Fake it. Create fake users, fake traffic, fake places they've been to, fake trips.

Creating fake but believable data will drive real users who think "this is really cool, I love User1023's trip data."

Don't create fake data all by yourself - it will have your hand obvious, rather pay people to create content how only they can do it. You can give them the brief instructions of course.

I've seen places where I can get services. I think it was Odesk.com and I think there are some others. But yes, getting disenfranchised with a project usually involves doing a lot of work yourself!

Amazon mechanical turk is pretty decent for this.

I've been working as a web dev for a marketing firm for years and this has never occurred to me before. Damnit.

Even if the OP doesn't use this tip, I will. Thanks!

Oh I will!

Is that what you plan to do with flotype.com...?

Checked out your site and as an avid backpacker found the idea pretty cool, but yes, it feels empty.

My experience is that backpackers tend to use Facebook a lot, so integrate your login with Facebook Connect for starters. Make it more social by hotels/restaurants/etc. having Like buttons that points to your site.

Create a Facebook group, where these people can get to know each other. It is also a good opportunity to advertise your page.

Try to fetch data from Google Maps/Yelp/Foursquare and put it on your site. Make badges and achievments like Foursqare does, that users can earn and show off. That makes them wanting to go back to your site and make activities.

Facebook Connect is in the works. I was thinking of having an internal like button to use with the internal point system each user gets for being active.

facebook group already exists and it has supporters.

I will look into those sources to populate the site with info.

Aside from it being new and empty, is there anything off the top of your head, as a backpacker, that would make you not want to use the site?

For me the main raison holding back is that I don't like to register to new websites. I like for example Hacker News' Clickpass authentication, because it's easy to use and I don't have to remember another password. But on your site Facebook connect would be even better, because it opens a lot of possibilites.

Another thing is that I don't know how the blog looks like because I can't find a link to it. So a Tour or Help would be nice, or a link to active blogs from the main page.

Other ideas:

Make a contest for newly registered users for a prize of something cool, e.g. iPhone4. Also make a mobile optimized version of the site, or an iPhone app, where the users can find, comment, upload images based on GPS coordinates.

I feel an iphone app may be too much time/money spent when I don't have the base of the site fully functioning or very usable. Resources are tight now, so I would want to focus on the usability of the main site vs iphone app.

Same things goes for the mobile version. I've had this conversation with many people and it always ends up in the chicken vs egg debate. Some people argue that having a mobile/smartphone add will increase user base, others agree to focus on the main site and have those as addons after I complete certain milestones

the header Travelers section has the blog info, but I will probably populate the homepage with them as suggested elsewhere

As you make changes to the main site, just keep in mind how that same URL will render on mobile devices, and make changes accordingly. There are many 'full' sites I use on an iPhone because it's still easy to consume info, even though it's not a dedicated 'mobile' version.

will do. We originally had a flash banner and crap like that ... that was opted against for various reasons

Make the homepage more focused. Have a primary call to action.

Fake user content, for now, to breathe life into your site. Several respected people on HN have noted this works well.

Issues:

* I'm not exactly sure what I'm getting for clicking on "sign up." Is it only a travel blog platform or is there more?

* I don't care "what's happening right now" on some map. That is prime homepage real estate that is being wasted. Perhaps leave that for when I'm logged in on a "news feed" page; and then only show my friends (via Facebook or Twitter connections); also, you could show other site users in whatever town I'm now in (if I'm traveling now).

* The Hot News and Travel Deals columns are competing for my attention. And I am repulsed from bothering to read them. It's the 50-50 column widths. And there's too many (10); try showing only the top 1 or 2 of each.

* You ask the user "are you a QT?" I don't get it. Maybe I'm missing something.

Credibility: I like to travel, I blog about my travels on my own Wordpress blog, and I read a lot of other people's travel blogs and travel-lifestyle blogs.

I hope that helps.

* I'm not exactly sure what I'm getting for clicking on "sign up." Is it only a travel blog platform or is there more?

Travel blog that scoops up recommendations to populate travel guides

* I don't care "what's happening right now" on some map. That is prime homepage real estate that is being wasted. Perhaps leave that for when I'm logged in on a "news feed" page; and then only show my friends (via Facebook or Twitter connections); also, you could show other site users in whatever town I'm now in (if I'm traveling now).

Brilliant ideas! I was already thinking of removing that section and was going to add search functions for the items on the left, but I like your suggestions a lot more!

* The Hot News and Travel Deals columns are competing for my attention. And I am repulsed from bothering to read them. It's the 50-50 column widths. And there's too many (10); try showing only the top 1 or 2 of each.

I was going to eliminate the Hot Deals section as it does get a lot of attention. I mainly threw it in there as a way to post deals via aff links and make money, but so far I haven't made a dime.

* You ask the user "are you a QT?" I don't get it. Maybe I'm missing something.

That was before I had any idea on call-to-actions and a poor attempt at viral. I am going to get all of these suggestions and redesign the home page.

Thank you!

On a side note, if you checked out the travel blog section, what would entice you to drop your blog and join this community?

The short answer is, do it yourself.

There are a number of EXTREMELY insightful HN users who have talked at length about doing their own marketing, SEO, client acquisition and related topics. The most prolific is Patrick (HN user: patio11). His personal blog is filled with a great deal of useful information

http://www.kalzumeus.com http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=patio11

thank you, will look into this

Clickable: http://www.QTripper.com

Thanks, I had no idea how to do that

You can't - in the description at least.

I like it and I'm scared for you. Here's why:

Like because: Design, interface, potential for information gathered there, potential use. You know all this.

Scared because: You're creating an information portal when Google does a better job. You need a massive amount of users to give you all this information when there is really no incentive for them to do so. Say I am in Amsterdam and want to go to a club. I go to google and type in "Amsterdam club". I will then get lots of information, reviews, photos, etc from a wide variety of sites. The very first entry is a map of a bunch of clubs linked to reviews. Fantastic! It's open, accessing every site in the world, and filled with info that is relevant to me. Your other problem that I foresee is accuracy of data. Clubs/restaurants/hostels close/renovate/change owners all the time. You need your listings to be curated and current. As soon as you fail once you lose that user.

I haven't backpacked in over a decade (1998) and when I did I relied on Lonely Planet books to get me places and then locals to steer me towards the good stuff. You get nothing more current, fresh, and accurate than locals, local zines, and lamp post billings. As for hostels there are many, many, many sites now that have traction and offer me more value (again, I just googled it). Trip journal sites abound (and offer many revenue possibilites like book journal printing). Restarant review sites abound, as well. User generated travel content sites have to be one of the toughest markets to crack. And with all the niches you're trying to combine into a walled garden I just don't see a clear path to success.

To add... as someone said, people just don't travel all the time. I used to be a member of a travel blogging site about 6-10 years ago. Haven't been back to it since and completely forget what its name is/was. It was a big one and very popular. Google replaced it for me.

I view the problem of too much information as a detractor. Let's say you go to Netflix Instant View and want to watch a comedy. Most of those are 1 or 2 stars and you needlessly flip through then until you get to something with some valuable rating.

Google fixes this issue with their algorithm based on popularity. Trip Advisor, in my opinion, is a garbage site, very confusing and cluttered. There is a reason people still buy travel guides and now ebook travel guides, because of the unreliability of search results.

A lot of times, especially when traveling, search engines change to local results, which might not be in the language you are looking for. Then you click on the English version and get different results. This is an attempt to standardize recommendations. Hopefully it will be like a living, breathing Lonely Planet guide accessible free of charge on the internet all the time.

Eventually, once the site grows, I will give incentives to the owners of the "recommendation" area access to update the contact information, but not the criticism, which will hopefully allow for more accurate data.

But yes, that is a concern.

I fully understand your concerns and I have wrestled with them over the years too. Yes, there are a bunch of travel blog sites, yes there are a bunch of review sites, but it isn't about who did it first, but who does it better.

Will I? I won't know unless I try. Can I fail? Probably, but that shouldn't stop me from trying.

I know people who made very lucrative businesses emulating existing companies with free data from the US census. On paper it should have failed, but it worked.

I see those websites as portals to information, but not aggregates. Think about Digg. What did they do? Nothing special, just post stuff you read from around the internet from the websites we all frequent. Reddit replaced it as king because it did that better (much, much better actually).

The idea is to improve on an existing niche. Give the people something your competition doesn't give them. Although many travelers use google for research, there is a bunch of garbage that needs to be filtered out. They do a good job, but not a great one. Do I want every hotel or restaurant listed? No, I prefer just the really good ones and provide quality control to steer people towards the must-not-miss for quality, value, or whatever.

One more note. When I started this project, my expectations where for every 100 people, 10 create blogs and 90 come for the information. Out of the 10 blog users, if 2 were consistently active, I would view that as a success. So, the blog section needs 2% active use for it to be a success because my reality is that most people:

1) don't write or care to share 2) view it as a hassle

I am a story teller and want to give other story tellers the ability to do so.

If you just focused on providing people with clear information about embassies and visa applications, that would be a HUGE help.

From my personal experience as an Indian with an Indian passport and lots of friends who don't have American or European passports, visas, even for holidays, are the biggest travelling pain. Suffice to say, I travel less because I hate applying for visas, not least because finding the correct information is really hard. If you took some of the pain out of that problem, you will get a lot of users.

I know it's not as sexy as making a social network for travellers who can check in to cool places around the world.

But, it's a real problem and will really help people.

Well, the embassy section is the most developed part of the entire site as it is the oldest. Most of the date is kept up-to-date in terms of contact information for the embassies and we have a widget that provides visa information for free.

The widget will also take you to a service that will help fill out your visa application and deliver it. Their fees depend on the service you require.

I also constantly email all the embassies/consulates in the database for updated information because, and many people don't know this, embassies/consulates in smaller countries are usually the house where the ambassador lives. So when they change (and they often do), so does all the contact info.

That's awesome. Your embassies page is quite good.

You could make it even easier to navigate by adding a map.

Instead of listing by embassies in a particular country, you should list by embassies of a country. To give you an example, if I'm thinking of going to France, I'm looking for the French embassy's website, not where I am applying from. That second bit of info is also needed, but you could ask that in the second filtering stage or by guessing the user's location.

By map you mean a generic map with clickable countries to take you to the embassies of that country? I'll consider it. I'll have to see how size would play into the visible area of the page.

I have tackled the embassies in vs embassies of on the listing and quite frankly, I don't have enough points of reference to make a call. There is a nifty search box on the right that allows you to filter though

If you get a lot of visits to that section, then you could A/B test to choose which is the better way.

A simple alternative I could think of is to get rid of the list of countries and make the search form on the right the main interface. You only need to ask "where are you going?", "where from?" and "your nationality". Simple search boxes or dropdown menus with flags would be great.

An additional meta thought: one key reason for the huge success of social networks is that they've accelerated the flow of information between people all around the world.

So, one heuristic for a good way forward is to look in places where information flow is still slow and broken. Embassies are a good example of that.

True, but when you search for keywords on Embassies, you directly compete with .gov sites that will always outrank you.

My idea behind the embassy section was to ensure that contact information was available when the sites go under, as they usually do, or cloak their information to not be bothered. Believe it or not, I actually made that database of 8000+ myself.

So, I have a great section that is useful, but hard to market. I rank least in embassy keywords even though my data is more up-to-date than other older sites.

I created an adwords campaign and managed to get $0.08 a click on my keywords with an average of 3 min/user to the embassy section, so I know it is useful. But organics are very, very low.

Plus, I don't want to violate the site with a bunch of adsense nonsense and the widget, which provides very little $$/lead has had 946 clicks in 6 months with 0 conversion

Have you considered hosting your embassy section on another domain name with the keywords? It will take some time, but you could probably rank with some organic SEO for phrases like "how to apply for visa to france from london" by blogging.

See http://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/01/24/startup-seo/

I have, but, I would then have to make one completely no-follow to not get dilution from double content, right?

I can see how I can focus on that one niche and become profitable, but wouldn't that be spreading myself thin over two projects instead of one big one?

I'm not sure about the no-follow thing, but you are probably right. A simpler alternative to a new domain might be a more key-word rich url or sub-domain.

I can understand you don't want to spend too much time over this. Can't you automatically generate static pages listing the key information given the user's destination, origin and nationality? I'm guessing the embassy information doesn't change too often, so having static content will help with SEO and caching.

You definitely need some sort of a mobile app - people usually don't think about their travel much before they actually go. But once on the road they will be more inclined to check your info.

Perhaps one that you can take notes/leave reviews on without being connected to the internet. These will then sync when next connected to wifi (like evernote does)

Data romaing charges abroad are massive, and your target audience are travellers.

It is in the works and your second suggestion is brilliant! Hadn't thought of that. Can also update on WiFi (which is what I was thinking about)

I think it is a little premature for a mobile app as there are a lot of kinks to still get through on the main page and investing time/$$ into a mobile app might be too soon, especially since funding is tight.

Go about emailing some prominent travel bloggers from communities like bootsnall, (like the families going across the world, etc.) and then try to give them some sort of incentive to update your site, and then talk about it on their blog. Use some way to integrate with a few that are influential (even if you have to pay them) and hope that it catches on in that community.

interesting idea .... i will def look into it

If you're 100% serious about this and "nothing left over" means you can still afford to then travel. Seriously. The cost of living in, say, South-East Asia isn't high. And your core customer base is sitting in the computer room in a hostel somewhere, looking for things to do and looking to share their experiences with others. Probably a carefully placed sticker will catch their eye. Or they'll be chatting to you at about all the places they've visited anyway. Maybe the hostel themselves will be so pleased at being listed on your website they'll stick up a "rated on QTripper.com" sign in reception. Don't underestimate the power of offline marketing.

Of course the cheap way to start off is going door to door in all the hostels in your own home city, assuming people travel there.

In terms of beefing up content, which apart from facts and figures your site currently lacks, checkout Wikitravel (CC-sharealike licensed) as a possible source for data if you haven't already. Even if it's just a temporary solution to your lack of content in many parts of the world it's a solution to the chicken-and-egg problem I think you're struggling with. Wikitravel bootstrapped by starting their country pages off with Wikipedia articles, incidentally.

To get more money coming in, improve your deal titles - "Lightweight travel laptop at bargain price" probably works better that "Acer modelnumber...." which just looks like a generic irrelevant ad. Have you looked at programs like Hostelworld. Can't imagine the commissions being huge - but it's establishing the usefulness of your site as a hub for useful travel links some of which happen to pay you.

Encourage and incentivise signup. Is your "Sign Up" button to QT-ly clever for its own good? Low signup rates suggest maybe. It's not really clear what you get for filling in all these boxes, especially when you can leave comments without it, and there are no calls to action to encourage you to "get your own travel ranking" or "recommend your favourite restaraunts in Prague" on the relevant sub-pages when I might want to register

Love it or loathe it, Facebook Connect seems to be the way forward for this sort of thing too, so that Bob can tell your site visitors and all 300 of his friends he's just found a really sweet hostel in Kota Kinablu. Probably one or two of the friends met him in the hostel back in Kuching and are doing a bit of travelling themselves...

I may have rambled on a bit here but I did consider doing something similar in the past.

It's funny that you mention this, because this is what I did this last year. I spent Dec 09 - July 10 traveling all around Argentina, Uruguay, Brazil, and South Africa. I handed out well over 500 business cards and would spark up conversations all the time.

It worked, but then quickly died out. The problem is that unlike most other niches, people don't travel all the time and are too lazy to add content about their own home location.

I am trying to use the Wiki as much as I can to give a more graphic interpretation of their data, yes. And I can see what you mean on the titles. I was making them that way for organic searches, but realistically I can't compete with all the deal sites and shopping sites. Very good point.

You are 100% right on the FB connect. There is no escaping FB and the like buttons thrown around everywhere.

If you considered something similar in the past, do you like where I have ended up? Would you be interested in joining?

Ahh, I will look to see if there are any hostels around here. i'm sure there MUST be, but who really knows until you look. I know Boston has 1 or 2 for the entire city (not where I live)

Thank you for all the attention and fantastic suggestions. I have begun implementing most of the suggestions here and we are going on a revamp of the site based on these recommendations.

It is very easy to become disenfranchised with a project such as this, but it is good to know that there is support somewhere!

Will it work? Maybe. Will it fail? Possibly. But it is worth trying

I guess your audience is the backpacker type, the ones who travel for an extended period of time (3+ months). Have you thought of approaching travel agents who specialize in these sorts of holidays so you could somehow partner with them? No sure what the deal would be but I guess your audience is right there..

The audience right now is focused on the backpacker type, but I want to eventually give it a feel as a go-to place to add your travel stories.

My idea is to eventually have backpackers in europe, a family going to disney land, or people taking a small trip who update their pics and status on facebook use the site.

And yes, I have looked in the travel agents but to no avail. At first I wanted to develop APIs that I would trade in exchange for their clients as my users. I've also pitched having them fund the development of a tool in exchange to use that tool for free. No one bit

Why not become that travel agent yourself? This might be a longer-term goal.

I have thought about this, but that is a very very long term goal. I can't juggle too many balls and have to create income off whatever I have first before I go into growth.

But, frankly, yes, a lot of my close friends have suggested I jump ship to that career because of my passion for travel.

If you say that travel is your passion, then I bet you could do a great job at it and figure out how to innovate and disrupt that industry.

thank you, very helpful

Have you tried getting mentioned on travel blogs? Try looking specifically at the ones targeting backpackers.

Yes, i've been rather successful at getting reviews for the project on some travel blogs, which did produce some results, but died out over time.

What kind of visitor numbers/member numbers are you getting? Do you know where people are finding the site?

I get an average of 3000 visitors a month and have 148 registered users, of which 60 or so are family and friends.

Most of the traffic generated has come from Google Adwords and testing ads for the embassy section. Next up is google organic, again, mostly for the embassy section. The rest are referrals from blogs/forums mainly to the Travel News section.

Are people responding well to it in forums? Do you find users promote it among friends?

The articles get a decent response. Activity usually lasts 2-3 days but the users only click on other articles from there and then bounce.

There isn't a lot of promotion as most people view this as something they might use while traveling as opposed to adding content in the city they already reside in. And, thus, there is very little word of mouth.

I have seen some people join from marketing efforts, especially people who are leaving for a trip, but end up not using the site. I have a rough idea as to why (usability) but it is not concrete enough for a radical change