Synotrippers

We're Looking For Your Feedback

2011-01-03T19:49:00.000-08:00

We had a great 2010, and we hope you did too!

By the end of 2010, just about 600 tour guides had signed up on Synotrip and hundreds of messages were being sent to tour guides per week. Plus, the tour guides are continuously adding listings and photos. Aside from some minor bugs, the site is just how we hoped it would be at this point.

Now we're looking for your input on how to improve! What would you like to see changed? What would you like to see added to Synotrip? Tell us what you want, and you just might get it. :)

To send feedback, please contact us via our contact form.

Seperate Pages for Interpreters, Drivers and More

2010-10-27T19:37:00.000-07:00

We've seen a lot of search queries specifically for interpreters, drivers and assistants. Previously, there weren't separate pages for these services so a visitor would need to first land on the tour guides page and then use the filter to show only providers of the specific service they're looking for.

But now, they should soon be able to land right on the pages they want, such as the China interpreters page or Beijing driver page or Shanghai shopping assistant page. We hope this makes it easier for visitors to get from search engine, to Synotrip, to their desired service provider.

Tour Requests Feature

2010-10-06T18:05:00.000-07:00

You asked for it, so here it is!

Now you can post a tour request and let the tour guides contact you with their best offers!

Get your ideal tour for a competitive price!

How it Works:

1) You post a tour request.

Provide as much or as little information as you want.

2) We notify relevant tour guides.

Some of our 500+ tour guides will be notified via email and rss feeds.

3) Tour guides contact you with their proposals.

No need to hunt around. Just sit back and let them do the work of selling to you.

4) The rest is up to you. Arrange a tour with a tour guide of your choice. Remember to come back and give them a review later.

Start Now

Tours Section

2010-07-09T15:53:00.000-07:00

We recently launched our "China Tours" section. Now tour guides can post recommended tours. This is ideal for travelers that do not want to plan out a whole tour on their own! We hope to build it up to include hundreds, if not thousands of specialized China tours.

Please let us know if you have any more suggestions for this feature!

Tour Guide Tags

2010-03-11T07:28:00.001-08:00

We've recently added a tagging function for our China tour guide list. We found that tour guides and trippers wanted tour guides to have more meta data, so now they can add it.

Tags aren't viewable on a city by city basis, but we'll likely add that feature later when there are more tour guides that are using the tags.

List Rearrange

2010-01-31T10:02:00.000-08:00

We recently rearranged the lists to make them more user-friendly.

Content used to be displayed with the newest content up top. Now, it is ordered first by votes (higher voted content up top) and if content has the same number of votes, the content with more pageviews is placed up top.

This isn't perfect and I'm sure we'll make later improvements later. But for now, it seems to be working better than what we had before.

For an example, see this list of Chinese tourist attractions.

200+ China Tour Guides Now!

2010-01-15T09:08:00.000-08:00

Synotrip's seeing a lot of growth lately!

We now have over 200 Chinese tour guides! We now have tour guides in almost every place most travelers would want to go to.

We've been getting more and more tour guides by a combination of SEO for Baidu and social media marketing.

100th Tour Guide

2009-10-05T08:09:00.000-07:00

We now have 100 Chinese tour guides with profiles on Synotrip. Cool!

Tour Guides Feature Very Popular

2009-09-17T08:03:00.001-07:00

There are now over 80 tour guides with profiles listed on Synotrip.com/tour-guides and we're seeing about 5 sign up each week. We've also heard news from tour guides that they are attracting clients through Synotrip.

This will be a key feature for us moving forward. What are our plans for the tour guides section as of now?
- We plan to keep it completely free for 2009, and introduce some form of payment in 2010. We will probably always allow tour guides to sign up free while also offering a premium service.
- We will be sprucing up the tour guide list pages (such as this one) soon to break the information down into logical groups and display more information about the tour guides' reputations.
- We'll be making it clearer to tour guides that they move higher up in the listings based on the amount of content that they add.

Any other features, changes you would want to see?

Our new content-item page layouts

2009-05-02T11:05:00.000-07:00

This is something I've been excited about. The layouts of the core content-items (example) have been greatly improved. Here are three of the main changes:

- On the top-right of each are useful links. We took into consideration that people may be looking for content for all of China or just for a city. So, for the example listed users can see more about "Guilin," "nigtlife" all over China or "nightlife in Guilin." Another example are these photos of Nanjing. People can click to see more photos all over China or click to see photos of just Nanjing.
- The Author is much more prominent. The author's name, avatar and "tagline" all show up prominently. We hope this motivates tour guides to post more as it basically turns all their posts into advertisements for them.
- The previously messy action links are now all organized nicely near the top-right. These are the guidebook, email, tweet and share links.

Our Chinese-language blog for tour guides

2009-04-13T12:51:00.000-07:00

Recently Samantha put up a new blog at http://cometosynotrip.wordpress.com/

It covers her personal experiences giving tours to customers that she has met through Synotrip as well as tips to help other tour guides gain more customers with Synotrip.

Photos can now be uploaded all at once

2009-04-08T10:02:00.001-07:00

Previously you had to browse for each photo individually to add it to www.synotrip.com/photos.

Now, you can select all the photos you want to add to the album at once. Cool!

Recent Improvements

2009-04-03T12:21:00.000-07:00

Below are some of the things that we did this week.
- Spiffed up the page that lists all the city guides.
- Installed a module to check for broken links and then fixed hundreds of broken links. There are still hundreds to go though!
- Resolved some bugs (as always).
- Improved ad positioning to provide some more profitable spots for advertisers.

Improvements This Week

2009-03-29T13:08:00.000-07:00

Since the launch of the new site last week we've made a few improvements.

- The user profile pages are much better. See http://www.synotrip.com/samantha for example.
- Photos can now reference Listings and then show up on the listings. See the "Photos taken here" block on the side of the Yuejiang Tower listing for example.
- A few bugs were fixed (for example, breadcrumbs are 90% functional).
- Some menus and page layouts were improved.

New site up!

2009-03-21T11:06:00.001-07:00

The new site is up! It's still not completely done, but it will be constantly improved upon and further developed from here on.

Here are the new features we have right now:
- Much more flexible content navigation. Users can navigate by location, channel, category (see http://www.synotrip.com/restaurants for example) and user-added tags.
- A "tour guide" profile type that allows independent local tour guides in China to sign up and promote themselves and gives them incentives to add quality content. We did a small test on the old site to see if matching up travellers and tour guides would work and it did, so now we're expanding on this big time!
- Registered users can build and organize their own "guide books" and conveniently print them off.
- The old spam-magnet forums are replaced with a Q & A. Answers can be voted on to be pushed to the top. Anybody can post, but posts are moderated.
- A highly flexible cms (Drupal) that will allow us to continue developing the site and optimizing the layout as we go forward.
- Chinese-language navigation layer. 95% of the navigation is translated into Chinese.
- Search results are returned for incorrect URLs. See http://www.synotrip.com/indian-foood for example - this isn' t a correct URL, but the system automatically searches for "Indian" and "foood" and brings up a few indian restaurants.
- A cool photos section.
- Algorithims that will allow us to better select popular and highly-rated content (we'll have to collect some more data before we can really put these to use though).

Here's some things that should be worked on:
- improving the layouts, especially for the content-items themselves and the user-profile pages.
- giving users better ways to subscribe to content. Right now they can subscribe via rss feeds.
- bugs. We've fixed almost all of them already but a few still linger... One of the important ones is getting our page intro-text back up. We have temporarily lost the intro-text at the top of most pages such as Nightlife in Shenyang for example.
- and LOTS more secret upcoming features and improvements.

Some Synotrip Stats Before The New Site Goes Up

2009-03-18T14:10:00.000-07:00

The New Synotrip will be up right away. We're doing a check of our current traffic and search performance. Here are some of the basics:

Stats from the site itself

1) Page Views - about 200,000 during February.

2) Visits - 66,000+ visits during December.

3) Users - not counting at the moment. Will count when the new site starts.

Stats on search engines and other sites linking to Synotrip

4) Incoming Links - According to Yahoo Site Explorer, Synotrip had 4,902 incoming links on March 18.

5) Google pages indexed - By searching site:www.synotrip.com on Google, we can see we have 2550 pages indexed by Google right now. This should jump quite a bit higher.

6) Search performance - I've chosen 30 terms to represent our Google search performance. I won't say what they all are, but we rank highly for some of these terms and poorly for others. We can call our current performance "100" and the more we improve for each term, the lower the number will get. Get it?

So, going forward we want to push all of these up except for #6, which should be pushed down.

January 2009 - Snapshot

2009-02-01T19:35:00.000-08:00

This "snapshot" was taken at the beginning of February, 2009.

1) Incoming Links - According to Yahoo Site Explorer, Synotrip had 4,383 incoming links on Feb 1.

2) Page Views - about 210,000+ during January.

3) Visits - 63,000+ visits during December.

4) Registered users - We'll start tracking this again after the new site is launched.

January Snapshot

2009-01-09T12:23:00.000-08:00

This "snapshot" was taken at the beginning of January, 2009.

1) Incoming Links - According to Yahoo Site Explorer there was 3,849 incoming links on Jan 9. I've found this number of links to be true. It includes some sites that have hundreds of links to Synotrip because they have our link on each page. Also Google Webmaster Tools shows we have 4,446 incoming links.

2) Page Views - about 186,000 during December.

3) Visits - 51,000+ visits during December.

4) Registered users - 2,300 registered users. This will change quite soon because users will have to signup again on the new version of Synotrip that will be launched soon.

Samantha

2008-12-22T18:49:00.001-08:00

This month we have a new addition to our Synotrip team.

Samantha was one of my best English students back when I was teaching English a year or so ago.

She will be working on listings and other marketing tasks at Synotrip. During her first month, she learned both our old system and our upcoming new system, added 800+ listings, translated the navigation on the new system into Chinese and gave valuable insight on the layout and features of the new site.

We're lucky to have her with us. Once the new site is launched, she'll continue with listings as well as help on the marketing side of things. I'm sure she can learn a lot and take on more and more responsibility as time goes on.

Over the next month or two, we'll see at least one more official addition to the team. Two, if I can find another appropriate "tech-dude."

Snapshot - December 2008

2008-12-06T12:52:00.000-08:00

This "snapshot" was taken on Dec 6.

1) Incoming Links - According to Yahoo Site Explorer there was 3,774 incoming links on Dec 6. Again, that's quite a huge increase so I doubt that the number of links actually increased that much. Interesting though.

2) Page Views - 170,000+ during November.

3) Visits - 45,000+ visits during November.

4) Registered users - 2,200 registered users. Some spammers were deleted.

Snapshot - November 2008

2008-11-09T13:36:00.000-08:00

This "snapshot" was taken on Oct 9.

1) Incoming Links - According to Yahoo Site Explorer there was 2,727 incoming links on Oct 10. Did the amount of links actually increase that much?... I doubt it. Honestly, it must have more to do with Yahoo actually realizing the links.

2) Page Views - 150,000+ during October. About 10,000 less than in September but more than October of last year. I expect we'll see peak views in July and August each year.

3) Visits - 39,000+ visits during October. Quite a bit more than last month or October of last year.

4) Registered users - 2,200 registered users. About 100 more than there was last month. So, we're seeing about 3 more users per day. Let's say if we can increase that when the new version of Synotrip comes out. I would say a conservative goal would be to increase the sign-up rate by 10-fold within 6 months of now.

Media Kit for Advertisers

2008-10-28T10:42:00.000-07:00

We've built our own media kit containing a few pages of information tailored towards potential advertisers.

Download/View it here.

I thank Billy for cracking the whip on this project and contributing a lot of useful information.

October Snapshot

2008-10-10T11:52:00.000-07:00

This "snapshot" was taken on Oct 10. Overall, there wasn't much change from last month.

1) Incoming Links - According to Yahoo Site Explorer there was 1,700 incoming links on Oct 10.

2) Page Views - 160,000+ during September. About 20,000 less than in August but more than in September of last year. How much more than September of last year is unclear because our stats weren't reliable at that time.

3) Visits - 28,000+ visits during September. 4000 more than last month.

4) Registered users - 2,100+ registered users. About 50 more than there was 3 weeks ago.

Synotrip Performance Snapshot

2008-09-19T07:31:00.000-07:00

I did some thinking about the most important performance metrics for Synotrip. I've only chosen metrics that will be immediately understandable to anybody, regardless of how much they know about web stuff. These four metrics make up our "snapshot" and can be checked each month to see what progress the entire Synotrip network has made as a team.

1) Incoming Links - These are links to all pages on Synotrip.com from other websites. I find Yahoo Site Explorer to be highly useful for checking these. Here's a page that shows our links. Yahoo Site Explorer can be used to check incoming links to specific pages as well. Try it out. Currently our incoming links are at 1,742. Pretty good. It would take a loooong time to build up that many links on one's own. With so much good content on the Synotrip network, we see more and more people link to us all the time. Much different from the days when I had to spend entire days at a time tracking down webmasters and asking for links!

2) Page Views - Each time somebody loads a page, it's called a "page view". Page views might be a little understated because if somebody wants to see a page soon after they first viewed it, they won't have to load the page again so it won't be in our stats. Anyways, our official number of page views for August was 180,000+.

3) Visits - Each time somebody visits Synotrip.com, it's a "visit". In total there were 24,000+ visits during August.

4) Registered users - This is the number of users that have registered on Synotrip.com. As of the end of August there were 2,100+ registered users on Synotrip.

What does this mean? Here's three of the most important insights that I can gain:

- Being part of the Synotrip network is a big help for those that are running city-sites of their own. There are many incoming links and the existing base of users and viewers. It would likely take years for a smaller independent website to gain that base and gain the corresponding traffic from search engines.

- I think we could much improve the number of registered users within a year. The next edition of Synotrip, which we're already working on, will include more features for the end user.

- Based on current traffic and our highly-targetted content, both the whole Synotrip network and many city-sites on Synotrip are already able to bring enough customers to advertisers that our ad space is worth money. Tour companies, local tour guides, local restaurants and bars... any businesses that target foreigners in China could and should be advertised on Synotrip!

More ad-sharing for Synotrippers

2008-08-13T11:28:00.000-07:00

The new direction of Synotrip is all about developing the "city-site" system by helping city managers make more money and have more control over their own city-site. I've started revising the "join Synotrip" page to reflect this.

The first change that was made is that people running city-sites on Synotrip now get almost all of the ad-spaces for themselves and they can do anything they want with those ad spaces.

What might they do with those ad spaces? Here's some ideas I had:
- Add Google ads. This is super easy to set up.
- Place ads for their own company. Overland Travel, a Sichuan tour company is advertised on the Chengdu site.
- Place ads for charities. Haven't seen this yet, but I could imagine somebody advertising an English school for poorer Chinese children or an environmental organization.
- "Send me money" ads. Ads could be made to say something like "Find this article useful? Billy researched and wrote this for you! Want to buy him a beer?" and include an option to send $3, $5 or $10.
- Sell advertising space. We've had Chinese advertisers come to us to ask to advertise. Certainly, with a little bit of networking, advertising space could be sold to local companies that want to attract foreign travellers.

What do you think?

First Post

2008-08-12T12:26:00.000-07:00

Welcome to the new Synotrip blog. This will be a place to share news and ideas related to Synotrip. I'll be moderating but I hope to see posts from other Synotrip members as well. What might we post about? Here's some ideas:
- New developments at Synotrip.
- Experiences living and travelling in China.
- Ideas for the future development of Synotrip.
- China travel news.