Backpacker.com and site management

Creating traffic and building awareness
When I joined the backpacker.com team, the embracing of new social networks was just starting to happen. I had the pleasure to help contribute, post and utilize these important resources to the advantage of the magazine, as just another means to audience communication. I sat in a meeting with my editors, while one wrote on a dry erase board about ways to which site traffic, readership and general awareness of the Backpacker.com brand could be achieved.

Facebook and Twitter
Having already started using a Facebook page, the new audience-gathering device was to be Twitter (access both by clicking respected logos below). After most every blog, video or article post, a tweet and Facebook update would always come next. When traditional sites lacked interesting blog ideas, I headed over to our followers on these networks to look for content.

Results
In looking at the general impact these social networking sites had on Backpacker.com's traffic, Facebook increased traffic by 21% since January and Twitter alone, in a few short months brought in 4,135 new page views since the start of the new year. Please see the Google Analytics graph below (click to enlarge).







Website maintenance-
Apart from cultivating and communicating with our audience on the social networking platform, a major part of my internship duties were website cleanup, referencing, and article maintenance. One of my major duties consisted of taking the print version of an article, and using our CMS system, to transform that article into a searchable, tag-able and linkable online article.

CMS and The Gear Guide
Our April issue was the 2009 Gear Guide. It was packed full of over 500 separate reviews and skills. It remains one of the more popular of our monthly issues. Most, if not all, of the gear articles in print, had to be transferred online. For each I would write a head and deck, webtitle, a brief description and make a quick edit of the body. I would then test or format links and add a photo from our servers. The process taught me two very important things; how to maintain a eye for detail and mistakes even after a few hundred of these articles are under your belt and to implement my deck, head and copy-writing skills to even the most non-breaking-news articles we hosted, such as a backpack review.

From print to web all thanks to CMS and site maintenance.
Below is the cover of our Gear Guide issue, featuring the Osprey Variant 52 pack. Below that is the web version of the pack's review, again, click to enlarge. The original link is here if interested.