Virginia Beach Blog

For those that have requested information on Virginia Beach Parasailing, we are now sending your requests to David with Adventure Parasailing.  I for one hope to give this a try this year.  It ought to be super fun.  Hopefully David will email everyone more information daily.

We look forward to having a write-up on our attractions page too (hopefully with photos)!

Well, what have we done lately (besides help a ton of people reserve hotels)?  We’ve been quite busy (the fact it’s past 1AM and I’m trying to blog should tell you a little about the schedule).

I merged the old attraction page with the new attractions we’ve put online.  We’re adding fresh Virginia Beach attractions weekly.  I know this is going to be a very big part of what we do from here out.  Our goal is to increase the # of minutes our readers stay on the site.  What better way to have more information about Virginia Beach Attractions and Virginia Beach Hotels?

We’re using a free “theme” for the attractions page.  I just spent close to $100 on a professional theme that also supports videos.  Unfortunately, it will take me a few hours to customize that theme.  I hope to go public with it this weekend.

I also opened up a flickr account.  We’ll be able to easily link into pictures that are uploaded there.  For anyone that is interested, my account name is virginiabeach.com (naturally).

We’re looking at hiring search engine optimizers.  Until now, I’ve done everything.  Unfortunately, I don’t have the time to create tons of relevant backlinks.  So I’m going to hire that out to someone.

I’ve been sick all weekend so I didn’t do too much on the site.  I have a ton of e-mails to address.  I’ll get to those as quickly as I can.

I was able to start sending the questions from www.virginiabeach.com/answers to Michelle.  If you write any questions on our help desk, she’ll be the one answering them now.  I guess I need to start getting backlinks to that page too.  It has good information on Virginia Beach there.

I also need to get all my affiliate sites backlinking to my blog.  I removed the blog link from all of them and my PR went to null.  Wow!  I haven’t figured out how to get other bloggers to link back to mine.  Hopefully someone else interested in running a GeoDomain will be interested in some of the things we’re doing over here.

That’s enough for tonight.  Look forward to the new theme on the attractions page this weekend.  If it’s good enough, it might become the new home page for the entire site!

Finally, a decent night of bowling for me.  I rolled a 590 set tonight.  Top game was 222.  Now that is more like it!

It’s really late and time for me to put on some new Virginia Beach announcements.

We have a few new clients coming on board!  You’ll see their sponsorships later this weekend.  We know we’re going to bring them an amazing amount of business.  There is no other site that can bring the same return on Virginia Beach advertising.  Our existing clients tell us no one else has come close to helping them succeed like we have.

When you’re offering better advertising programs that cost less than the telephone book, everyone benefits (the readers, the advertisers and us).  There are no losers.

One client spends almost $1000/month with the yellow pages.  They offer tourist accomodations.  What tourist looks in the yellow pages after coming here?  They don’t.  They want that information before they come to the area.  That’s why our readers keep coming back to our site.  They want to know what’s here before they arrive.

We’re proud to be serving the Virginia Beach business community and thank everyone for supporting us (readers and sponsors alike).

Thanks everyone!

We’re proud to announce that the Virginia Air & Space Museum has added us as a media contact.  They were thrilled to see our write-up.  That information will soon go live for millions of tourists to see.

Our ability to match Virginia Beach tourists with local businesses and attractions is second to none.  We fielded three sales opportunities today.  When I started cold calling Virginia Beach businesses back in 2000, I don’t think people recognized the true power of this domain name.

Now, it seems as though people have finally caught up to what I’ve known all along.  This  GeoDomain is really on its way to becoming the “new” newspaper for tourists in Virginia Beach.

We can’t wait to see how we continue to grow in the coming years.

Well, tonight was no better than last Tuesday.  In fact, I was one pin down (534 series tonight).  My high game was a 201.  I said it last Tuesday, I’ll say it again, “Ewwwwww.”

Guess I should stick to being a CEO.

We’re proud to announce we have an upcoming meeting with the Virginia Aquarium.  We want to do a series of web articles on why tourists should make this one of their top ten things to do while visiting Virginia Beach.

Rachel has written two more articles and they are fantastic.  She features the Air & Space Museum and American Indoor Karting.  We hope these guys will become part of our new newspaper family with more articles to come.

2008 is definitely going to be our very best year serving Virginia Beach.  These are very exciting times.  Soon, we’re even going to post our phone number on the site to answer your voice questions.  We’ve done this in the past but didn’t have the manpower to help everyone.  I feel now is the time to really outperform every other website and take rightful position as the #1 web site dedicated to Virginia Beach.

I bowled horribly last night.  My first game was a 217.  I was feeling like I could do no wrong.  My second and third games were terrible.  Overall, across three games, I shot a 535 series.  Ewwww.  I’m not sure what happened.  At least our team won two games and overall points.

Since we’ll be emailing all of our travel guide readers once new stories come out, we need to test the ability of the software to work.  This is that test.

We really have some amazing tools here that nobody knows about to help companies advertise in Virginia Beach.  2008 will turn things around as we push to make the local companies aware of our abilities.

Tourists already know.  Millions of dollars in hotel revenues go through our site yearly.  We have more hits that other sites and we’re finding our readers are coming back regularly.

What are the benefits of advertising on VirginiaBeach.com?  Incredible ROI [return on investment].  Here are some of the tools we have to help local companies advertise:

Pay-per-click.  You can be on our home page for .75c/click.  If no one clicks on your ad, you don’t pay a dime.  If someone clicks, you get the benefit of the traffic and hopefully close a sale on your web site.  Our advertisers that use this are very happy and are multi-year advertisers.

Tourism opt-in mailing list.  A very small percentage of our readers will request information be mailed to them on Virginia Beach.  We keep this information in an on-line database.  People that advertise with us can search that database.  Want to find everyone who is interested in para-sailing within the last 30 days?  We can provide you with their name, address, e-mail and phone.  They want your services.  You want their business.  Advertising with VirginiaBeach.com is a triple-win situation.

Search engine.  Yes, we are a mini-Google.  If you place your ads with us and someone types in your keywords into our search engine bar, your results will be shown.  Because we are a local search engine, local companies advertising are not fighting with larger national companies and their larger budget.

Virginia Beach advertising works.  We can help.  E-mail us at sales@virginiabeach.com for more information.

Well, I’ve spent some time getting the new Virginia Beach Guide on-line.  I decided not to use the www.virginiabeach.com/1000 link.  The name didn’t convey what we were trying to do.  It’s something new.

We already have our first attraction on the guide.  After a few more are put in there, we’ll open it up for the public.  My goal is to feature 1000 companies/attractions/events.

As a brief list, I’m talking about pictures/information on:

Busch Gardens

The Chesapeake Bay Bridge Tunnel

Hampton Air & Space Museum

Virginia Aquarium

Virginia Living Museum

etc.

We can’t wait to fully develop the content here.  It’s going to help with search engine marketing and really help our tourist readers.  We feel this is going to be one of the best things we’ve ever done on this site.  I hope you feel the same!

This is a test of the blog software to see how it will handle an image to the left hand side of these words. How will our Freelance writers be able to submit “pretty pictures” with their thoughts, comments and insight?

Will they also be able to handle pictures and code on the right hand side of the screen? I’m not sure. I’m wasting time and potential sleep seeing how this can be done. I’m also quickly running out of words to type on the screen. Isn’t that a lovely picture of a Ferrari steering wheel and shifter? On my good days, I missing having that car. It was a pleasure to drive. I can’t wait to get my next one. OK, I have enough words done that I can try a right justified picture. now.

Wow. It seems to be working pretty well. Too bad you can align these pictures easily through the upload feature. This might make it harder for the Freelance people. They’ll just need to know the default directory and the name of the file they are uploading so it won’t be too bad. I want to ramble a little bit more so I can see what the pics look like after I save this file and keep writing. I’m glad I type really fast. Otherwise, I would be here until 3AM. I need to get some sleep badly as I’m driving to Raleigh, NC tomorrow morning. Hey, I just got underneath the picture. Woohoo!

Ok, enough is enough. Time to save this puppy.

Part of running a good website is adding content.  That’s what’s driving our 2008 campaign to add more things about Virginia Beach for our viewers.  Content should drive us higher in the search engine rankings.

By having more content, one can expect (or hope/pray) that other sites will link to that great content.

Getting content isn’t easy.  Generally, you have to pay for it or write it yourself.  I don’t have the time to write it myself.  So we’re hiring freelance writers.  Because we’re outsourcing this, we need a good way for our writers to easily add their content to our site.

That is why I’m researching article software (AKA CMS software).  It’s almost 1AM on the East coast and I’m still looking for the best options.

I think it’s time to stop and resume this tomorrow.

By visiting www.virginiabeach.com, you’ve already come to expect this site to give you the very best deals on Virginia Beach Hotels (http://www.virginiabeach.com/hotels).

You’ve even praised us for having the best list of Virginia Beach Attractions (http://www.virginiabeach.com/attractions).

We can’t wait to start up our new project. 1000 things to do when you visit Virginia Beach. Our new list is going to start very soon. I believe the URL is going to be http://www.virginiabeach.com/1000. It will be the biggest list of all things tourist worthy and will not be solely focused on Virginia Beach. It’ll cover the entire Hampton Roads area.

Not only will it be a list of places to see and visit, you’re going to have a firsthand account written by one of our new staff writers who is not from the local area. You’ll be able to experience the area through her writing and photographs. Tourism from a tourist’s point of view.

We’re very excited about this new feature coming to www.virginiabeach.com!

Steve

Working with Google is definitely a love/hate relationship. While you want to have the traffic they can bring to a website, you certainly want to write them a very stern letter about their inability to help diagnose problems.

I’m very glad that our web site doesn’t depend on them for traffic. About 10% of our traffic comes with web search engines. The majority of our readers merely type in www.virginiabeach.com to arrive here.

On Feb 8th, 2008, we switched to a better design of our web site. For you long time users (eight years of uptime, 12 years being registered), you were probably glad to see a fresh face on the web site. I know I was ready. After the redesign, our rankings were even better than before. We were in the top five of Google (not a bad place to be) for the search term, “virginia beach”.

On the 18th, we disappeared from the rankings. None of the SEO experts I consulted with could really tell me what went wrong. Since we had just undergone a redesign, the blame was placed there (mostly by me). I didn’t know if we should go back to the old design (I didn’t want to do that). I couldn’t find anything offensive in the new site that would make Google mad at us.

About ten days later, I found the problem. The site was being penalized because there was another site with the exact same content as mine. This took me a long time to find. Once I did, I was able to get the site taken out of Google’s index. I then resumed my normal rankings.

Was this Google’s fault? Absolutely not. However, it would have really been nice to see an error or message in my Google Webmaster Tools. It would have been incredible to be able to call someone and ask if I was being penalized (open a 900 service, you’ll make even more money). You can’t do either with Google. The WMTools are much better than nothing, I’ll grant them that whole-heartedly. I just really wish they had a mechanism to say “you’re not showing up in the index because the following sites look identical to us: yoursite, othersite”.

That would be a level of customer service worthy of a stock that is over $500/share.

Once Google is able to do that, I think they’ll be the best search engine in the world (sorry Yahoo/Microsoft - I like you guys too but Google has the best apps so far).

Steve

Congratulations to Kathy of Phelps, NY. She is our first winner of “Tell us your vacation story”! She wins $50 in cold hard check money as the post office doesn’t like it when we send cash through the mail.

While her story of losing their money with a strong tide was heart breaking, we’re glad she’s coming back to Virginia Beach 33 years later for another go at it. Hopefully our $50 will help with gas money.

Thanks again Kathy!

Click her to read her story.

Steve

As the CEO of VirginiaBeach.Com, Inc (yes, we’re a real corporation), I thought it might be nice to write about some of my experiences running one of the best GeoDomains in the industry.

While it won’t be as exciting as watching an episode of American Chopper, it might be kind of fun (or perhaps stress relief for me) blogging.

The software (Wordpress) was pretty easy to setup. I wish all PHP applications were this easy. Well, to be fair, most are but this one was really, really easy. If anyone else wants to start a blog on www.virginiabeach.com, just let me know.

Steve