Our hotel photography website has just hit 1,000 visitors for the past 30 days! When we began our company and launched our website, we were excited if we got 30 hits for the entire month but currently we are averaging between 30 and 50 visitors every day.
We have an iPhone app called Quicklytics that allows us instant updates of how many people have been on our website in a given day, week, month or custom period. We watch our hit stats the way a stockbroker watches a market ticker. The reason we track this information so intently is because we have found that there is a direct correlation to the growth of our business.
In the classic book, Think and Grow Rich, Napolean Hill says , “When riches begin to come they come so quickly and with such great abundance that one wonders where they have been hiding during all those lean years.” Most successful businesses can look back and see when the business finally took off but rarely can they point to one specific event or decision that caused the spike. While we wouldn’t say our riches have arrived quite yet, our business has experienced exponential growth.
We shot 54 virtual tours in our first sixteen months in business.
We shot 52 tours in the first quarter of 2011 — but made 10 times the income for almost the same number of tours.
We shot 88 tours for the second quarter of 2011.
We will have shot 70 360 tours in the past 30 days!
Our virtual tour business and our web traffic have grown through a series of intentional building blocks. We started with learning the software and technology involved in creating tours. We purchased a template website and did some minor tweaking when we first began the business. Then we began building our portfolio and client base. The website wasn’t our main focus and to be honest, getting it fully updated is still on the back burner.
If anyone asks us what the secret is to our success, the answer would be very simple…We find people who know more than we do and follow their advice. We never claim to be particularly original but we recognize when someone knows more about an issue than we do and we try to do what they do. In the case of building an online presence for our virtual tour business, there is no one better to emulate than Real Tour Vision. A Google search for almost any keywords related to virtual tours will find Real Tour Vision (RTV) in the top search results. Jason LaVanture of RTV swears by blogging so I started blogging within the past few weeks and the results have been amazing.
After just a few weeks of blogging, we saw our web traffic skyrocket and as of today, we have 1,081 web visitors for the past 30 days…an increase of 89.98% over the previous 30 day period! I guess Jason knows what he is talking about!