Quality content attracts audiences
Many in the SEO community spend their lives trying every trick in the book to attract inbound links to their websites. Who hasn't done a link exchange?
The revelation for this little website was that linking for linking's sake is a total waste of time. We never devoted any time to generating links for Holidays2Menorca, yet the quality of the content has attracted a steady flow of web referrals.
The lesson (that all too many webmasters ignore) is that there's no substitute for creating interesting content that people want to read. All good things will follow - most importantly traffic.
Affiliate feeds deserve time
We used this site to integrate various affiliate (mostly accommodation) feeds but the clickthrough rates were horrific.
The reason? Creating bland listings doesn't get you ahead of any other site and offers no reason for visitors to use your website over anyone else's. Further experimentation showed that the more we added, e.g. a quality search, the better the conversion rate.
The size of this website didn't really justify the work involved but we have successfully used affiliate data feeds elsewhere as a result. The lesson is: use feeds to create something unique.
AdSense actually works
There was a time we thought any site using Google AdSense to generate revenue was just plain cheap. Then we tried it for ourselves: Oh how wrong you can be!
AdSense's ease of setup and ability to show the right ads at the right time (mostly) does genuinely work and generates a real income.
As with all things it requires some patience and some experimentation on page layouts.
The result on Holidays2Menorca is a site with quality content, that requires zero management, and generates a modest income every month.
Now if we could only create another 50 sites like this... we may retire!