My vision of Love Snowdonia is that it will serve four main purposes:
- To ensure people who want to visit Snowdonia have access to unique information about the region, derived from the real experiences of people who live, work or holiday in Snowdonia.
- To provide an outlet for people who want to share their experiences of Snowdonia – literally, to ‘share the love’.
- To offer free and very cheap ways for Snowdonia businesses to promote themselves.
- To create a warm and friendly community of people who love Snowdonia and want to connect with other Snowdonia lovers.
People-powered magazine
The idea is that Love Snowdonia will be a people-powered magazine, where the visitors will provide a lot of the content.
The content you choose to share might include:
- Videos: next time you have a day out in Snowdonia, take your video camera and film your adventure. Upload it to YouTube or Vimeo, and send me a link along with some information about where you went and what you got up to.
- Photos: send me some photos you’ve taken during your day out in Snowdonia, and I’ll create a gallery for them here on the website (you will of course receive full credit).
- Articles: tell us what you love about Snowdonia, or your favourite Snowdonia attractions, or write a restaurant review, or write a travel journal of your visit to Snowdonia, or recommend a great place to climb/cycle/surf etc. As long as your article is on-topic (that is, it’s about Snowdonia) and doesn’t directly promote your own business, I’ll be happy to publish it.
There will need to be a few rules and regulations governing the way you present your content and what I’ll do with it, which you can find on the ‘content guidelines‘ page.
Promoting your website
Subtle promotion
I appreciate that getting you to provide unique content is a big ask, so I’ll reward your contributions by offering you a free, optimised, do-follow link to your website for each piece of content that you provide. This will help search engines to find your site, and will also encourage readers of your articles to click through to your website and see what you’re all about. Your link will be part of an ‘author biography’ which I’ll ask you to add to the end of each piece of content you send in. If you don’t have a business to promote, you can link to your personal blog, Twitter profile, Facebook page or anything else you’d like to link to (as long as it’s family-friendly and inoffensive) – or just omit the link completely, if you prefer.
Blatant promotion
As I develop Love Snowdonia, I’ll find ways to help Snowdonia businesses to blatantly promote themselves here. Plans for this side of Love Snowdonia include a built-in social network, where you’ll be able to create a self-promoting profile page; a business directory where you’ll be able to add a free listing or, if you want to upgrade, very cheap ‘premium’ listings; and banner advertising, which again I’ll keep very cheap.
I’ll also be looking at ways for Snowdonia businesses to list their special offers, news and events.
These features may take a while to implement so I’m not able to provide any real detail just yet, but as soon as each new feature and/or promotional opportunity arises I’ll announce it on Twitter, Facebook and in a newsletter – so make sure you keep up to date with our news by using the connect and subscribe links which you’ll find at the bottom of each page of this website.
A friendly community
As mentioned above, something I’m very keen to add to Love Snowdonia is a built-in social network, where members can chat among themselves about anything and everything to do with Snowdonia. The tool I’ll use for this is BuddyPress, a very simple WordPress plugin which enables members to create forums, ask and answer questions, make announcements and make new friends. Again, if you’d like to be notified when this feature goes live, please use the connect and subscribe links at the bottom of any page of this website.
