Name of your website?
Living in Santiago
Your name?
Jerry
Your Location (city, etc)
Santiago
Please give us a short summary of your website?
Living in Santiago is geared to people who either want to visit or move to Santiago, Dominican Republic.
What inspired you to launch your own website?
Clients from my other business requesting additional info on the Santiago area. Hotels, real estate etc.
When did you launch your first website, and what was it?
1 year ago for living in santiago. Years ago, about 9, had another called traveltoniagara.com was living there and getting good results with hotel bookings. Moved away from area and could not find anyone to help run it. Being a tourist site needed to keep it dynamic and could not do that living outside the area. So we closed it down.
How did you decide on a name for your website?
Kind of has a ring to it.
What makes your website different from other, similar offerings?
We are building a one stop shop, including calisfied section, events calendar, newsletter, real estate, hotel listing, spanish lessons. We are going to be expanding to service listing like plumbers, mechanics, etc
What is your eventual goal? (To sell it, keep it for income, secure a book or other mainstream media deal?)
Keep it for income.
How does your investment of time and money balance against your success?
Slow first year but income paid all cost. Now we are seeing big growth in the real estate section. In fact this launched an office for us with us being able to secure our own listings. Not a part of the original goal of the site.
If you had an unlimited development budget for development, how would you change your site?
That is a good question. I would have to think more about that.
If your site got really big, really quickly, would you be able to keep up with the demand?
I believe that we could. We have people waiting to be a part of this.
What unexpected costs and headaches have you had to deal with?
cost have been as expected so far. Now looking at options to expand the real estate section.
What has been your biggest challenge?
Living here and trying to deal with companies in the US. Sometimes very hard.
What method has been most successful for promoting your website?
house rentals in search engine results
How has running your website differed from your expectations?
been doing this for years for others. So far no surprises.
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?
1 year, no time limit as it was mostly built to suppliment info for our other clients. So it was done as a customer service type of deal and we were not expecting to make a living with it. Hard to explain but 2 years ago was not the time for this site. Thought about it, but not the time. 1 year ago was the time to start something small, which we did. growth was slow but along the lines of what we expected. Now we are seeing the timing is there to expand different items from the site into more tradiational type businesses. So even if it make no money it still serves its original purpose. Any thing else is gravy.
What is your website address?
Living in Santiago
