One Year Anniversary of Paliparan.com!
Today we are celebrating the first anniversary of Paliparan.com – which was launched exactly one year ago. In this post, I want to look back at everything which happened last year and what you can expect from us in the next 12 months.
One year ago
Exactly one year ago, on 9th December 2019, the first ever post on Paliparan.com was published. This post included, a total of 285 articles were published, an average of less than one post per day.
As founding father and editor-in-chief of Paliparan.com, I want to take the opportunity to give you, our dear reader, a look behind the scenes of our website.
Success
Looking back at last year, there are lots of reasons to be happy where we stand right now as a website and where we want to be to in the future.
Dozens of our articles rank on the first page of Google when searching for relevant key phrases. If already now the website ranks this well, there are lots of reasons to be optimistic as ranking normally only improves further as we grow bigger and gain a larger foothold.
This also reflects in website visitor numbers and huge share of organic traffic, which are both certainly good too. And that is without having done any kind of website promotion and with zero focus so far on building up our social media fanbase.
On a personal note, I also tremendously enjoyed working on the website!
What to improve
In the next year, you can definitely expect many more articles, reviews and guides like the ones we published last year. The goal is to increase production and to improve on our score of 285 articles a year.
Given how time consuming some articles can be, this isn’t necessarily a bad score at all. Especially the destination guides and trip reports take up quite some work when it comes to research, editing pictures and simply writing them.
It’s an all-volunteer effort which is done outside of normal working hours, another aspect which should not be forgotten.
That said, the goal is to publish two articles per day on average in the coming year. We have plenty of material that has yet to be processed!
More flight deals
There are some other website improvements which will hopefully be made in the next year.
Given how much the ongoing corona crisis has affected travel since March, we didn’t focus as much as we initially planned on flight deals. There wasn’t simply much demand as most people stayed home.
Besides, flight traffic was at an all-time low (for modern-day times) and national quarantine and isolation requirements (both in the destination country and on return) made for some more complications.
With the first person in the UK now being vaccinated against COVID-19, and most European countries set to start their vaccine programmes in January 2021, there is some reason to be more optimistic when it comes to travel for the summer season of 2021.
As soon as the current corona wave is over and most restrictions across the continent have been lifted, we plan to put more focus on our flight and travel deals section.
Social media interaction
Currently, we use our Facebook and Twitter pages to interact a wee bit with our followers and to share our published articles. On Instagram, we share our favourite travel snaps.
It’s the minimum level of interaction, really, and it is an area where there is a huge potential for growth. In the course of the next year, we hope to increase our social media following.
Hopefully it will also result in some more interaction in the comment sections on the Paliparan website or on our social media pages.
Introducing other writers
So far, working on Paliparan.com has been mostly a one-man effort. Although I received some help from friends in setting up this website, there is so far only one article published by someone else besides me. It’s an article from our guest writer Carlo on visiting a football match in South America, so check it out if you haven’t read it before. It’s a great read!
There are however some travel articles in the pipeline written by new authors. That means that in the coming months, you can expect some quality reads by different writers (with their own style and views!) on a number of topics.
Trip reports
As for my own articles, I still have to finish the newly started Greek island hopping trip report as well as an older trip report about Indonesia. The latter one has already been fully written, but still needs to be slightly edited and adapted before I can publish it on this website.
Last year I made several other journeys which would make for fine trip reports, of which the trip to Poland has the highest priority to be written next.
Of course, I don’t know what 2021 will hold. So far, I don’t have any trip planned as I want to wait for January before making any decision about a possible winter trip.
With so many parts of the world still in lockdown or subject to corona restrictions, I don’t want to plan anything in advance. Like the last year, I will book my trips 1 to 2 weeks out by most as not to face any U-turns in corona entry restrictions.
Although I do have some travel plans in my head (who doesn’t!) it’s a bit too early to detail them now. Yet even in the unlikely case of being restricted to home, I still have tons of old travel stories and pictures in my own personal archive which would make for excellent articles or trip reports.
Thank you
I’d like to conclude this one year anniversary note with a big thank you to everyone who has helped me out in this project to date, as well as to all those people who have read our articles and has left behind kind messages of support.
We are always open to feedback and ideas from our loyal readers, so don’t hesitate to give us a shout!
So again a big thank you to our readers. Stay healthy, and hopefully see you around on our website in the coming year as well!
Koen
Paliparan.com Editor-in-Chief
