Name of your website?Philippine Travel Guide
Your name?
Arnold Alvarez
Your Location (city, etc)
Paranaque, Metro Manila
Please give us a short summary of your website?
The site previews the most popular destinations in the archipelago. Featured are: The capital city of Manila, Baguio City, the Banaue rice terraces, Batanes islands, Boracay beach, Bohol, Cebu city, Davao, Palawan islands, the Hundred Islands in the province of Pangasinan, Puerto Galera beach and the UNESCO World Heritage site of Vigan in Ilocos Sur.
What inspired you to launch your own website?
I love traveling in my country and I got the idea of sharing my experiences with other people. That inspired me to make a travel site about the Philippines.
How did you decide on a name for your website?
I decided to give my travel site a generic name (Philippine Travel Guide) because it is easy to remember and also because the term (keyword) is searched often in the search engines.
What makes it different from other, similar offerings?
Most travel sites about the Philippines are focused on a specific tourist spots like Cebu or Boracay. I decided to make my site about the different places, specially the destinations I think potential tourist would be interested in.
What is your eventual goal? (To sell it, keep it for income, secure a book or other mainstream media deal?)
My primary goal from the beginning and still up to now is to help promote my county and let the world know the beautiful tourist spots my country has to offer. The money I earn from it is just an added benefit.
How does your investment of time and money balance against your success?
The time and money I spent to make the site is well worth it. The site now gets a couple of thousand visitors a day and is still climbing. In addition, since I discovered I can make a little money from putting ads on the site, the modest financial rewards is a bonus to the satisfaction of knowing that I have helped my county promote tourism.
If you had an unlimited development budget for development, how would you change your site?
If I had the budget, I would hire a professional photographer to take pictures of the beautiful destinations around the country for posting on my site and also hire writers to contribute articles to expand the website.
What unexpected costs and headaches have you had to deal with?
There really isn't any headache or any unexpected cost that I had to deal with in running the site. It has been a pleasure all along, from the start and up to now.
What method has been most successful for promoting your website?
I don't spend much time promoting my website but when time permits, I do submit to web directories and I guess the links I get from these directories have made my site appear on search engines like Google and Yahoo! which sends the site most of its visitors.
How has running your website differed from your expectations?
Yes, when I first published the site online, I did not expect to have as many visitors as I do now. Also, I did not expect to be receiving emails from site visitors, which are mostly positive.
How long have you run the site already, and how long will you continue to keep it up if you don't enjoy big gains in traffic, income or popularity?
Philippine Travel Guide has been online since July 2005 and I have no intention of shutting it down even if the traffic goes down or the income from the ads drop to zero. I will be happy to maintain and improve it as long as I can.
What is your website address?
Philippine Travel Guide
