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How to Score a Press Trip

February 14, 2011 By 60 Comments

How to Score a Press Trip with your BlogThis is a guest post by Christy and Scott.

We have been getting this question from many bloggers since recently securing our first press trip.  I know this is high on many travel writers/bloggers list of things to accomplish, so I’ve written down the steps I take when requesting a press trip.

First thing to keep in mind about press trips is that you can’t be afraid to market yourself. Nine times out of ten, the press trips won’t come to you. You need to actively seek them out.

Put together a form letter to have ready to send to PR agencies.

For Ordinary Traveler, our letter includes:

1. Traffic Stats (Numbers from Google Analytics)

2. Alexa Score

3. RSS/Email Subscribers

4. Recognition Around the Web

5. Twitter Follower and Facebook Fan Numbers

Introduce your blog and let them know you have a loyal readership and specify what your readers are primarily interested in (ie: travel, photography, etc.). Even if your traffic stats are not high, it’s still possible to get a press trip if you show the company they can benefit from your blog promoting the destination.

Get creative and find a unique angle in which your blog can help bring tourism to that area. It is best to approach them with a way in which you can benefit them, rather than just asking for a freebie.  Depending on who I’m contacting, I don’t always ask for a freebie. Sometimes I will just ask if they offer a media rate or a discount in exchange for a review or to promote an area.

We have had PR reps reply to our request by thanking us for such a thoughtful email. If you put time into drafting your letters/emails, you will come across as looking professional and as if you have done this before (even if you haven’t).

Find a place you either want to go or already have plans to visit.

My suggestion would be to approach PR reps during the area’s off-season. For instance, if you are looking to visit a National Park, plan on going in the winter months. This is their slow season and they are more likely to grant a press trip during winter than in the summer months when everyone and their mother wants to go.

After I have figured out the destination I want to go, I send out the form email, tailoring it to that specific area. For Scott and I, if we are going to a place that has waves, then I mention that we are surfers and our blog has a following of people interested in surfing.

There are a couple of different ways you can go about securing a press trip.

The first one is to contact tourism Bureaus for a country you want to visit. Sometimes they will pay for your flight (in our case they did, however I’ve been told this is not common). Other times they expect you to pay for your own flight, but they will pay (or give a discount) for your lodging and tours.

The second way is to contact hotels and tour companies directly and ask them if they would be interested in providing a discount in exchange for a review.  This type of press trip is more common since you have a lot more options of hotels and tour companies to contact, rather than just one tourism bureau for an entire country.

Follow Through

This may be the most important part of going on a press trip. After the trip, follow through with what you told them you would do. If you said you would write 5 blog posts, then do it. Send them an email with the links and stats from each of those posts.

This is important not only for your blog’s reputation, but for travel bloggers as a whole. You don’t want to ruin the next bloggers chance at securing a press trip with the same company. Keep in mind that press trips are a great way to supplement your travel fund, but it should also be treated like any other job. In the end, you want the company to be happy they decided to sponsor you and your blog.

Have you been on Press Trip? Do you have any other tips for scoring free travel and swag?

Ordinary TravelerChristy and Scott are two surfers riding waves around the world and sharing their experiences along with budget tips and unique photography. You can follow their adventures at www.ordinarytraveler.com or on their Facebook fan page http://www.facebook.com/OrdinaryTraveler.

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Filed Under: Business of Blogging, Marketing Tagged With: , ,

How to Spend Less Time Blogging and More Time Traveling

February 7, 2011 By 70 Comments

How to balance blogging and travelThis is a guest post by Dave and Deb from the ThePlanetD.

One of the most important aspects of running a travel blog is being able to travel.  This can be a difficult task.  While many travelers start up a travel blog at the beginning of their first around the world trip, many fail or lose interest part way through their travels.

Running a successful travel blog takes a full time commitment and this can really cut into your quality time seeing the world.

How can a person travel and enjoy their time exploring the earth while running a successful travel blog?

It is much easier to keep up to date with everything when you are at home in the comforts of your living room, but on the road any situation can pop up.  You may be in the middle of the jungle for several days or climbing a mountain without Internet access. Many countries have terrible and slow connections and you may find that you cannot upload photos or even get into your site.

You have to be prepared for any situation and you never want to have a blog that hasn’t been updated for long periods of time.

We have developed a system that not only allows us to travel, but to go on multiday adventures without even looking at the Internet while still managing to post content 7 days a week.   While things are easier when we are not travelling, we have our greatest increase in traffic and interest when we are out exploring the world. So our goal is to be on the road as much as we can each year.

Here are the ways that we manage to stay on top of social media, post content regularly and manage to contribute to other blogs through guest posts and interviews regularly.

1. Schedule Posts

Before leaving on a trip, we have two weeks of blog posts already scheduled.  We stay two weeks ahead on our blog at all times. This gives us a cushion if we find ourselves in a situation where we can’t get to an Internet.  Even though we are not in the location that we are writing about at the time, nobody knows it.  Only our core group of friends and fellow bloggers know the truth about where we are, but they are not the audience we are writing for. We write for people searching for information on a location or people that are interested in our adventures and don’t know us personally. They still get the story, just two weeks later than when we were there.

2. Schedule Social Bookmarking Sites

It is extremely important not to fall out of the loop of social networks.  We receive a lot of our traffic from twitter, facebook and StumbleUpon. We learned early in our travels that if we didn’t tweet and share other people’s content, they would forget about us. We use a combination of Hootesuite and  su.pr to schedule tweets.  Bloggers that we know who put out good solid content regularly are tweeted automatically from Hootesuite using their RSS/Atom application.   In doing so, we can instantly share their content and not even be online.

Su.pr is another great way to spread out our tweets and to post on facebook. We will spend a day scheduling people’s content to be tweeted and shared at different times throughout the week.  This allows us to add a human element to our scheduled tweets.  Autotweeting doesn’t allow any personality, but when scheduling tweets with your own little comments it allows you to engage with your audience.

We also use su.pr because it gives people an easy option to submit our posts to StumbleUpon.  It must work because we receive a lot of traffic from StumbleUpon.

Use Facebook Effectively – Start a fan page and use networked blogs to syndicate your content on facebook. It will automatically pull your feed from your blog and post your content onto facebook as soon as it is published.  This lets your fans instantly know when your new post is up.  You can also schedule facebook status updates through Hootesuite.

3. Photos

We host our photos on SmugMug and Flickr. This allows us to mass upload photos to be used on the website.  SmugMug houses our more professional travel photos while Flickr hosts our snapshots. Both types of photos are just as important to further the story of a post.  These sites are useful because it is quick and easy to upload several photos at once rather than inserting one photo at a time to the blog.  All we have to do once we write the article is to link the photos to the post where we want them. This saves valuable time online.

4. Write posts ahead of time

There is a lot of down time when traveling. You can spend hours on a bus or sitting in an airport. Use that time to do work.  Pre write your post on your laptop and sort and choose your photos for uploading. When you have an Internet connection all you have to do is copy and paste your content into the site. And when it comes to your photos, all you have to do is upload the album that you have already made.

I even pre write my tags and the excerpt for my post so that I don’t waste time having to think about anything at the Internet.  The less time I have to spend online, the more time I have to enjoy my travels.

5. Keep a Journal

When you are out on a tour jot down some notes. This will help you write a post faster than trying to remember details or having to look up information.  I brainstorm ideas all the time in my journal and keep it close by for quick reference.

6. Buy an iPhone or Blackberry

We always carry an iPhone to answer emails.  Advertisers contact us daily and we would hate to miss out on a business opportunity because we can’t get on the Internet.  We buy a SIM card and data plan in each country as soon as we enter. Our iPhone has become one of our most important items because its an excellent way to stay connected.   We can send out tweets and facebook updates and moderate comments on our blog all while stuck in transit.

7. Enjoy your travels

We travel hard and then we work hard. We will go for several days at a time unplugged but nobody knows it. By doing all the legwork, we stay connected and have posts coming out regularly while we are off enjoying the adventure of a lifetime.  Once we are finished our adventure, we then settle in for a couple of days to catch up on our work and write our next round of posts.

Take advantage of the many times that you will be stuck waiting for boats, trains, planes and buses to get your work done. There is nothing else to do in a waiting area but wait; you might as well do your blogging so that you don’t have to work when you arrive at your destination.

We like to immerse ourselves in our travels.  We aren’t a type of traveler that sits in one place for months on end. We take part in adventures; we go on treks and move around a lot.  The last thing we want to do is spend too much time on the Internet.

Do you have any time saving ideas that help you to spend more time enjoying your travels and less time sitting at the computer?

Dave and Deb are a Canadian blogging couple who have been married for 13 years. In that time they have managed to hike, bike, paddle and climb their way across 5 continents. They have built a large following at their adventure travel website ThePlanetD. They have taken part in successful media campaigns such as the Rocky Mountain Adventure Drive with General Motors, the Princess Cruises “Follow Me At Sea” Twitter Cruise, and most recently joined Fiji’s Influencer tour as a part of their FijiMe Campaign. Dave and Deb consistently rank highly as the one of the world’s most influential travel bloggers and websites.

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Filed Under: Business of Blogging, Nuts and Bolts Tagged With: , , ,

Build your Brand: Be Yourself and Be Everywhere

January 17, 2011 By 66 Comments

Personal Branding for Travel BloggersThis is a guest post by Caz Makepeace of yTravelBlog.

“I can’t keep up with you guys. Everywhere I turn you’re there.” A couple of people within the travel blogging community have said this recently to Craig and I.

Our response: “Perfect. That means our plan is working.”

We started our travel blog eight months ago with a whole lot of determination and passion. Before we launched our blog, we had spent a fair amount of time learning from some very successful bloggers, so we had an idea of what we needed to do to enable such quick success.

The most important of these lessons for us was to build our brand. We had to build it big, and with that building we had to get ourselves out there in as many places as possible. We needed people to recognize us as authority figures and to not forget us.

This doesn’t seem nearly as hard as it sounds. All you need is a consistent plan of attack and an authentic and likeable brand.

Be Yourself

Who are you and what makes you special? Yes it’s true. You are special. There is something unique about you that you can offer to others. Really the greatest advice I can give in building your brand is to be yourself. Let what is unique about you shine through.

Being yourself means that whatever you do will carry authenticity, which is what attracts people to you. When you are yourself, it makes all your online marketing, communication and networking so much easier and a lot more fun.

You have to be your brand in everything you say and do, online and even off.

Not paying attention to what you are writing in every tweet, post, comment, facebook status update, and email can really kill your brand. Just think about how easily celebrities can fall from grace from an incident that was not in keeping with their brand. Michael Phelps got busted smoking bongs at a party and lost millions in sponsorship deals- not quite the squeaky athlete superhero image we were all used to.

Someone is always watching you and if you carelessly reply to an email, or tweet a couple of 140 characters that is not in keeping with your brand you could be in serious trouble. There have been several people in the online world that I have stopped following because of several tweets or emails that came out that made me say, “Ooo, I didn’t think they were like that. And I’m not sure I can relate anymore.”

If you are being yourself with your brand then you really shouldn’t have to worry about this. People will stop following you only if they think you aren’t who they thought you were.

Your brand in images

Have a clear photo of yourself, that shows you in your best light, prominently displayed on your blog. Use this photo for all of your activity on the web. This immediately brands you. As a potential reader moves from place to place they instantly recognize your friendly, happy face yet again.

Skip the sunglasses, hats that block your face, and forget using animals for your avatar. It is cute, I know, but it makes it very difficult for someone to connect with a faceless person. They are constantly left asking, “Who are you really? If I could just get a look at your face, I may learn more.” Cartoon avatars can work really well, if you can nail your brand with it at the same time. I think Where is Jenny does this really effectively.

We’ve had the opportunity to connect with and network with people in the offline world, because they have recognized us immediately from our photo. If you don’t have that, you could be missing out on some incredible opportunities.

Guest post and interviews

Take every opportunity that comes your way to guest post on other sites, or to be interviewed. Bloggers are always looking to interview those with interesting stories (and yes of course you have one) or for someone to write content for their site.

Make sure that you are maintaining your brand within your guest post and interviews. I always make sure I somehow interweave our tagline “It’s all about the memories, make your life a story to tell,” in our post. This is our message; I must remain true to it.

I always put my hand up to do these sorts of posts and I track people down to ask if I can. I’m not really interested in page rank or subscriber numbers, or posting on the most popular blogs (although this is a great strategy to employ). What I am interested is spreading myself wide and deep.

Each new website I appear on gets pushed out to a new bunch of RSS subscribers, twitter followers, facebook fans and commenters. If I write good content, I am likely to get new followers. Not only that, if someone is browsing around websites and they see me on one site, and then see me on another, they start thinking “Hey this person is everywhere they must be important.”

Sidenote: I also like posting on other sites so I can perhaps bring some of my readers over to the new blog and help them out. Your interactions should always be win-win.

Promote the heck out of your work on other sites.

My mentor always said, “Whenever anything about you appears on another site, you need to promote it. I don’t care if it’s good or bad, you want to stumble it, tweet it, like it, link back to it, comment on it and say thank you.”

Don’t be afraid of losing your followers to the new site you promote. This won’t happen. You are verifying your brand and providing more social proof that you are an authority figure. And you are increasing the power of the links that are coming back to your site, which in turn grows the authority ranking of your brand.

Comment on other blogs

Commenting on other blogs is such a great way to build your brand and authoritative voice. Always leave a positive and thought provoking comment, that follows your brand’s message.

There are many strangers reading blogs who might read a comment from you and be intrigued to learn more about you. Sometimes I leave comments that could be a whole blog post by itself. This is not a strategic move on my behalf, it just turns out that way because I have had a passionate response to what I have read.

Andi Puerillo from My Beautiful Adventures and Ayngelina from Bacon is Magic, do a fantastic job of commenting on other blogs. Every article I turn to read, they have already been there and left a comment. “Oh my God, there they are there again! How do they find the time?”

After seeing their bright happy faces for a while, I decided I liked them and needed to check them out more. I now follow them both keenly. And every time I have seen their comments, they have stuck to their brand–positive, supportive, encouraging, and thoughtful. Who doesn’t want to follow that?

Much of your success will be determined by how you build your brand. Be yourself and be everywhere.

Caz and Craig Makepeace have been living and travelling the globe since 97, both solo and as a couple and now with a three year old. They believe life is all about the memories and their travel tips and stories at yTravel blog and their fanpage aim to inspire and teach others how to make their life a story to tell.

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Filed Under: Build Traffic, Business of Blogging Tagged With: , ,

Running an Online Business: The Stuff They Didn’t Put in the Brochure

December 29, 2010 By 22 Comments

online business no paperThis is a guest post by Andy Hayes.

I’ve been running an online business for about 2.5 years now – not long enough to identify any serious trends, but long enough to have messed up plenty of things.  Thinking about the 1,000 Blog Challenge, I thought I’d share a few things I’ve found that weren’t in that “make money online” brochure.
 

Overnight Success?

Here’s the deal: blogs are just like any kind of business in that you don’t open the door and have people throwing fists full of bills at you.  Hard work results in that, but it takes time to get the traction and get the attention you need.

The latest buzzword on this topic has been the idea of overnight success.  Many of the world’s millionaires, such as Richard Branson, have noted that at one point in their career they were considered an overnight success.  That’s because you didn’t notice all the stuff they did to get there.

Someone mentioned this to me at a conference I was speaking at this year, and it was all I could do not to roll my eyes. I’d encourage you to read up on three gentlemen who certainly know a thing or two more about overnight success (and the lack thereof):

[Todd here, couldn't agree more with all these picks. A big thanks to Chris who also shared his ideas on the recent article here 16 Money Making Tips from Some of the World’s Most Popular Bloggers]

Most Important Skill to Running an Online Business?

This is a question I get a lot. What’s the key to success online?  It’s a loaded question, because you can’t succeed with just one skill – you need passion, blood, sweat, and probably a few tears as well.

I think the one skill, though, that everyone needs and that we all could do better is marketing.  You need marketing to know who your target audience is.  You need marketing to know what kind of website design will appeal to your target audience.  You need marketing to know what kinds of problems your target audience has, and how you can fix them.

If marketing is your weak point, go to the library.  Seth Godin is a personal favourite on marketing, as well as Dan Kennedy, but make sure you expand your scope to books that talk about persuasion, advertising, and psychology, not just books about Adwords and Facebook.

Old School Business Rules Apply?

Sometimes, us virtual folks start thinking that old school business rules don’t apply. There are lots of those, but the one I’d like to talk about is CASH.  You know, the stuff you use to pay your bills.

I don’t have the latest statistics handy, but pretty much the number one reason any business fails isn’t knowledge, or talent, or effort.  It is running out of money. No matter how good your stuff is, if you aren’t able to last long enough to get it in front of paying customers and convince enough of them to buy, you’re done.

There is lots of talk in the blogosphere about monetization and how you should monetize and when you should monetize.   Everyone’s situation is different so I’m not going to get into that here, but be sure that you do think about this from the beginning.  If it doesn’t make money, it’s not a business, it’s a hobby.

Get Some Fresh Air Sometimes

Lastly, I’d like to encourage you to shut that laptop lid, put away your smart phone, and go outside.  Get some fresh air.  I say this for two reasons:  one, because when you focus too hard sometimes it is easy to lose your focus on what’s important.  And two, because you need to go out and meet some people in the flesh.  Network with your peers.  Talk to people who would be ideal customers and find out their pains, their wants, their needs.  Life online is great, but the real world these days seems to be underrated.

What are your marketing strategies? Share them below or in the forums.

 

Andy Hayes runs Sharing Travel Experiences http://www.sharingtravelexperiences.com, a travel lifestyle magazine.  He also owns Travel Online Partners http://www.travelonlinepartners.com, a resource where you can download guides and tools to help you market your travel business online. You can connect with Andy on Twitter here @andrewghayes

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Filed Under: Business of Blogging, Make Money Blogging Tagged With: , , ,
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