OK, it’s official, I’m absolutely hooked on development. For the great mass of domains in your portfolio parking is currently the only scalable solution but for the few select domains then I’d highly recommend that you develop them out.

Pick a domain that you are passionate about not one that bears no resemblance to anything that you’re interested in and begin a great and surprisingly fulfilling journey. As many of you know, I’m a pilot and therefore Downwind.com.au was a logical choice for me to develop. Why Downwind? Downwind happens to be a word that most pilots use when they land at an airport.....hence it’s a very popular aviation term.

So what’s happened since I’ve last written about Downwind? In my spare time I’ve continued to develop out the site adding more and more areas for pilots to get hooked. I now have made accessible databases of airfields, every aircraft in Australia and we’re filling out a complete Australian Aviation directory. We’ve been holding monthly online chat events with industry notables, built out a forum and blogging area and holding our first face-to-face event at a massive simulator centre. It’s been pretty busy.

The results have been pretty staggering. We now have 35% of the pilots in Australia regularly visiting Downwind and this is continuing to increase at 20% per month. We have just started selling advertising on the site and will be launching a job board, flyaway destinations and an aviation shopping mall within the next month or so.

One of the great things that has occurred is I’ve now been approached by a number of magazines to purchase articles for publication. We now have a 12 month agreement to supply articles for both a combination of advertising space and a set monthly fee. This is a good solution for both the magazine and Downwind.

We’re just about to dip our toe in the water of testing a subscription system with users for a new service. I think that it should be an interesting experiment that if well received will provide another great service offering for the aviation industry. All of which will contribute to Downwind’s position as a market leader on the web.

We are now just about at the point of getting a part-time sales person to drum up advertising business sales and selling positions in our aviation directory. My guess is that we’ll put someone on in about the beginning of October when the flying weather begins to improve and aviation companies are looking for new business.

Remember Downwind initially started as a great research project into the best ways to develop out a site and I’ve only worked on it in my spare time. I’ve learnt a few good lessons along the way including what software to use and not use, building systems for people to use rather than continuously driving content myself, better ways of getting members involved etc. It’s all been a great experience that I’ve thoroughly enjoyed. I’ll keep you up –to-date on further progress that we make.

TrackBack URI for this entry

Comments (0)

Subscribe to this comment's feed

Name

Email

Website

Title

Comment

smaller | bigger

Subscribe via email (registered users only)

I have read and agree to the Terms of Usage.

Add Comment Preview