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As many of you know I've been developing an aviation website for the pilot community in Australia as a part of both my passion for flying and research project into how to develop a domain with real customers, services etc.
To date, Downwind.com.au is getting about 40% of the pilots in Australia going to it each month.....which is a great outcome! It has a community, forum, marketplace, a host of directories plus an area for pilots to be able to blog about their adventures. All this was built using the content management system called Joomla (joomla.org). I'm a big fan of Joomla as it's unbelievably flexible and it allows me to create a host of features almost instantly and at very little cost. Feel free to let me know if you are interested in knowing the specific software plug-ins that I'm using.
 From the popularity of the site I've now been asked to write regular articles for one of the premier Australian flying magazines. This was great news which provided a modest income stream from the site content and a nice way to getting some discount promotion!
It has been a bit of a struggle getting advertisers onboard as despite its hi-tech appearances the aviation industry is still operating with an old-school mindset. This is slowly changing but I anticipate it will take a little longer to get anchor advertisers onboard than I first thought.
This brings me to advertising. I've only spent a few hundred dollars promoting the site and it was really throwing mud at a wall and hoping some of it will stick.....and lucky for me some did. I've now built a tracking system that allows me to track just about everything.....it was a bit of fun learning PHP but was much simpler than I thought it would be.
For instance, we just sent out a newsletter and every link had a tracking code built into it which allowed me to know what the members were really interested in. One of the biggest mistakes I think that I've made is guessing what they want rather than being a little more methodical. Let me assure you that it's absolutely true that links at the top of an email get much more clicks than links at the bottom.
As another effort in trying to generate additional traffic I recently made a decision to try and open up the Downwind databases for the whole aviation community. I built an aviation directory search engine that anyone can add to their site and brand as being their own. The goal is to develop the definitive aviation directory that is used by many more sites than just Downwind and generate more traffic than I could do alone.
What I've found is that working on Downwind is a lot of fun. Real customers, real services combined with a lot of real effort can reap financial rewards but look on them more as long-term rather than the immediate results that often come from parking. In the meantime, I've got some more work to do!
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I'm not sure about your view, but a lot of domainers I talk to don't appreciate that sites that get their traffic from search engines don't need a great domain name. In my view they overvalue their domains as a result. Think of all the sites that have built big brands with completely random domains (ebay, skype etc).
Sure, a good domain can bring you extra traffic, but it's not a given that you need it as these guys will try and make you believe.