When it comes to content, Jeff Tucker and Rob Kvidt are hyper-focused on one topic: Hawaii travel news.
Over ten million visitors come to their site, Beat of Hawaii, every year to better understand what’s really happening when it comes to Hawaii travel, from airlines to accommodations and etiquette to short-term rental laws.
But that hasn’t always been the case. When Jeff and Rob launched Beat of Hawaii in 2007, they clocked 37 visitors on one of the first days. That modest readership made them wonder if blogging wasn’t a lot more complicated than people realized.
As it turns out, however, they were on to something big—but it took putting in the work and a little bit of help from one well-known guidebook author to bring it all together.
Finding their beat
Back in the early days of blogs, Rob was working as a college admissions director while Jeff was in technology. “The first time I saw a blog, I thought, oh, this looks really weird. I showed it to Jeff, and he said, ‘I don’t really know what this is.’”
The concept of a blog sparked something in Rob’s imagination, so when they headed to Australia for work, he started a blog about the trip for his family. When they came back home, they were looking to make a change.
“When you live in Hawaii and you want to work for a living, you have to be super creative,” said Jeff. “It’s not a place where you find normal work.”
So Rob started thinking more and more about blogs.
“I found out people were living on the mainland writing about Hawaii,” he said. “So I said to Jeff, ‘you know, we’re right here. We’re in Hawaii. Maybe we could do something with this.’”
He came up with the name Beat of Hawaii.
“That’s our news beat—Hawaii. So we started it, and oh my gosh! We had 37 people on the site in one day. And I thought that was pretty good.”
Jeff wasn’t so sure.
“I thought it was a waste of time at that pace.”
How Arthur Frommer put Beat of Hawaii on the map
So Jeff started paying attention to what else was out there in the world of travel news. What were people writing about? Who was pulling in an audience? In his research, he came across famed guidebook author Arthur Frommer.
“He was the father of modern-day travel,” said Jeff. “Before the internet, you would go to a bookstore to get a Frommer’s travel guide.”
Jeff started leaving thoughtful comments on Arthur’s articles. “He was a funny curmudgeon similar to me, and I wondered if he’d ever read my comments because there hadn’t been a response back.”
Six months after launching Beat of Hawaii, they had an answer.
“We woke up one morning and the website had crashed because there were so many people trying to visit,” said Rob. “We didn’t know what was going on. Until we realized, Arthur Frommer had featured Beat of Hawaii in his column and shared it globally.”
“He said ‘if you’re a fan of the Hawaiian islands, rush quick to Beat of Hawaii,’” said Rob.
“I still feel emotional about that,” said Jeff. “It was a big deal.”
That moment started a real-life friendship with Arthur. Rob and Jeff appeared on his weekly radio show and Beat of Hawaii earned a mention in some of his books.
“He actually put us on the map,” said Rob. “We started with 37 people in a day. Now it’s not even noon, we’ve already had 75,000 pageviews, and we have more articles coming out.”
Getting started with advertising
Of course, not every site that reaches this level of notoriety is able to sustain its traffic, or try to monetize it. And for a while, Jeff and Rob weren’t sold on ads.
“For the first few years, we had no advertising at all,” Rob said. “We didn’t even want any.”
But once they built a community of engaged readers, advertisers came to them. “A guy contacted us from Hawaiian Airlines and said, ‘Could we advertise on your website?’ So we thought, well, I guess we could try it.”
“It was a novel idea,” said Jeff.
Jeff and Rob stayed with affiliate advertising for a long time. “As a destination site, we could make five figures a month easily, just with Hawaiian Airlines. So it wasn’t like we weren’t making significant money,” Jeff said.
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But as Beat of Hawaii evolved, it moved away from being a destination site and became a Hawaii news site, reporting the news behind the vacation: real-time conversations, tracking legislation, digging into controversies, and breaking stories from the islands.
“If someone wants to know where to snorkel, there are hundreds of destination sites for that,” said Rob. “If they want to know why their flight is delayed, why visitor rules keep changing, or what HawaiianMiles will look like next year, they come to us.”
As the site’s focus changed, so did its advertising strategy. They eventually worked with several ad networks to introduce programmatic advertising before connecting with Raptive in 2019, and have been partnering with Raptive ever since.
There’s a lot of trust with Raptive because of our history, and they’re taking care of a big part of our business right now. We couldn’t do what we do without that ad income.
“This is not an easy way to make money. We’re publishing the better part of 100,000 words a month. We don’t have time to manage advertisers or video players. We have to focus our energy on content and comments.”
With ad monetization off their plate, Jeff and Rob can focus on their content strategy. They recently challenged themselves to see how much they could grow in six months, and managed to double their earnings in that time period.
Beat of Hawaii’s successful content strategy
“We got smarter,” Jeff said. “We pay very close attention to what engages our audience. And based on what engages, we do more of that.”
They rely on past performance to inform their future content, using the Raptive dashboard to pull reports on top-performing articles to help them determine the type of content, photographs, and titles to replicate.
But the secret to their growth is what caught Arthur Frommer’s attention to begin with: their unique, authoritative voice and local expertise on Hawaii news.
“You can have a great title, but you have to deliver the content,” said Rob.”I don’t want it to sound like something I’m going to read in the newspaper. It has to have our voice and our tone in it, because that’s why people come to Beat of Hawaii.”
“It’s also paying attention to the news the way we do,” said Jeff. “That takes a huge amount of time and a bunch of technology. I digest 2,500 to 5,000 articles a day.”
“I got a press release from the Governor’s office about new speed cameras,” said Jeff. “We’d written about them once before. So I went and looked at our article to see how we could leverage the prior content, tap into the comments, and integrate it with the press release.”
They did the same with a potentially dry subject matter: state tourism data. With a creative title—”Why Hawaii’s visitors are telling a different story now”—they drew upon comments from prior articles to tell a newsworthy story, rather than just report statistics.
“I’m always looking for ways to put our unique style and imagery into our content,” said Rob.
The beat goes on
Readers might find their way to Beat of Hawaii looking for tips about the islands, but it’s Jeff and Rob’s take on the news that keeps them coming back. By listening to their audience, paying attention to the industry, and leaning into what makes Beat of Hawaii stand out, Jeff and Rob were able to turn 37 visitors into millions—not something that can be said for many who started a website when they did.
“When Beat of Hawaii was in the early days, we went to the first Blog World Conference in Las Vegas,” said Rob. “A lot of the people were in their twenties or thirties, and I heard someone say ‘I can’t believe there are people here with gray hair,’ as if to suggest we could never succeed.”
“I don’t know how many of those people are still around. I think a lot of people gave up. It shows that at any age, even if you’re an older adult, persevere. You can do it.”