Dear readers, advice and forgiveness please

As far as I am concerned your posts have value. Missed some of those trips the first time around.  I find anything posted outside of Gear Swap these days welcome. Real nice job on your new site.

Love your posts. Plan to use some of your resources. Thank you.

Amy:

I’ve read many of your reports, especially the ones around the bay area and Point Reyes, and many have been added to my list of to-do hikes.  Your reports are great, wonderful to read and very informative. Thank you for posting them and sharing with others.  I look forward to browsing DoingMiles.com

Thank you friends for “permission” to clutter the feed. I just updated a couple more old threads. More on the way as we try to clear the backlog. Amy

Your trip reports are some of the best things out there. Clutter up the forum, please!

I’m with Doug, clutter away!

Yes indeed, do continue to clutter away!

Glad you have your own site now, and I also appreciate the reports.

When in this process, watch the google search results including image searches. It is interesting to see how SEO works in realtime.

I look forward to re-reading your trip reports as they reappear! Congrats on the new site.

Love the new site!

Thanks for your encouragement. We’re plugging along here, a few new reports each week. We’ve got a big backlog, and we’re working hard to make them concise and useful, so we’re not moving too fast.

“We are not making money on this site and are not doing this to drive traffic to the site. We know that bumping all these old threads will cause a pain in the behind for people who are looking at recent posts to find new content.”

The amazon affiliate links on your site speak otherwise. Even Dixon and Skurka don’t seem to bother announcing every single post to their monetized websites.

John – a bit of a crusade?

“When you buy anything using this link to Amazon we earn a 4-7% commission which we donate to land conservation groups. Read our Code of Ethics.”

Give it a break.

We have already reimplemented 15 of our old trip reports and added comments to each of those old BPL threads. I think we have 14 more old trip reports to go. Most of the feedback about bumping the old threads was either positive or neutral, so we’ll continue to do it. Once that is done, we’ll go back to our old pace of 3 or 4 trip reports per year. Thanks for being patient as we get through this initial phase.

I wondered how people would react to our use of Amazon links and these are the first comments I’ve received. So I’ll chime in with the story.

When we started building the site we didn’t intend to go down the affiliate path. But after talking to a buddy who uses links on his site, we decided that affiliate links might generate enough money to make it worth the effort. We support many organizations with missions to purchase and protect public land, and affiliate links seemed like a reasonable way to direct more money their way. There’s no cost to us to add the links, and no cost to the buyer to have 4-7% of the purchase price go toward land conservation, so it seemed like a win-win.

Is it working? Not really. Since launching the site on December 24th we’ve raised a grand total of $4.20. On the other hand, we’ve spent $385 building and hosting the site. Whatever affiliate revenue we eventually generate is not being used to offset our direct costs, but will be donated to land conservation groups. Please trust that we are not doing this to fund our retirement.

We are not planning to do any of the things it would take to make this site generate much revenue: creating a twitter or facebook presence to generate “buzz”, writing product reviews and gift guides, becoming product ambassadors, posting new content each week in order to generate traffic, optimizing content to improve our search engine rankings, etc.

Thanks for your patience, Amy