BarcaTrips_

Initial setup

I started this project in January 2023. Having done a bunch of research on SEO, I wanted to try to rank a website in Google. To do this, I also wanted to pick up a new tool; this ended up being Nuxt. Since its known to have SSR out of the box, which makes pages load faster, it seemed like the perfect match.

Since it was just a test, I started with some basic components and hard-coded content for about 10 to 20 pages. While working on this setup, I was already working hard to get the performance score as high as possible, even manually cropping images and uploading them separately.

While this approach worked well at the start, adding new articles was very time-consuming.

CMS Integration

Since we started getting traffic and the site at least showed some potential, I decided to start adding a CMS connection. After extensive research, I ended up with Storyblok.

The decision to go with Storyblok was mainly because it was fully headless, built on components, and offered a generous free tier (this has changed since then). Setting up the connection was quite straightforward since I already had everything split up into components.

After this integration, we could focus solely on uploading more articles, with not much development work needed anymore.

Monetizing the website

After the website began attracting a decent number of visitors, the focus shifted to monetizing it. Since it was just a simple blog, the most straightforward option was to use Affiliate links.

While simple affiliate links in the content got some clicks, it was not enough. To try and get more affiliate sales, we started heavily testing out custom affiliate widgets. By adding flexible slots inside of the content, we started developing many different variants of affiliate widgets, and by testing + tracking these, we ended up increasing affiliate income a lot.

Multi-site setup

With the Barcatrips website running well, the next idea I had is to launch new websites using the same codebase. For this, I refactored a large part of the project to use a Storyblok configuration for branding, colors, and everything tied specifically to Barcatrips.

Then, by launching two Cloudflare workers using the same repository, but different environment variables, for example, the Storyblok Space, we ended up being able to run multiple websites under this same repository. With this we launched WeAreTanzania.com