For the past three days I’ve been busy co-leading the first ever Park City Bike About bicycle tour. The tour was an idea I came up with while in Peru just a few short months ago… and it was an idea that, with the help of Jeff Manwaring from Exclusive Excursions, I was able to make happen in just one month’s time. But with only one month to market and promote this three-day bicycle tour in my current hometown of Park City, Utah, the turnout ended up being super low. That said, I had a good time and I think that our one main customer, Bill, was happy with his experience as well.

On day one of the tour, Bill was joined by my friend and neighbor, Mark Davidson, and together the three of us cycled down the narrow and bumpy Lost Prospector trail and then pedaled the entire length of the Rail Trail – all the way from Park City to Coalville.

On day two of the tour, Bill was joined by his wife (Sylvia) and his 17-year-old daughter (Lauren). I led the three family members down the steep gravel road that runs from the top of Guardsman’s Pass to the city of Midway.

Once there, we ate a quick lunch and then traveled south in the car to the top of the Provo Canyon Parkway, where Jeff took over the leadership responsibilities and I drove in the car and took photos of the group as they passed by at multiple locations along the trail.

On day three  of the tour (Sunday, June 26th, 2011), Jeff, Bill and I covered a good chunk of Park City’s famous Mid-Mountain trail. We cycled from Deer Valley’s Silver Lake Lodge to the northern end of Park City Mountain Resort and then cut down to Park City from there. Bill fell off his bike two or three times, but jumped right back up each time and was quick to continue on without complaint.

Jeff and I are already talking about doing another Park City Bike About around this time next year. We had a lot of fun leading the tour this weekend, but I think we learned a major lesson this time around: You need to promote this kind of thing several months in advance so people have the time to make travel plans.

I’ve been working on this website for nearly a week now, but today I pretty much finished it. It’s the new website for Bothy Hostels – with locations in Arequipa and Puno, Peru. I created this website as part of a trade agreement between myself and Raul Gonzales (the owner of Bothy Hostels). He got a new website for his business and I got 3+ free weeks in his apartment in the historical center of Arequipa, Peru.

On Wednesday my website at www.bicycletouringpro.com turned three years old.

I’ve been working incredibly hard on this website over the past few years, but it’s just now getting to the point where my hard work is paying off. You can read about some of things I’ve done with the site over the last three years by reading this post.

What I’m most proud of, however, is that in three year’s time I’ve been able to help hundreds of people conduct their own bicycle touring adventures and for the past seven months at least, Bicycle Touring Pro has been paying for the mortgage on my condo in Park City.

My goal for this site in the future is to continue helping other people and to have the site paying for my entire lifestyle by this time next year.

Today I officially launched a new website called Motorcycle Touring Pro. The site is meant to be the sister-site to my popular blog about long-distance bicycle touring. At the moment, there are only about 30 blog posts on the site, but in a few year’s time I hope to have this motorcycle-centric website generating as much traffic and and as much income as my current website at Bicycle Touring Pro.

If you know of anyone who is interested in motorcycles or motorcycle travel, I would appreciate you telling them about my site at: www.motorcycletouringpro.com. Thanks in advance!

I had some new business cards made for myself… and they came in the mail just a couple days ago. As you can see, I’ve designed the cards to match this very website. Same colors – same fonts.

On the front side of the card I have my name, email address, phone number (which I’ve blurred out because I don’t want everyone on the Internet calling me), and my mailing address. On the back side of the card I’ve listed my three main websites: darrenalff.com, touringpro.org (which links to bicycletouringpro.com, motorcycletouringpro.com and backpacktouringpro.com), and silvermountainmarketing.com.

Nearly two weeks ago I launched a new website called PogoTricks.com. My goal with the site is to get it ranking on the first page of Google for the keywords “pogo tricks” and “pogo stick tricks”. At the moment, the site is ranked 7th for the keyword “pogo tricks”, so thus far, thing are going well.

When I purchased the domain name for PogoTricks.com two weeks ago, I also purchased the domain name www.unicycletricks.net.  I bought the domain because I saw it as another potential niche that I could easily get into, so over the past couple days I’ve been building up the website at UnicycleTricks.net. As you can see, the website is pretty much identical to my pogo stick website. The only real difference is that I changed the colors.

I have a lot more work to do on this site, but it is up and running now and already being picked up by the major search engines. It should be interesting to see which website (the pogo stick site or the unicycle site) performs the best.

In other news, I spent an hour today on Skype, talking with ex-pro BMX freestyler, Ryan Melia, who is in the process of preparing to ride a bicycle from Chicago, Illinois to the country of Panama, while at the same time raising money for Natural Solutions Foundation, an international NGO (Non Governmental Organization) focused on reclaiming natural, Beyond Organic food production and preserving both health and freedom.

Ryan and I spoke about how to raise money for charity, how to gather press and publicity for a bike tour, and a number of related subjects. To learn more about Ryan and his bike trip through North and Central America, be sure to check out his website at: www.healthfreedombikeride.com.

PogoTricks.com is a new website I created over the past couple days. The aim of the site is to help people learn which pogo sticks to buy and how to do incredible pogo stick tricks. I’ve been learning a lot about SEO (search engine optimization) lately, so this site is really just an SEO experiment. I want to see how quickly I can get the website to rank on the first page of Google; how quickly I can increase the website’s traffic; and if at all possible, actually make a little money from this new niche website. We’ll just have to wait and see what happens…

I spent the last day or so working to totally redesign the website here at DarrenAlff.com. The redesign not only looks better, but it will allow me to share larger, wider images and to post more frequently about less important items.

The biggest addition to the new website is a new section I am calling my “Journal” where I plan to share photos, stories, and events from my daily life. This new section will be about the smaller things I am doing in my life. They may not be big things, but neat little things I want to record.

I wanted to add this journal section to the website so I could use my site here as a sort of online diary. I often times write in a physical journal, but an online journal allows me to share photos and video as well, so I think it will be a neat way to record my life. If I can continually journal online, I think it will be neat to look back at this website after a couple years and see everything that I’ve accomplishment. My physical journals are not nearly as fun to look back on.

This is the first website I have ever sold and despite the amount of work I did on it (and the potential I know it has), I let the site go for an extremely low price. My main motivation for selling the site at this point in time is that I simply have not had the time or the energy to put into the site in order to make it something really special. I hope that by selling the site and getting rid of all the work it entails, I can concentrate more on my business at BicycleTouringPro.com and really turn that site into a venture that will pay for my current and future lifestyle.

For now, however, it is time to say goodbye to Social Media Schools. I look forward to seeing what happens with the site in the future… and I wish the new owner all the best!

For the past several months I’ve been working to make today happen.

After teaming up with bicycle travelers Tom Kevill-Davies, Alastair Humphries and Kate Harris, the Bicycle Travel Network was born.

The Bicycle Travel Network (or BTN as we often times call it) is an organization we created to provide advice, backing and encouragement for a New Generation of Global Cycling Adventurers.

As part of our work at the BTN, we decided to create a scholarship fund that would help to actually pay for the travels of several young people. We created the Bicycle Travel Network scholarship because as four individuals who started traveling by bike at a very young age, we know how difficult it can be at times for young people to fund their travels and how rewarding it can be to individuals lucky enough to make it happen. We hope that by giving out these small micro-grants to the right people, we will be able to help these people make their dreams come true in some small way. And as someone who has conducted several long-distance bike tours on just a few hundred dollars, I know what a big difference a small amount of money can make.

Today we announced the BTN’s first round of scholarship recipients! You can check out the list of individuals selected for the micro-grants by clicking this link.

We launched the Bicycle Travel Network on March 22, 2010 and in just one month’s time we were able to raise approximately $800 USD to give away during this first round of micro-scholarships.

In total, 47 people applied for this first round of BTN scholarships and it was a difficult process to narrow down that list to just a few individuals. Every person that applied had a great story to tell and it was really hard to narrow our selection. We wish we had more money to give away, but we are extremely grateful for the results we were able to achieve in such a short amount of time.

Over the next several months we plan to follow up with today’s BTN scholarship recipients and feature them on the website at www.bicycletravelnetwork.com. We will be learning more about each of their trips, interviewing them about the lessons they’ve learned from life on the road, and sharing some of their stories from their travels.

Click here to see who was selected as the first seventeen BTN scholarship recipients.