Beach Walks with Rox is our very own internet tv show, aka video podcast, aka lifestyle blog on YouTube. Shane and Roxanne started this a podcast experiment in February, 2006, and carried on creating a new video episode every day for 402 days in a row! There are now a total of about 780 episodes, “sharing a little aloha every day.” Within weeks, we had viewers in 60 countries and went on to win several awards, be featured in several books, and earn over 2.5 million downloads. We also spoke at SxSW, BlogWorld, Podcast Expo, and many conferences teaching others how to use video to tell their stories.
LAUNCH: 2006; new design in 2014
BUSINESS TYPE: Inspirational Lifestyle Video Blog
LOCATION: Hawaii
PLATFORM: WordPress
OPPORTUNITY:
We were experimenting with the new video podcast technology yet quickly realized the power of sharing “a girl a dog, a beautiful Hawai beach, and original Hawaiian theme music. At the time, WordPress was one of the few options, having a built-in RSS feed that was required for the podcasting to work. So our site was originally built in 2006 and thrives still today, with the full archive of 780 episodes online.
We had a major re-design in 2014 – but all of the hundreds of pages of content was updated ‘automagically’ when we installed the new design theme. This is another great benefit of WordPress – build your site once and you can keep adding to it and re-designing it “forever.” By the way, Google loves sites that have been around for 10 years and have hundreds of pages of content that has been continually added over time. It’s “the real deal” that cannot be faked up like so many SEO hackers.
Our bigger challenge was that the video hosting sites we used over the years largely went out of business, one by one. So we’ve had to stay ahead of that curve, and keep posting our videos to new platforms as they developed. We are happy to say that we now have a full archive on YouTube, and about half of our newer episodes on Vimeo.