Name of your website?The Body Soul & Spirit Expo
Your name?
Chandler Armstrong
Your Location (city, etc)
Calgary
Please give us a short summary of your website?
THE BODY SOUL & SPIRIT EXPO Canada's Largest & Longest Running Holistic Spiritual Wellness & Healthy Lifestyle Expo & Online community that serves over 62,000 members that particapate in our events which takes place in several cities across Canada and provide an opportunity for the general public to explore all the options available in the creation of a healthier and more conscious lifestyle. It also offers a unique opportunity for a diverse array of businesses individuals and organizations that offer products service and resources that facilitate this quest to meet face to face with the a highly targeted and motivated audience and share their offerings services and knowledge. Over all its one of the best opportunities to develop relationships reach new clients and gain exposure and recognition for your business or organization.
What inspired you to launch your own website?
After first lauching the Body Soul & Spirit Expo Website, and inviting our many speakers, experts, authors and business to share their information and offerings on our site, we soon found that we were getting inquires for other that wanted to be included in the sites directory. We realized that the site was reaching many more people that were seeking options to live an happier, healthier, more conscious and successful lifestyle than attended the show, and many of them wanted to list their business / organization, contribute articles and post events. To accommedate this, we created our first site which provided information about our event, as well as resources and listings for those who visited us online.
When did you launch your first website, and what was it?
The Body Soul & Spirit Expo Event Website, which listed our events, exhibitors, vendors, and speakers, as well as the events program guide was launched in 1995.
How did you decide on a name for your website?
The site's name is the same as our event
What makes it different from other, similar offerings?
The Body Soul & Spirit is both an online community and and event. By providing tools and resources that keep our members connected throughout the year, we are able to create many additional opportunities that help our members build their business, clientelle and organizations throughout the year.
What is your eventual goal? (To sell it, keep it for income, secure a book or other mainstream media deal?)
We are currently undergoing a very ambisious upgrade and plan to launch a much more dynamic online community with evern more features and create a much more global online community using a API platform that with a much more community / social focus. Currently Ramp Group has been selected for the development.
How does your investment of time and money balance against your success?
We measure our success by how well we accomplish our mission of creating a culture of mutual support, and bringing people together that are focused on providing options to living a better life, and providing them with opportunities to share there knowledge, information, products and services with the public! Our website has been one of the most valuable tools in accomplishing this, and has also had the pleasant side-affect of being finacially rewarding as well.
If you had an unlimited development budget for development, how would you change your site?
Well that's a loaded question, as we are currently exploring options to raise the capital to launch our new online community. The development proposal is fairly detailed, but to summarize, it would allow for automation of much of the work involved with coordinating our online community, booking and managing our events, as well as provide a more collaborate environment for all our members to both co-create our event and community with us, as well as share in the rewards through affiliate opportunities.
If your site got really big, really quickly, would you be able to keep up with the demand?
We are already unable to keep up with the demand, with our events being invited by venues across North America, we are working on automating the the administration of our events, as well as providing more 'self serve' tools for members to help keep up.
What unexpected costs and headaches have you had to deal with?
Developers that start but don't deliver the functionality we are looking for in our IT Applications.
What has been your biggest challenge?
Finding the Capital and the Talent, and more importantly the balance between the two. We currently find that our revenue gives us little capital for further development as most of it goes to maintaining the costs for our events.
What method has been most successful for promoting your website?
Reciprical link programs, member support, our events promotion and publicity driving traffic to our site, and word of mouth.
How has running your website differed from your expectations?
Our dream was to have a system that would automate the process of booking exhibitors, directory listings, and automate the process of posting the content pertaining to our events such as exhibitor and member listings, member events, articles, newsletters, however, much of this did not work as expected and requires a lot of effort to maintain. Members need a lot of "hand holding" to get them to update their information.
How long have you run the site already, and how long will you continue to keep it up if you don't enjoy big gains in traffic, income or popularity?
As long as our events keep growing, and the demand for member listings continues... hopefully for many more years.
Where do you see your site in the Future.
We see our event and online community expanding to a National Event in Canada, and possibly expanding to North America and Beyond. We see the opportunity, potential and demand for first a national and then global event and online community, which provides unique and useful content for each city we host our event, and maintain an online community as well as a global presence for all who are involved.
What is your website address?
The Body Soul & Spirit Expo
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