Just rambling...

As the title states, I am just rambling. The last week has been nice. The Lathmar Holi video on Dirty Old Boots has been received quite well. In fact I was just checking its status on Metacafe. Our video had 69 views while NDTV's had 6. Felt nice. Must be doing something right. On DailyMotion ours waas the only video on Lathmar Holi. Does that mean it is not worth uploading or does it mean that others have somehow missed the trick on a unique festival. I would rather be biased to my way of thinking. Dirty Old Boots is alive and well and the first few tentative steps that began about three weeks ago are becoming a lot more surer. A long long way ahead. We have not even begun to project the kind of things that we want Dirty Old Boots to become. A definite travel resource. Today it is little more than a drop box of sundry videos. To a casual visitor to the site, focus is something they will feel is lacking on the site. But we know where we want to go from here on in. And we will get there. Slowly and surely.

The other day I was speaking to a friend of mine and he suggested something that I have been grappling with for some time. How does Dirty Old Boots generate revenues for itself without waiting for advertisers to come in. I know advertisers will com ein, but that is still some distance away into the future. We need a threshold level of traffic to the site to generate advertising revenue. Till then ... what?

Well, on ething that I have been doing and now will intergrate into Dirty Old Boots is tours. I go to Ladakh every year. I love going back to Bhutan at every opportunity. Sikkim is a favourite. My plans of rafting down the Zanskar this August and the Brahmaputra this December is final. Why don't I start packaging all these trips, plug them with the videos that we produce and generate revenues from that? Sounds like a plan. In fact that is something that has kept me busy for the better part of today. Added five trips that we plan to promote this year - Ladakh, Zanskar rafting, Bhutan, a road trip to the base camp of Mt Everest and a trip to Kailash and Mansarovar. The last two I have been wanting to do for ages, maybe 2011 is my lucky year.

One route I would like to add to the offering is Mongolia. It is a mystical country, relatively unknown and exotic. A horse trek across the Mongolian steppes, through the Gobi desert, witnessing the Nadaam Festival, maybe even spending a week out with Kazhak eagle hunters. Mongolia is a place I will need to recce soon. Maybe spend a month there figuring out details, then packaging shorter trips.

The other thing I have kind of figured out is the difference between budget packages and high end packages. I would rather work on the second kind of guests. But this year may be too early for that, I am not yet geared to cater to the high end clientele. 2012 for sure.

Well, enough ramblings for now. I was kinda hoping that during the course of my ramblings Dirty Old Boots would have crossed another milestone. It is at 9,858 hits, and I was hoping it would cross the 10,000 mark. No sweat, probably sometime during the night. Just the beginning. Need a million hits a month for Dirty old Boots to do what it is gearing up to do. Godpseed.