Updates on stickers, shirts, the Facebook page, and ‘advertising’

There’s been a bit of confusion on our Facebook page as of late that I’d like to clear up. Since there’s a lot of new fans on the page, I’ll start with what Daily Hiker is and isn’t:

About us:

Daily Hiker is a blog/web magazine/whatever else you want to call us. We generally publish 5 articles a week that get posted to DailyHiker.com. When this happens, they also get tweeted on our Twitter feed and on our Facebook page for our fans/followers. We generally try to cover a fairly wide range of topics from news, gear reviews, trail reports, backpacking recipes, upcoming outdoor products, and anything else we run across that seems relevant to those interested in the outdoors.

We generally run two seasons around here. Around April, the hiking season starts and the coverage will mostly be hiking related. Once the fall comes, we switch over to winter sports. Since we ski and don’t have anyone that snowboards, that’s usually the topic we’ll cover. Additionally, there could be snowshoeing, backcountry pursuits, and the occasional hiking product update. Generally though, the hiking news (in general, not just here) is pretty much dead in the winter, so it’s mostly snow sports.

Advertising:

Earlier today someone suggested that we were advertising too much on our Facebook page. So, let me clear the air here. As of today, we have never sold anything on Daily Hiker other than advertising space; which we try to keep to an absolute minimum. We don’t advertise any products on Facebook. The only Daily Hiker stuff you see is given away for free to our readers, but more on that below.

Facebook Page:

With that in mind, we generally stick to the following schedule on our Facebook page: 1 news article, 1 picture, and 1 question/comment per day. This is generally Monday to Friday, although occasionally we’ll post something on the weekend too. We’re trying to keep a balance between keeping a conversation going and monopolizing people’s news feeds.

We’re trying to build a community of people that like the outdoors and give you guys things you’d like to read. We really want to know what you guys like, do outdoors, and would like to read. So, it takes a bit of traffic to get the conversation going. We’re certainly sensitive to spamming news feeds, but we try to keep it to a minimum.

You can also expect us to comment on people’s pictures, posts, etc. Unfortunately, we don’t really have any control over that going in your news feed. So, I’m sorry if that shows up all the time, but that’s Facebook’s programming.

That said, we’d love it if you guys contribute. We can’t give you guys interesting reading material if we don’t know what you like.

T-Shirts:

As I said on Facebook last night, we have another batch of T-shirts coming in the next couple weeks. I just heard from the printer this afternoon that they’re out of the color that we ordered in Medium and Large. So, we’re switching to a Hanes shirt that’s Denim Blue. It should be roughly the same, but may be a slightly different shade. The new shirts are going to be available in Small to 2XL. We hadn’t had any requests for XS, so we didn’t order any. If we get some requests for that size, we’ll order it the next time around.

We’re going to be giving these away weekly on Daily Hiker via photo contests, trivia, and really anything else I can think of that seems like fun. We have a couple remaining shirts in the old design, which will be going out the door first. So, depending on your size, you may get an old shirt if you win one in the near future.

Also, we’ve had a massive number of requests to be able to buy the shirts. As I mentioned before, we’ve never sold anything to people on Daily Hiker. Since people want it though, we’re going to try and get that going.  There’s a lot of tax implications though, and paperwork needs to be filed with the state of Washington before that’ll happen. Keep your eyes peeled though, we’ll let you know when they’re available (and will try not to over advertise on our Facebook page, I assure you).

As of now, we’re thinking of pricing them somewhere between $15 and $20 with $2.50 flat rate shipping. Sound good? I’m looking into getting a synthetic shirt instead of cotton for the ones we sell though. This way you’ll actually be able to wear them hiking and be comfortable. Any  proceeds from the shirts will be spent on more giveaways/promotions in the future.

Stickers!

In the mean time though, we’re going to be giving away stickers to anyone that wants one. For the first batch, we’ve ordered 1,500 stickers to give away. We’ll order more if they all get sent out, but the ones we have will be first come first served.

I don’t know the exact date that they’re going to arrive, so bear with us for a bit until they come in. Once we get them, we’ll post a link to a form that you can enter your details in and we’ll mail you one. We’ve setup a sign-up form for those that want stickers in the US and Canada. We’ll mail them out once they get here.

We may also change up the design the next time around. So, keep that in mind.

Sound good everyone?