I contacted the person who was posting the ads and offered to design, develop and optimize a website for all her rental properties. She agreed. The arrangement was that I was to keep a percentage of the rentals. And so we embarked in a project that lasted 4 months to put live.

I built the wireframe for the site, manage all the content (did lots of re writes), I designed the site trying to reflect the beauty and uniqueness of the place. Calitri is not an easy place to promote, although located in one of the preferred destinations for Americans, the fact that Calitri is embedded into central southern Italy was a challenge to promote.

I contacted restaurants, local shops, local artists, local bed and breakfast to gather information to make the destination more attractive. I focus on “traditional” Italy and market the website with that in mind. It was a great challenge to contact all these people as many do not speak English (which added to the idea of a place being traditional). Not only I needed to built and designed activities once I got people there, but also needed to provide transportation. I had the same arrangement with a local transportation company, I deliver the customer, I keep a percentage, and they agreed.

I managed to place the website under highly competitive keywords, and all niche keywords. Of course anything related to Calitri, the site is ranking #1 even tho I have not worked on the site for the last two years.

The site is still ranking (again, note, I have not worked on this site for the last 2 years) under competitve keywords. I worked really hard on this site for 8 months.

We got people coming into the site and renting the properties. I was able to communicate effectively that even Calitri being a small town not conviniently located, it is a place to meet the real “southern Italy” where people are friendly, where food is exceptional, where local artists will open their studios for you, where you can take a cooking class at the local Palazzo, go truffle hunting, etc.

I also created “supportive websites” not only for link building strategies but to increase awareness. I created a forum called

At the beginning this site brought visitors and converted them into guests at the bed and breakfast, but competition was growing and decided to go for a more web 2.0 design layout and moved the strategy to www.gotraveltoargentina.com and put all SEO and social media efforts onto the new domain.

Restricted by the available free time that I have, I left this project far behind but I hope I will be able to revamp it in 2009.

My main goal was to rank the website for “Wine Tasting In Buenos Aires”

because I was promoting my mother’s friend sommelier school in Argentina. But because they charged a lot of money for their wine tastings in Buenos Aires – If I recall right, they wanted to charge about $150 per couple for wine tasting, they couldn’t convert. I suggested to go about $25 per couple but then it was not worth it for them.

After testing various strategies, I converted the site to be a supportive site for www.try2cook.com