I’ve just launched my latest (and hopefully soon-to-be greatest) website. It’s aimed at helping new arrivals moving to Kampala but we’re hoping that it eventually grows into a resource fit for expats and locals alike. It’s modeled after my really successful (in popularity, not really in earnings – yet) Kigali website and we’re hoping that this new site will become the go-to online guide for Kampala’s residents. More importantly perhaps, we hope that the larger target market and more internet-savvy business community will mean that the site will earn us some cash, too!
My First Business Partnership
I say ‘we’ and ‘us’ because the Living in Kampala website will be my very first project with a partner. As you may or may not know… I don’t actually live in Kampala. I live 8 hours south in Kigali, Rwanda and, while I’ve visited a bunch of times, I’m barely even comfortable getting around town, let alone an expert on anything. Enter Tyler – a dude from Oklahoma who moved to Kampala several years ago to see if he could start a business. I forget what his life story is but I do know that he now owns and operates Inflate Africa which offers inflatable advertising products… so he’s an advertising guy! Exactly what I’m not and, in my mind, his experience in and love of Kampala makes him a great partner for this project.
I initially got in touch with him when a blog reader who neither of us knows personally put us in touch through Facebook. My original hope was to hire him as my content writer, paying a set amount per article. He had bigger plans though and pitched the idea of a partnership where he would be the marketing and content side of things and I would be the nerdy part, setting up and updating the site, managing programmers, and looking after SEO stuff. So far the partnership is going really well. Our division of work is great and we both seem to have the same vision and expectations. He realised that making a site like this work will take several months, maybe even over a year, and is in it for the long haul.
I was a bit wary about working with another person on a project like this, especially one that will take an investment of some money and a lot of time. I like taking things at my own pace and without any expectations and partnering up means that suddenly I have someone else to answer to about everything to do with the site. But it’s been great so far and I’m excited to be working with him on this project. I really think that together we can make something pretty amazing.
Early Days
We launched the site just over a month ago with a bit of fanfare on Facebook which brought us some early spikes in traffic. Continued use of Facebook has meant that we’ve had about 30 to 40 visits daily, a much better start than my Kigali site had two years ago. I’m finally seeing the benefit of Facebook pages! Most of our traffic is from within Uganda and very little of that is from Google which means loads of room for improvement with our SEO and also with reaching people yet to arrive in Uganda.
SEO Strategy
We’re slowly climbing up the rankings and are now at the bottom of the first page of Google for my key term ‘living in Kampala’. I don’t see any problems getting to number one for these keywords because of the domain name we have, the SEO we’re doing and the lack of high quality sites ahead of us in the rankings. Then my plan is to target ‘moving to Kampala’ (currently ranking high on page two of Google) and lots of long tail keyword combos that will bring people to our internal pages.
I’ve stuck with Linkvana (14 day trial for $5 affiliate link/50 free outsourcing credits affiliate link) even though many people have been worried about them becoming de-indexed by Google. If they have been, I’m not seeing any evidence of it. They’re the only link building I’ve done and I’ve seen the site steadily climb since I added my Kampala site into the mix.
Goals for the Site
Our hope is to become the leading site for expats in Uganda. The site is aimed at everyone in Uganda, including locals, but the articles are definitely aimed squarely at foreigners in Kampala, either living there or passing through as tourists. The idea is to create a community site that people come to to review restaurants, comment on posts, and communicate on our forum. I don’t think there’s a decent forum for expats and tourists in Uganda and we plan to be the best and busiest option. We haven’t put much effort into the forum just yet (although I really feel this is where the focus should be but my partner is a bit busy at the moment) but I see its success as the key to the site’s success.
We hope to become a great resource for new arrivals to the city, offering articles and guides on all of the mundane and annoying things that you need to figure out when you arrive in a new place – transportation, phones, finding a house, grocery stores, etc. We want to write in a fun way and hope to earn a reputation as experts on the city and have people come to us not only for information but also for trusted advice. Eventually we’d like to use our popularity and reputation to attract advertisers wanting access to our lucrative niche of expats in Kampala.
Challenges
In the time between registering the domain name (November 2011) and launching the site (August 2012), a bunch of quality sites have sprung up with a similar purpose to ours. The best of the bunch is www.inkampala.com which seem to be aimed at everyone, specifically Ugandans, and have a strong cultural, reviews and events focus. They’re not really a ‘welcome to Kampala, here’s some help’ type of site like ours and their design isn’t the greatest, but they are filled with some good information and, most importantly, they’re consistent. They seem to have a team of writers on board who keep the content coming.
Content is another of our challenges. Of the three writers who started out eager and excited about the project, only one remains. The other two have lost interested partly, I think, due to our launch date being dragged on forever, partly due to our low pay rates and partly because their lives got busier with new jobs. So keeping our content consistent will be our greatest challenge, I think. We’ve got a two month buffer but not a lot coming in at the moment, so it’s a bit worrying. However, my Kigali site is hot and cold with content but that doesn’t seem to be an issue now that it’s been established as one of the best resources on the city.
As I mentioned above, I think our Kampala forum will be a big key to the site’s success. Figuring out a way to grow the number of readers and posters will be a tough one. I’ve never run a successful forum (although the Kigali forum is really picking up) and am a bit curious about how to get it all started. I’m going to need the help of my partner and writers for this one to keep answering people’s questions but I’ll need to figure out what I can do from my end.
What Next?
Now, we wait! People need to find the site, see that what we’ve got on offer is good stuff, get engaged with our content, start using our forum and sharing things on our Facebook page. This will take a lot of SEO on my part, a lot of word of mouth, and a bit of time. Or maybe a lot of time, I’m not sure yet. I’m not expecting any miracles within the next six months and I think that, as long as we can keep the content coming in and our Facebook followers growing, we’ll be in a really good position by early next year.
Regardless of what happens in the near or even the far future, I’m really excited about this project. My Kigali site is my biggest source of internet pride – most people I meet not only know about it but also really love it – and I really think we can accomplish something similar with this Kampala site, just on a larger scale as the city is a lot bigger than Kigali and has a lot more expats. I think my partner is a great fit and we’re both on the same page with expectations and timeline – which is very important.
So the site is up, let’s just wait and see what happens!
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