The story behind the stories

GoGirlfriend was born out of a desire to connect and share with women searching for travel information online. By furnishing honest reviews and personal stories, it incorporated user generated content and early social media adapters before the site even launched. Coupled with expert tips and slice of life features, GoGirlfriend became a trusted resource for female travelers. Add a splash of humor, spa and foodie reporting and that’s GG.

Since its inception,  GG has incorporated SEO best practices with social media as its primary traffic driver. An accredited news source to Google by 2008, GG articles and stories were often picked up and sited by other news sources after appearing on Google News.

Up close and personal with GG readers

From our research, we knew a few things about our travel-oriented readers:

• She invested in her career
• She was comfortable making decisions about where to spend her money
• She considered travel necessary to her well-being – not a luxury
• She was young (in her own mind) regardless of her real age
• She was a hard worker and go-getter, but made time for play
• She was as comfortable at chic restaurants as she was at local hangouts

GoGirlfriend addressed a key concern of mass-market review sites by maintaining a boutique-feel and respecting the female focus in every story published. In 2007, women were hungry for travel but online resources oriented for them were minimal.

• Age. 35-55 (median age 40)
• Gender. Predominantly female (85% female, 15% male)
• Education. College educated
• Household Income. $75, 000+
• Marital Status. 35% single, 27% live in households with children

When GoGirlfriend launched, the demand for female-centric travel information was growing at a healthy rate:

• Women represented 50% of frequent flyers
• Women represented 40% of business travelers
• Women made 70-80% of all travel purchases
• Women converted travel research into purchases at a higher rate than men
• Women researched a destination (42%) prior to travel

GG suffered an enormous set back in 2009 and the site lay dormant for almost a year. No content was added, emails went unanswered and social networking was completely dropped. But in early 2010, Julia obtained ownership of the site and began again.

On average, GoGirlfriend currently enjoys 10,000 visitors and more than 20,000 page views per month. The site is updated once a week, so many visitors arrive via organic search to older posts. Because of spam bots attacking the site, we’ve tightened commenting restrictions.