Trying Out Lonely Planet Again

Awhile I ago, I said I wouldn’t use Lonely Planet’s blogsherpa program. I decided to test it out again over the last few months.

My findings? It still blows.

I get about 100 visitors per month from blogsherpa. Now, it’s not a big deal. I’m only tagging posts I won’t seo so I don’t have to fight myself in the rankings but even still, this shows that the program doesn’t offer any huge benefit. Can anyone out there show they are getting substantial traffic from these?

Conclusion? I’ll tag my photos. For 100 visitors, the 3 seconds is worth it. But I won’t be tagging anything I’d like to get search traffic for now or in the future. It still is not worth it and I still find quality control issues there. Letting everyone and anyone in reduces the traffic impact and makes the system pretty pointless.

You know where I find good traffic? Thorntree. Sure, the forum is a mess and people spam it and there are silly postings like “can i find atms in thailand?” but the volume of people that use it leads to great click throughs. Whenever I post links on thorntree, I get about 100-200 people. In fact when I am active on the forum (which isn’;t often because of time issues), I can pull between 200-300 visitors per day from thorntree.

THAT is where to get traffic. Not blogsherpa. Reply to posts, put relevant links into them, and watch the clicks. Just don’t spam them with links…b/c it’s annoying.

added bonus? LP thorntree links are do-follow.

Homeland Insecurity

So it’s happened again. Some would be terrorist managed to almost blow up a plane. Luckily, those we put our trust in helped keep us secure. No, I don’t mean the TSA. I mean the other passengers on the plane who actually do the TSA’s job!

Now, I can’t go number #2 an hour before I land, my water bottle is probably classified as a biohazard (but it’s still ok to keep next to the security area), the woman at the x-ray machine is still NOT looking at it, and the TSA is gonna start screening more babies now while the jittery guy with no luggage gets to go right through.

I think everyone who works at the TSA or Homeland security should be replaced by a team of monkeys. I have more faith in them than I do whoever is running the ship now. Now they are creating more rules to keep us safe, which won’t do anything to keep us safe. Why? Because all the rules in the world don’t matter when your staff reads at a preschool level.

Let’s see: Guy gets on a plane to America with no luggage, jittery, named Abdudlalajlah, is on the terror watch list, and his dad calls an embassy to warn he might blow up a plane. What happens? He’s let right through and almost blows up a plane.

What idiot didn’t think this was a potential hazard?

For starters, he’s on the terror watch list!!! What the hell is he doing on a flight anyways?

Secondly, his dad calls to say his soon might blow something up BEFORE his son got on a plane. Why didn’t anyone question him?

Third, who the fuck gets on an international flight with no checked luggage? MAJOR FLAG right there!!

How about instead of more rules we pay people to actually do a good job? I’m ok with higher taxes if that is where it is going! I can’t count the number of times I’ve gone through the airport and watched as the xray machine person WASN’T looking at the screen. Hello! That’s where security starts!

Or how about the water bottles? If it’s so unsafe, why is there a big pile next to me in security? Wouldn’t you want to remove that in case all of a sudden my poland springs bottle went nuclear? I mean you never know what could happen when water, plastic, coke, and gatorade come together.

This whole thing is going to produce a lot of show and even less security. All the rules in the world aren’t going to help us until we start getting competent people working security and we have the government actually taking those phone calls and memos (remember bush’s august memo?) seriously. Our government is great at insecurity but still not so good at the security thing.

Until then, let’s just hire the isreali’s to protect our airports. No one ever gets on their planes with even a dull pencil.

End Rant!

What’s Going On in My Life

Somethings require a different blog….like life updates….so going on my life:

I’m going to New Zealand next week. I’ll be there until about January 18th and then, as planned, I’ll still go to Australia to explore queensland and take care of some business in Melbourne. I also managed to get myself a free Kiwi Experience pass for my trip around the country. I might also try to get a Stray Travel pass too. I hear the Kiwi experience is full of college kids who want to party and while I enjoy a good party, I’m not sure I’ll want 45 days of it. However, like any good journalist, I must investigate so I can accurately report back to my readers.

Even though I said I am not going to use Blogsherpa, I’m testing it out again with photos and blog posts I don’t want to rank on google for. They made some changes to the program so I’m checking to see if I can get any consistent bump in traffic. Results are inconclusive right now. I’ll report back again in a month.

I’m also using Facebook ads to see if I can get people to my fanpage. Results are complete failure. I’m still playing with it though to see if I can hit upon a demographic that works. So far females from the US between the ages of 18-24 click through the most. There is so much potential in Facebook I’m going to make this work. Expect a long blog post on it when I am finished. I suspect when I give away a trip to Costa Rica in January, I’ll have more success with that. But I’m not going to give any more details about that….just yet.

I’m also going to try FB ads for my ebooks.

I’m also trying LP thorntree. While it is possibly the worst forum in the world, there is just so much ridiculous traffic there I’m seeing if I can up my clicks and traffic from there. I mean each posting, no matter how crappy, gets like 500 views. There has to be a use for it! Reports on that later.

I also wrote a new ebook on how to create a travel blog. Take a look. It’s only four dollars.

In non web work related news, I’m excited to go to NZ to meet Craig and Linda from Indietravelpodcast and see some old friends who live in Christchurch. I’m obsessed with the British band La Roux.

I’ll be speaking at TBEX ‘10 next June. If you are a travel blogger or just someone with an interest, you should come. Last years event was the first time there was a “travel blogger” conference and this year’s event looks like it is going to be even better. It’s two days with a lot of workshops and talks. Come!

I have two other big big big big projects in the works but I want to keep those a secret. All I will say is one involves helping travel bloggers get free stuff and the other involves sending someone on the trip of a life time.

Other than that besides working, traveling, and buying bootleg movies in Bangkok, I lead a boring life and don’t do much else. Sorry for the boring blog update.

Ohh but I was named one of the ten sexiest twitterers…I should put that on my business card!

My Travel Plans

Curious as to where this nomad is going? Well, be curious no longer. My upcoming travels include:

Now until Nov 7th: Copenhagen, Berlin, Munich, Vienna
Nov 7-Dec 3- Bangkok
Dec 3rd to Mid January 2010- New Zealand
Mid Jan to Feb 28 2010- Australia
March 1 to April 30th- Indonesia/Malaysia/Thailand (Songkran!)
May 1-July 30th- SUMMER IN EUROPE! (Greece, Italy, Portugal)

After that, it’s a return to the US. I think I am going to rent a place in NYC for a month or so and then drive across the country. I’d like to do Central America after that but I don’t know. That is too far out for me to plan right now.

If anyone lives in these areas or is going to travel to these parts of the world around these times, drop me a line and let’s meet up!

Why I Won’t Use Blogsherpa

A few months ago, Lonely Planet came out with a way to try to engage bloggers called “Blogsherpa.” You tag your blog post with blogsherpa, the LP bot picks it up, and it ends up on their site like so: http://www.lonelyplanet.com/travelblogs/6/631/Exploring+Edinburgh?destId=360630. It’s exactly as it appears on your own blog. When I thought I could have my stuff on Lonely Planet, I thought “cool! I’ll probably get tons of traffic and valuable backlinks!!!!”

But the more I’ve thought about it, the more I’ve tested it, the more I’ve realized it’s a raw deal for me (and other bloggers). While I think the guy who runs it, Matt C, has really good intentions, I don’t believe the bigwigs above him do or are really looking to connect with bloggers. This has just turned into a way to get free content. So Ive decided to no longer going to contribute. Here’s why:

• Something for nothing. You are giving LP your full RSS feed so they get your whole article. Free content for them, nothing for you. Google adsense is placed next to your feeds but I’ve found that your click through rate is TINY and you don’t get much money from it. Also, if you use adsense normally, this will lower your CTR and thus your payments. Moreover, most of these pages don’t even get cached by Google unless they are really old. Since they aren’t in the Google index, you don’t even get the benefit of a backlink from lonely planet. Then when they do get cached, since the Lonely Planet brand is better than yours, they will out rank you FOR YOUR OWN CONTENT! That’s not a problem if you put some work into building backlinks to page- you’ll get above them but your doing double the work to beat the article you wrote? That’s sort of crappy.
• No Traffic.  If people are able to read your full feed, why would they bother to click over to your site? I’ve found my Lonely Planet traffic is about 3-5 people per day. Considering I have over 25 posts on “blogsherpa” and usually 1/2 the traffic I get comes from the forum I post in, the traffic value of Blogsherpa is crap. I bet most people aren’t getting anything. In fact, I get a much better conversion from their cluttered forum than I do from Blogsherpa and I don’t have to fight myself in the Google search results.
• Quality Control.  Let’s be honest- some people are just better writers than others. In the beginning, there was a small group of people who were part of this. But lately everyone is allowed to do it. There is a video that tells you how the program works and let’s you know that as long as you can write a sentence, you get in. Not exactly the highest standards in the world. I’m sure some blogs get denied but I have noticed a large, large number of new sites in the system.  Now, as a branding thing, I think it’s awful for LP because it sullies their brand but that is my business mind at work. But for a blogger, it’s awful for two reasons: First, you get crowded out. With so many blogs out there, unless you are blogging about some unknown destination no one goes to, your blog is going to be just one blog out of many. One popular destination pages like Thailand, there’s a million blog posts there. If your work isn’t at the top, you aren’t going to get much traffic.  Secondly, not all bloggers treat their website with “journalistic integrity.” Many bloggers considered themselves online journalists (I do) and really go out of their way to produce quality work. However, a lot of people write about their trip and it’s mostly “hey mom, look! I’m in Italy”. I love to read those blogs and follow abut 50 in my RSS and, while they do find some cool stuff, in terms of planning my trip, I wouldn’t exactly call these people experts and wouldn’t want to use them for trip planning.

  So while it may sound elitist, I work very hard on my site and my brand. I don’t want to be lumped in with “hey mom” travel blogs on Lonely Planet. Having those style blogs on Lp takes away from the public perception of the value of the all blogs there. If people think some of the sites aren’t quality travel planning sites, they will think all of the sites aren’t. I work too hard on my brand to have it perceived as just another “hey mom I’m in italy” type of blog. When I’m traveling, I put a lot of work into finding budget deals and getting information. And while I’m not 100% there yet, I like to feel my site is more than simple travel blog so to potentially be perceived otherwise doesn’t sound good to me.

I think the idea of reaching out to travel bloggers is great and I’m glad there is an effort on the part of LP to do so but I think how this program is run right now gives lonely planet a bunch of free content and you a bunch of nothing. Most people are going to be enamored with the idea of having content on Lonely Planet but if you really think about it, you aren’t getting anything out of it.  Could this be a great traffic generator? It sure could. LP mentioned me in their community blog and I saw 200 new visitors to my website. Blogsherpa could have the same effect but it requires substantial changes to their program and I think a much broader commitment than the big shots at Lonely Planet probably want to make right now. If there were some changes to the problem and I bit more visibility for the blogger on the LP website, this would be great. But as it stands now, you get the short end of the stick.