2018 In Review
How Did We Do?
We launched bearlives.ca May of this year. As the 2018 summer hiking season comes to an end, it's time to look back and see if we met our goals.
Our Goals
In 2018 we wanted to:
- Launch bearlives.ca with a variety of hikes
- Make an impact in our community
- Break-even in the first year
- Rank high organically on Google (Bing too I guess. Heck, throw in Yahoo while we're at it)
When we first dreamed of this website our expectations were low. Funny enough, this website started as a joke. On the way to Big Peter's Lake in August 2017 we were laughing about how after every Instagram post we made, a week later three people would go to the same hiking spot and post it on Instagram. "They're stealing our hikes!" We joked. Jason said, "We should charge for this". That sparked a long conversation.
Initially, BearLives wasn't even a website. Some of you may know we started by selling "BearLivesMatter" shirts. We ordered 40 shirts from a local shop and sold them to everybody we knew. Parties became a storefront for our brand, friends transformed into customers, and we were hard to be around. A month later we had sold all 40. What now we thought?
Turns out the reason we were selling shirts wasn't our super neat logo. People wanted to hear about the beautiful places we've been and the crazy stories we had. "Where was that? How can I get there?", they always said. That part was hard to explain. We would text them a link to some other hiking website. They'd text back staying "L0l, it's trying to charge me for the location" or "is this the same one we talked about? The site isn't very clear". We'd have to text them a starting location and a paragraph telling them what they need, what to expect, and what kind of car they needed.
Other hiking sites in Kelowna quite honestly sucked. We researched what they were missing, how they made money, and how websites work. Hundreds hours of work later, we created a draft for bearlives.ca. We iterated on our ideas throughout February and launched in March.
How did we do?
What we accomplished:
- We launched with 40+ hikes. Each hike launched with a Google Maps link, full information, and pictures of what to expect
- Over 3000 unique people visited our site in four months. Viewership retention suggests they loved what they saw. Huge impact
- Ads and gear sales projected to the end of our fiscal year suggest we will just break-even for the 2018-2019 period
- We rank on the first page of Google for most of our SEO goals.
What does that mean for our future?
BearLives will stay online for the fiscal year 2019-2020. However we need to scale revenue if we are to stay open past that.
What can you do?
If you use bearlives.ca we cannot thank you enough. You are making our vision possible. Keep using our site, that's the best way to keep us up and running.
Submit some feedback on something you wish we had. The more we can improve, the more viewers we will retain.
Want to do more? Tell a friend or two about us. Word of mouth is the most powerful way for us to grow.
Need new hiking gear? Buy it through the link on our site. We found the best valued gear on Amazon; buying though our link gives us a small cut of the purchase.
What are we doing to grow?
To celebrate BearLives' first year anniversary, are launching a store selling shirts, mugs, and other fun stuff. These feature our original logo and an assortment of colour options. Buy one today, remember 25% of all profits made from this site are donated to the Canadian Parks and Wildlife Society.
Winter is a tough month for a hiking website. We hope this store will bring in new customers from across North America. Will their 2019 summer vacation be in the Okanagan so they can try our hikes? Not likely but we could sure use their money.
BearLives is also putting together sponsorship packages for local businesses. This will allow us to lower the amount of ads we show on our site and support local businesses doing great things in our community. Packages will be targeted for Spring and Summer 2019 as that is when we see the most viewership. Know a business that would be a great fit for us? Let us know at officialbearlivesmatter@gmail.com or in our feedback section.
In the winter months BearLives will go through several key changes on the backend. These changes are geared to automate the process of creating categories and create more consistency throughout the site. What you may notice is more categories and subcategories tailored to one's specific tastes. As the process of creating categories will be automatic (right now we manually enter all the categories and their information) we will be able to create catergories dynamically based on trends and requests.
Changes will also be made to SEO (how we get higher on Google). The goal is to get within the top three search results for common search terms in the Okanagan. We know after someone uses us they realize we deliver the best hiking information experience for this area and keep using us.
Truly thank you for your support. BearLives would not be possible without people like you.