Desert Rat Preppers is no more.

[DragoSapien]

 I just wanted to notify everyone that my website desertratpreppers.com no longer exists.  After a whole year I’ve pretty much been dead and no activity, I decided not to waste anymore time or money on it.  All I have left is a small  Desert rat preppers group on Facebook which consists of mostly West Texas folks.  I plan to start livening up this website and coming over here more often now.

 So for those of you that were advertising my website on your sites and blogs you can go ahead and remove it.  I thank you all for the support and Advertisement of my website.

Robbie

[Tevin]

Sorry it did not work out, Drago. I noticed you went dark a week or two ago, so I changed the link on Off Grid Ham to send readers to your new Facebook page.

I know from personal experience that it can cost big $$ to run a website, so if there's no action, then yeah, decisions need to be made.

This past winter I shelled out about $300 to upgrade Off Grid Ham to add security features and automatic backups. This is on top of what it was already costing me to run the site. These will be yearly, recurring costs 

I don't mind so much doing it as long as OGH continues to be successful. I found out the hard way that the more popular your website is, the more security you need.

Thanks for all your efforts. We'll see you on the other side.

[AD]

Yep been there thinking about that.

Trying to come up with some cost-effective means of getting traffic back here.

[DragoSapien]

 Well it’s clear to me that social media sites have killed the private website.  I just remembered you have a Facebook page for prepared ham.  Maybe we should start using it.  I know the Ham Radio Go Box group on Facebook is full of activity.

[AD]

You may be right about FB.

[Tevin]

I thought about starting a Facebook page for Off Grid Ham.

My reservation is that the FB page would get a lot of activity, but that would not result in more visits to my website.

Off Grid Ham already gets a respectable level of traffic but I'd like to take it to the next level. I'm not sure Facebook would do that.

[spacecase0]

I don't like facebook for the tracking and filtering they use.
any prepared ideas seem to be filtered out...
or at least once they get noticed
if you are using facebook keeping in mind that, your best bet is only to use it to advertise this website

[ghrit]

FWIW, facebook and I will never interact.  I'll trust them about as far as I can throw a bull elephant, so even setting up an account for any reason just will not happen.  I'm a throwback when it comes to trust.

[DragoSapien]

 I can tell you from experience having both the main website and the Facebook page does not work at all. The Facebook page will most likely take everyone away from the main page and it will die.  If your main page is getting some decent traffic I would stick with that.  The only plus to the Facebook page is that it’s free and yes it has good advertisement potential.  Because of the nature of the site, prepping and  being prepared,  most of your loyal members don’t even go to other social media websites so if they’re regular on your site I would keep it.  My site started dying down quite a bit before I created the Facebook page and never did pick up after that. The Facebook page took off.  But here’s the big difference.  On the main site everybody discussed projects and teachings of their own personal life and prepping.  On Facebook everybody is just cut and pasting things they fine at a different site but nothing that they’re actually doing.

[Tempstar]

Facebook (nsabook, as we call it around here) is aimed at the younger, attention deficit crowd. It's the same with tv shows aimed at younger viewers, having the annoying quick cuts between cameras because studies have shown that the 30 and younger crowd get bored after more than a few seconds. As much as it sucks, it's the growing trend. Our Ham Radio page has gone from a high of 27,000 hits per month in 2003 to just 7 last month. Old guys like Ghrit and I still have the patience to read and absorb large amounts of material, but data shows that just isn't the case with a big part of the population anymore. Being in the TV industry, I get to see the market research that shows how the ratings for such things as the evening news suffers when a package is more than a minute long. People want a little info and then move on to something else. Our Facebook page gets 100 times the hits of our website, and our Alexa feed is equally as popular. Our demographics show a marked and steady trend of younger viewers preferring the Facebook and Alexa feeds while the viewership for the actual news at 5 and 6 pm is the 45 and up age group. What does all of this babble mean? Sadly, websites and forums are on a downward trend in usage. I won't even get into what this probably means for our future as a society.

[Tevin]

I can tell you from experience having both the main website and the Facebook page does not work at all. The Facebook page will most likely take everyone away from the main page and it will die.  If your main page is getting some decent traffic I would stick with that.  The only plus to the Facebook page is that it’s free and yes it has good advertisement potential.  Because of the nature of the site, prepping and  being prepared,  most of your loyal members don’t even go to other social media websites so if they’re regular on your site I would keep it.  My site started dying down quite a bit before I created the Facebook page and never did pick up after that. The Facebook page took off.  But here’s the big difference.  On the main site everybody discussed projects and teachings of their own personal life and prepping.  On Facebook everybody is just cut and pasting things they fine at a different site but nothing that they’re actually doing.

Thanks for the insight, Drago. I created a FB page for my website but never did anything with it. It's just a shell account.

If I thought being on FB would drive traffic to Off Grid Ham then I'd do it in a moment. But I know what would happen: I'd post an article from my website, it might get some short term attention, but then all the comments and discussion would happen on Facebook, mostly by people who did not even read the article. So basically, I'd be driving traffic to Facebook and not my website. I am considering paid promotion on Facebook. I have not looked into the details but from what I understand it's not that expensive and it does work.

On the plus side, readers do occasionally post my articles to their own Facebook accounts and groups they participate in, and I always see a bump in traffic at those times. This kind of unsolicited, organic reaction is much more effective and means more to me personally.

[AD]

I wonder if giving away a few cheap radios might help revive the site.

I bought some during amazon prime day thinking I might do that.