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Time to Monetize? Travel Blog Case Study #1

October 18, 2011 By 31 Comments

This is a guest post by Lisa Egle who runs the travel blog Chicky Bus. Lisa approached me here on TBC to see if the travel blog community can help her decide if she should try to monetize here blog, and if so, how best to approach it.

Travel Blog Case Study

Come on, how can you not help me???

I think this is a great chance for us all to learn as I know many (if not most) of us have faced this question about monetizing. Lisa is very brave to open up her site completely to all of us and see what is going on traffic wise. Many of us have a piece of the monetizion puzzle and this is a great opportunity to help out each other in the comments. I will also post a follow up article with all the comments organized along with my own thoughts.

Time To Monetize?

When I started my travel blog–Chicky Bus—approximately one year ago, I had two primary goals: sharing my travel stories, tips and photos with others while building a social media platform to help me publish/sell my travel memoirs, once completed.

“Monetizing” my site—with ads, widgets, affiliate sales, etc.—was not high on the list although, admittedly, it was in the back of my mind.

Now, one year later, the monetary possibilities have grown in importance and moved up on the priority list. I recognize the value of what I do/see the engagement, put in a lot of time/energy and have seen my “numbers” improving. I’ve also spent not just time but money on my site for: a premium theme builder, webhost fees, a social media consultant, a web developer and some paid plug-ins. I’d love to see a return on my investment.

Before I ask my questions and we conduct our “case study,” here’s some background on my site:

Background

Monetize a Trave BLog

Site Name/Tagline: Chicky Bus: Finding yourself off the beaten path.

How it appears on Google: Chicky Bus: Travel tips, spirituality and humor.

Age of Site: 1 year, 1 month

Domain Name: I chose the domain name, www.chickybus.com, because it’s memorable, the backbone of the overall concept and thus, “brandable.” Early on, I opted to do this versus choosing a “discoverable” name, one that would be found in simple searches about travel—eg, “solo travel” and “female adventure travel”. I do, of course, use these and many other “key words” in certain posts.

Concept

Chicky Bus aims to take readers “off-the-beaten path and into the moment—to a place of self-discovery”—via tales, tips, photos and more. This reflects the theme of the book I recently completed and works the same way; readers/”passengers” are taken on the bus for trips/”rides” to 5 continents around the world, which entertain and lead to introspection and hopefully, inspire healthy risk-taking and more in-the-moment “authentic travel.”

Target Audience

The site is geared to anyone, male or female, with an interest in travel/cultural experiences and photography:

·      independent travelers (solo/couples) who travel internationally and in the US

·      travelers who generally take tours and wonder what it’s like to get off the beaten path

·      people considering their first trip

·      students and professors interested in cultural exchange/world politics

·      anyone interested in personal growth (living in the moment, taking risks, etc.) and open to the idea of it happening via travel

Actual Audience

According to Alexa statistics, my site’s audience “tends to be childless; they are also disproportionately highly educated women between the ages of 25 and 45 who browse from home and have incomes under $100,000.”

Visitors

Visitors to the site spend approximately 44 seconds on each page view and a total of seven minutes on the site during each visit. Search engines refer approximately 10% of visits. (Note: this is also per Alexa and some of it differs from what Google’s metrics said.)

My Numbers

Alexa Ranking: 146,280 worldwide (42,532 US and 57,281 in the UK)

Google Page Rank: 3

Google Analytics: Approximately 3250 visitors (75% new) per month, of whom about 2530 are “absolute/unique”; 5676 page views in the past month; time on site varies.

Twitter Followers—3000 followers

Klout Score: 63

*I realize that there are mixed reviews re: the validity/value of some of these numbers and metrics; however, since they’re what many people use, I’ve listed them. What I do know is that those visiting my site tend to be loyal, interested and highly engaged.

Monetize Now or Later?

Last month, Virgin Atlantic (via a marketing company) approached me about running a search widget on my site and I agreed to it. It’s a start, but I’d like to see more money coming in.

I’ve been approached by other companies, those less well-known, and haven’t been sure what to do. Some of them seem spammy and not worth my time. I recently set up an advertising page to show which options are available.

So, my question to you—those already making money—is…is it time for me to really monetize or not? Is my site the kind that’s appropriate for this? Are my “numbers” high enough? And if so, which types of situations will bring in the most money without creating a lot more work for me?

The challenge here, of course, is time. I’ve finished writing my book and am considering publishing options. Meanwhile, I’m a full-time ESL professor and have a busy life. Of course, like many of my travel blogger peers, I’m a bit of a social media/Internet addict and, at times, feel burnt out.

My Questions

Here are some of the things I’d like advice about—and to see demystified if possible. And if it helps to share links to lists, articles, etc, if relevant, please do so. Without further ado, here are my questions:

1. Affiliate links: Are they worth it?

I recently bought some slashproof travel gear that I thought was excellent. Is it worth writing a post about it and using affiliate marketing to try to earn commission? Is it worth the time/energy? I am sure that other travelers would benefit from the post, but would they click and buy?

2. Advertising: What’s the best approach?

Do I, the travel blogger, pursue it? Look at other bloggers’ sites and see who they have as “sponsors” and if their “numbers” and niche are similar, approach that particular advertiser? Or do I wait to be approached by the advertisers themselves? And if/when that happens, how do I know whom to trust?

And if they are legit, how much should I charge? How long should I commit for? How do I re-negotiate for a higher rate? And what about homepage versus single-post page versus sitewide? Are there different prices for each option?

Anyone out there have a form or rate sheet to share that they give to advertisers to show the options/pricing structure?

3. Sponsored vs paid guest posts: One or both?

Every once in a while, I see that a traveler blogger’s post was sponsored by someone else; at the bottom, there’s a link to a travel-related company. I wonder how much they were paid to include this link.

Other times, I see a post that the blogger allowed someone else to write—and obviously got paid for, too. The writing quality (and number of comments) is generally low or simply awkward sounding; sometimes the post seems out of place and, on occasion, compromises the integrity of the site in some way.

In my case, I’m more comfortable with allowing for the former situation versus the latter. Also, I’d even consider writing a “targeted post”—one that the advertiser wants to run that includes a link. This, however, would cost a lot since it would really be labor-intensive.

What’s a good/basic protocol for each of the scenarios? How much can/should one charge?

4. Press Trips: “It’s complicated,” right? Or not?

As a former reporter, I find the idea of a press trip a bit perplexing and wonder how it really works. What specifically do “they” (eg–the agency, tourism council, etc.) pay for—airfare, transportation, tours, etc? Some of it? All of it?

And what about compensation? Do you get paid, too? If so, what is it fair to ask for? And what happens if the trip doesn’t go well? How do you handle writing about it? Is there any sort of conflict of interest?

What about income tax (if you’re not a permanent digital nomad)? Must you claim the “free trip” (and what it would have cost) as income? Do you have to pay sales tax on it based on the rate mandated by the state in which you live?

Final Question: How Do I Monetize Without Losing Sight of My Original Goals?

These are some of the monetization situations I’ve been wondering about and would love to know your thoughts re: my particular “case.” As you can see, if I pursue monetization, I’d like to work “smart” versus “hard.”) The question is–how do I manage it all without losing sight of my primary goals—providing quality content to readers, maintaining my social media platform and getting my book published?

Bio: Lisa Egle, founder/owner of www.chickybus.com, is an independent traveler and an ESL professor at a 2-year college. She recently finished her travel memoirs, a collection of short stories about her experiences on 5 continents around the world. She’s done everything from (unintentionally) eating dog in China to being proposed to on a chicken bus and recently, meeting a Colombian hermit in Lebanon. Her travel philosophy (and the concept of her site) is “travel off the beaten path and into the moment–to a place of self-discovery.” 

Links:

So what do all of your smart travel bloggers things about Chicky Bus’ situation? Leave your comments below and let’s figure out this monetization issue!

Filed Under: Build a Better Blog, Case Studies, Make Money Blogging Tagged With: ,

More Travel Blog Advertising Survey Results

September 5, 2011 By 16 Comments
Advertising on Travel Blogs

Do you really care what others are doing?

This is a guest post my Laurence over at Finding the Universe. Laurence was my partner on the ad survey and deserves ALL of the credit for crunching the number and making the pretty graphs. As with my initial post and analysis please note that this we know this survey is loose and not fully representable of the blogging community. But it does offer some interesting data, and most of it is very close to what I see bloggers charging and making out there. We both hope this helps you in some way figure out your own pricing schedule and monetization strategies. Take it away Laurence”

How much should you charge for advertising on your blog

The question of what to charge for advertising on a blog is one that nearly every blogger will find themselves asking at some point. The answer is unfortunately not a straightforward one, and varies based on a multitude of factors.

In an effort to understand the existing situation, and perhaps clarify the muddy waters somewhat (or just pour more mud in, who knows?) Todd and I put together a poll that we sent to existing travel bloggers to ask them what they currently charge for various advertising options on their sites. [Todd here: if you like this poll, and want more comprehensive ones we are happy to oblige, just leave a comment below in support]

Based on the responses, I have put together a number of charts detailing, amongst other things:

  • An idea of revenue a blog may be able to earn
  • Which types of advertising are most popular amongst travel bloggers surveyed
  • How much travel bloggers charge for different categories of advertizing

Whilst the numbers of bloggers who responded wasn’t particularly high (44), there is still enough data to provide some useful information. Forty four being, after all, more than none, which was the previous benchmark.

Most of the results will be presented in the form of charts (who doesn’t like a good chart!), with some additional thoughts from both myself and Todd [I like to talk in italics]. Naturally we’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments below also.

Revenue from a travel blog.

Part of the travel blog challenge is to achieve a turnover of $1000 per month. Clearly, this is a challenging target to achieve from a travel blog, as of those polled, less than 15% are currently meeting this target.

Note that 40% of those polled did not disclose their earnings. This is probably due to the fact that I (Todd) added the question halfway through after realizing we needed a data point to compare answers to.

Of those polled who did disclose their earnings, 46% are earning between $0 and $200 per month, and 54% are earning $200+ a month.

Page rank would appear to correlate closely with earning potential, as only those blogs with a page rank of four and higher broke the $500 a month barrier.

How much do travel blogs make
Monthly Earnings in USD

Types of advertising – popularity:

For the poll we identified thirteen types of adverts that a travel blogger might run on their blog and price according to Page Rank. The three most popular types of advertising offered, in order of popularity are:

  • A text link on the home page, paid monthly
  • A one off sponsored post
  • A text link in a post with a one off payment

Beyond that, other types of advert are as seen in the chart below.

Types of advertizing used to earn money with Travel Blogs
Types of Advertisments

Prices for advertising:

And now, for the bit of the article you are probably most interested in. The first graph shows the average prices charged for each type of advertising offered, in USD, for sites with a page rank between 3 and 5 (0-2 PRs were excluded due to lack of data):

Averaged Advertizing prices for websites PR 3 - 5
Average Prices for PR 3-5

Now to see how that average price differs if we break it down by page rank:

What travel blogs charge for advertising based on PR
Average Advertising Prices by PR

With the exception of the odd anomaly, probably caused by low data points, the trend appears to be that the higher the page rank, the higher the average price that is charged for a product.

The average price however does not show the whole picture. The series of graphs below show the minimum and maximum prices for each advertising option, grouped by Page Rank.

Clearly there are some serious variance in price across all the bloggers polled! (Note that there were very few respondents in the PR 0-2 region, so these were grouped together.)

Advertising Prices for PR 0-2 Travel Blogs
PR 0-2 Advertising Prices
Advertising Prices ofr PR 3 Travel Blog
PR 3 Advertising Prices
PR4 advertising prices
PR 4 Advertising Prices
PR 5 advertising prices
PR 5 Advertising Prices

The reality is, as can be seen, prices for advertising vary enormously, even within the same page rank. There is no one size fits all price. For example, a sponsored post on a PR4 site can go for as little as 30USD, and as high as 1000USD. [Todd here, if you are a PR 4 and charging $30 you are nuts!]

So what can we conclude? Well, despite the massive variance in prices, few bloggers are earning big bucks with their travel blogs. Presumably, a balance is being achieved, where those with higher prices sell fewer of a product, and those with lower prices, sell more. I know, not exactly mind blowing stuff, but useful to see.

Thoughts for next time

Page rank, whilst one metric, is clearly not the only differentiator. In retrospect, it was perhaps not the best way to categorize the answers, even if there is a relationship between page rank and earnings.

Page Rank and success are likely to go hand in hand, so it is not an entirely useless metric – and certain advertisers will use it as a negotiating tool.

As your blog grows however, other metrics are likely to become far more relevant to your prices. Look out for another version of this poll, revised based on what we have learned, in the not too distant future.

Quick Word from Todd

I don’t have much to add that I didn’t say in my last article based on this data Advertising Survey Results, but I would like to say thank you to everyone who participated and to everyone who is going to comment below! I agree with Laurence that PR is not the only metric but I do think it is most commonly used metric in justifying text links. The next version of this survey will be more detailed and will take into account visits, page views, and above and below the fold areas.

But I’d like to reiterate an earlier point I made. While I think that advertising can bring in a steady income for travel bloggers, and can be an assets towards making at least $1,000/month, I think it has its limits. This is not going to make anyone rich and it won’t be around forever. So plan your future strategies well.

Ok, have at us. What do you think? Where do you stand amongst the rest of the pack?

Oh, and don’t forget to connect with Laurence on Twitter or Facebook.

 

 

Filed Under: Business of Blogging, Make Money Blogging

Travel Blog Advertising Survey Results

August 1, 2011 By 45 Comments
Advertising on Travel Blogs

Do you really care what others are doing?

A few weeks ago I created a survey on advertising prices for Travel Bloggers linked mostly to Page Rank. The idea was to collect (anonymously) data related to common rates in the industry and to see not only where the current market stands but also if selling ads was a viable way to earn sustainable income.

Before we get into some of the details of the results I have been notified by my team of monkey lawyers that I should add a few disclaimers.

1) The information here is for entertainment purposes only. The data should be consumed with a nice scotch or a cold beer, dancing is fine, but only if you really throw yourself into it.

2) The data here was gathered from 44 individuals and does not even come close to representing the thousands of travel bloggers out there, let along the hundreds of thousands of bloggers struggling to be noticed by more than their Moms.

3) I will present data as is or in some cases as scales so that I don’t run into any anti trust issues.

4) This survey was open to anyone who wanted to participate.

5) The format of the answers is less than ideal because I’m too cheap to splurge for the pro features of Survey Monkey. Plus I’m heading out on a trip very shortly. I’ll make it prettier in upcoming posts where I will also link the answers to specific PR values. This is just to get the gross information out to you fine, handsome and fun people.

The Advertising Survey Results

I am going to just give the basic results here and leave a more in depth analysis for a later post. If you are the type of person who likes to read ahead, and think for yourself, please feel free to analyze them yourselves :) All numbers are in USD.

1. What is your Website’s Google Page Rank (PR)?

PR Response
Percent		 Response
Count
0 2.3% 1
1 4.5% 2
2 4.5% 2
3 36.4% 16
4 36.4% 16
5 15.9% 7
6 0.0% 0
7 (seriously?) 0.0% 0
8 (now I know you are lying) 0.0% 0

Total answered 44

2. How much does your blog earn on average per month?

Note-only 29 people answered this question as it was added later.

 Response
Percent		 Response
Count
$0 10.3% 3
$1-$50 24.1% 7
$51-$200 17.2% 5
$201-$500 24.1% 7
$501-$1000 3.4% 1
$1,000 + 13.8% 4
$2,000 + 6.9% 2
$5,0000 + 0.0% 0
$7,5000 + 0.0% 0
$10,000 + 0.0% 0

3. How much do you charge for a Sponsored Post – written by advertiser?

There was a wide variety of answers here. We will compile the relationships to PR in a future example rate card. Presented here are the answers themselves only.

One Off Fee

$50 (2), $100 (4), $140 (3), $150 (2), $180, 200, $250 (3), $300 (2), $350 (4), $500 (3), $1000

$100 (link stays live for 1 year)

Monthly Fee (fewer people offered this type)

$14, $25, $30 (2), $40, $100, $125, $200, $500

4. How much do you charge for a Text Link as part of an existing post written by you?

There was a wide variety of answers here. We will compile the relationships to PR in a future example rate card. Presented here are the answers themselves only.

One Off Fee

$15, 25 (2), 50, 100, 125, 150 (3), 155, 160, 200 (2), 300 (3), 350 (2) 400 (2), 500

Monthly Fee (fewer people offered this type)

$15 (2), 20 (4), 25 (4), 30, 50 (2), 60 (2), 75, 90, 100, 200

5. How much do you charge for a Text link with additional surrounding text as part of an existing post written by you?

One Off Fee

$15, 25, 50, 80, 100, 120, 150 (2), 155, 160, 200, 250, 300 (3), 350, 500

Monthly Fee (fewer people offered this type)

$10, 15, 20 (3), 25 (3), 30, 50 (3), 75, 150

6. How much do you charge for a Post reviewing a product or service written by you?

One Off Fee (link live forever)

Don’t charge anything for reviews, $50, 125, 150, 160, 200 (2), 250 (3), 500

Monthly Fee (very few people offered this type)

$20, 50 (2), 500

Initial Fee and then Monthly fee to keep link live

$200 for the first year. The same thereafter (I haven’t had many takers)

$350 then 25/month after 6 months

7. How much do you charge for an Advertising text link on your home page?

One Off Fee (link live forever)

Many people indicated they would not do this. Other gave the following responses:

$150, 200-400, 300-500, 450, 600, 700

Monthly Fee (this option was more popular but with a wide variety of answers)

$25 (3), 30 (2), 35 (3), 40 (2), 45, 50 (5), 60 (4), 70, 75, 100, 150, 200,

8. How much do you charge for an Advertising Text Link on your home page surrounded by additional text?

One Off Fee (link live forever)

$200, 300, 400, 450, 600, 700

Monthly Fee 

$30 (2), 35, 40, 50 (6), 60 (2), 75, 100 (2), 150, 200,

9. How much do you charge for an image advertisement on your homepage?

Monthly 125 x 125 button

$25, 30 (3), 35, 40 (2), 50 (3), 60 (2), 65, 75, 80, 85 (3), 100, 125, 150, 200

Monthly 120×600 skyscraper

$50 (2), 60 (2), 80, 120, 150 (2), 160, 175, 600

Monthly 300×250 rectangle

$50 (1), 60 (2), 75 (2), 80 (3), 100 (2), 120, 140, 250, 350 500

Monthly 728×90 leaderboard

$120, 140, 150, 250, 800

First Impressions of the Data

I know I said that I wasn’t going to analyze the data, but I just can’t help myself. I’ll just note a few things here, and then I’ll crunch the numbers according to their respective PR values in a future post.

1) It is clear to me that people are not making that much money from their blogs. If we follow this to its logical conclusion, either there are not enough advertisers who will pay these rates, or there is not enough room on a blog to scale these earnings high enough.

2) There could be a ton of other factors besides PR that go into pricing models like these. This is just one example. We also do not know how many links each person sells per month.

3) I was surprised that people dealt more (on average) with one off fees rather than charging by the month. I’m not sure if this is due to insistence by advertisers, or if it is easier for people to deal with. Either way, I advocate against selling permanent links.

I can’t get away from the thought that this type of advertising is just not sufficient to sustain a consistent income. It may be fine as an income stream, but the risks associated with being sandbox google  and loosing traffic or being moved down in the SERPs just does not seem to pay off. If you are just looking for beer money than this might be fine.

The question is whether this type of advertising can help us to consistently meet the 1000-1000 challenge. It has for me, but not consistently, and after 1000/month it is almost to scale it higher without starting other blogs.

What are your impressions on the data?

Photo Credit

Filed Under: Business of Blogging, Make Money Blogging

5 Successful Travel Bloggers Discuss Money and Travel Blogging

July 27, 2011 By 34 Comments

Earn Money BloggingIt feels like everyone around the net is discussing making money from travel blogging but never getting into any specifics. This site was started as an experiment to prove or disprove whether travel blogging can be a viable online income generator for more than just an elite few. As my own thinking about my business plans evolve I am committed to sharing with you my ideas, what works and what doesn’t. But besides thinking through the next stage of my own strategies I have been pouring over hundreds of travel blogs and websites to determine what is and is not working.

Before I get further into my own detailed plans I want to point out 5 great resources I have read recently about travel blogging and making money. As you all know by now, I believe that to be successful at travel blogging we need to 1) approach it as a business 2) work our asses off 3) accept that it takes time (thus is the dilemma of entering a business with no barriers to entry) 4) produce kick ass content that is also useful and leads to sales of “something” and 5) be more creative than the next guy or gal.

Now the “something” is for each of you to decide. You might be selling ad space, click through for Pay Per Click advertising, affiliate sales for information products, affiliate sales for hotels or travel products, selling your own e-books, or even promoting our own services.  Next week I’ll be discussing the top lessons I learned, and wished I learned from 5 years of writing Todd’s Wanderings.

But today I want to introduce you to a few different discussions going on around the web regarding what it takes (or doesn’t take) to make money from travel blogging. These are important issues everyone needs to come to terms with as they progress in their site(s) development.

The Dilemma of Press Trips

Andy from 501 Places wrote a very thoughtful piece about the opportunity costs of participating in blog/press trips. He looks at it from the side of travel bloggers who have to weigh their time spent on a trip vs the earning they could make if they stayed home and worked. This goes back to the issue of what is your ultimate goal with your blog, and where you see your money coming from. Check out The Business Case for Blog Trips and the Bloggers Dilemma and let us know if you think they are a good or bad idea for your business.

A Little More Dirt On the Press Trip

Does it sound like I’m bashing press trips? I don’t mean to but they are often held as the holy grail of travel blogging and help to “prove who has made it and who hasn’t.” Karen, from Europe A La Carte goes into further detail about why we need to think of our blogs as businesses and why we should be compensated beyond a “free” trip. Again, it all comes down to what your goals are. For those only looking to continue to fund their travels around the world then press trips are great. But for those looking to earn a living the choices become more difficult. So have a read on Where are Travel Bloggers Heading after their next free trip?

Enough Bullshit about Making Money Travel Blogging

Darren, from Travel Rants, and creator of Travel Blog Camp goes into an inspired rant about what it really takes to make money from travel blogging. I think he nails the subject by saying: “Get your business model right, and write transactional content along with inspirational / useful content…” In addition he recommends focusing on SEO to drive targeted, relevant traffic to your site in his eloquently put Enough of the Bullsh$T about Making Money Travel Blogging. And because I like his work here is a bonus post: Bloggers Need to Think like a Business to Make Money.

Start thinking Like an Editor

Ok, so by now you might be feeling discouraged, and you might be thinking that you’ll never make it as a travel blogger. That’s where David the Grumpy Traveler comes in. While he doesn’t paint a rosy picture of the travel blogging world (it is a difficult business to make a decent living at) he does offer some concrete advice. While I am not convinced about his multi-author site pitch (it really depends on if you are a personality or niche blogger) he does a great job of showcasing the amount of work needed to succeed. His description of how to use a press trip as an asset to develop deep content that is both usable AND can lead to conversions by people searching online is great. Check out the full discussion on Why Travel Bloggers need to Start Thinking like Editors.

A bit of Holiday Cheer

And to leave you with a final example of some concrete advice here is Chris from Pfft who encourages travel bloggers to stop writing to the small market interested in that tiny cafe in Bangkok, and write to the larger audience that go on holidays. The higher the numbers, the more clicks, the more money you make etc etc etc. Now, the trick is that Chris is telling us that we can keep our inspirational tone, writing styles, and voice. We just need to move it to a wider audience beyond the “I’m traveling all the time” market. It’s good advice and well worth a read on why we should Stop Being Travel Bloggers, Start Being Holiday Bloggers

What does this all mean?

So, you might be wondering what does all this advice mean? Aren’t people saying different things? Well, yes, in a way. But there are also some very clear lessons here.

1) You need to have a plan.

2) If you want to make money travel blogging you need to find an audience who will convert on your site.

3) You have to have a plan. Wait, I already said that! But it’s true. Your plan needs to define who your audience is, what they want, how you can give it to them better than others, and then integrate a conversion/sales plan that meets the needs of the readers you attract.

4) Blogging is not a get rich quick scheme. Travel Blogging/writing takes hard work and dedication. But if you love doing it than you are halfway to there. But you can’t forget the practical issues of mortgages, taxes, and 20% tips at bars in America.

Which advice above resonated the best with you? Is there room for us all in the travel writing/blogging business or will only a few succeed? Share your story :)

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

How Much Can I Really Earn from my Travel Blog?

July 12, 2011 By 34 Comments

Earn Money BloggingThis is a question that has been plaguing me recently as I have begun to work through a new strategy for Todd’s Wanderings. It is also a question that is inevitably on the minds of TBC readers and just about anyone who is attracted to the bright lights of blogging.

According the 1,000-1,000 Challenge we are focused at the minimum of earning (or proving that it’s possible) 1,000 USD per month. To be very honest, this is not such a hard thing to do. Developing 1,000 visitors a day is MUCH more difficult. The hard part in monetization is deciding if you want t make more and then choosing the correct strategy for your business model.

Maybe it’s the development worker in me, but I hate developing plans without a solid set of data guiding my decisions. Recently I set off a rant about advertisers trying to low ball good, honest, attractive, hard traveling bloggers. It occurred to me that there is nowhere we can point advertisers to industry standards to back up our claims that our rates are fair and not inflated. To help rectify this situation, and to help us all in answering the question of this post I have put together a poll, along with Laurence from Finding the Universe, to help create a rate card for text based advertising and sponsored posts.

I actually have an ulterior motive for this poll. It has occurred to me over the past two years that advertising can only get you so far in your monetization strategies. If you only want to make 1,000 a month and keep your blog loose then this is a great option for you. Check out our three part series on making money with your blog for a good introduction to advertising.

But if you are looking to live off of your blog, or spend more money when traveling, than it requires a different strategy and business model. You might also have other goals with your blog and text links are a potential liability to your future growth as Google frowns upon them to the point they have permanent wrinkles. For example, my goal at Todd’s Wanderings is to help get my first book published and sold to millions of people. If Google deindexes my blog my plan is ruined.

First things First: The Survey

Please fill in our quick 8 question only Advertising Survey, and share it with others.

Click here to take the survey

This will help the entire Travel Blogging Community and we will share the results wide and far.

Second things Second

I have been thinking long and hard about what has made Todd’s Wanderings a success to this point, as well as what my next steps need to be. I have gone through a process of analyzing popular blogs, in and out of the travel world, and have reevaluated my own goals, vision and strategy.  You can preview and critique my new blog design to see where I’m headed.

By now your thinking, great what good will this be for me other than making sure that Todd picks up the tab when we meet in person? Well the benefit is that I’m planning to layout my whole process here on the TBC. I want to help you build up your blogs, earn more money, and be able to take me out to dinner (drinks included) when we meet up :)

Over the next few months I plan to lay it all out, build up a number of free tools for TBC readers to use, and I might even develop a more in depth course that goes into greater detail on each of the subjects I’ll touch on. I want this to be useful so keep the comments and the suggestions coming and I’ll step up my game.

Anatomy of a Successful Travel Blog

First off I want to make one thing perfectly clear: there is no one way to be successful. To that end it pays to be creative, and to establish yourself and your blog as a purple cow. But in general a successful travel blog will realize that a blog is not a business by itself. I have struggled with this concept as I desperately want my blog and my daily writing to earn money on its own. Unfortunatly, this is not the case. A successful travel blog is one that uses the medium of a blog to interact with an audience, and in that interaction develop a business.

What does this mean? It means you have to have a business plan that is linked to but separate from your blogging plan. It means that you need to have a plan to attract your audience through your blog, but then you have to have a plan of what you will do with them once they are listening and talking back to you.

Many bloggers, myself included, spend so much time focusing on producing content to increase our traffic numbers, but then we fail to take the next step. We naively assume that increased traffic will lead to increased revenue. Of course massive traffic can lead to more money, but of all the travel blogs I have seen very few actually reach the 1,000 visitors a day that we strive to meet here at TBC. This does not mean you can’t still earn money, it just means that you need a plan.

At the core of many successful blogs are three factors that work together:

1)   Find something that you love to do (I’m assuming that is traveling, exploring, getting drunk in odd places around the world)

2)   Find similar people who value your expertise at the thing you love to do

3)   Make sure that it’s something that people will pay for (yeah, this is quite an important part)

Travel Blogging Adds Extra Demands

The “how” is a very different thing from the topic of your blog. And this is where things become a bit more difficult for Travel Bloggers. Besides the normal blogging and business basics, we also need to be expert photographers, storytellers, researchers, writers, videographers, editors, marketers, and conversationalists. That’s a lot to ask from anyone. Oh, and you have to be up to speed on all the hottest trends in internet technology and where the kids are hanging out (what you don’t know what Google + is yet?).

Did I also mention that there are thousands of travel blogs competing for your audience, and a few smaller websites like Travelocity, National Geographic, Times, and just about every single newspaper on the planet?

Are you freaked out yet? Are your palms sweating? Have you cracked open another beer to ease the pain of what you committed yourself to?

Actually, it’s not as hard as you might think. In fact, if you have a good plan, work hard, and are talented you will have no problem :)

So that I don’t leave you hanging, here are a few of the topics I’ll be delving into over the next few months. Don’t worry; the structure will come as well:

  1. Website Design and Usability
  2. Branding
  3. Distinguishing yourself from everyone else
  4. Available Market and who your audience is
  5. Developing Content
  6. Providing Value
  7. Conversion (what you want people to do besides read your words and look at your pictures)
  8. Promotion (this goes beyond just the “use social media” or “guest blogging” suggestions. You need to have a strategy on who you want to attract and how you will target and engage them).

After we talk about all of this, we also have to discuss the nuts and bolts of travel blog writing, developing stories, getting people to care, and developing your voice.

Oh, and then we need to talk about the actual business blue prints that are working for travel bloggers, how to monetize, what your options are, and how to decide what works best for you.

Yeah, and you thought you had a busy schedule coming up!

And just in case you don’t believe me that anyone can earn money attracting an audience online, have a look at ShaneShane. It will blow your mind :)

What else would you like to learn about? Any essential travel blogging aspects that I missed?

Filed Under: Build a Better Blog, Business of Blogging, Make Money Blogging Tagged With:

Is Your Blog a New York Bistro or a Fast Food Chain?

July 4, 2011 By 17 Comments

Fastfood Blog vs Bistro BlogRecently I have bumped heads with a number of advertisers looking to take advantage of myself and my blog. I have also been hearing stories from other new travel bloggers who don’t yet have the longer term experience to notice when they are being taken advantage of by advertisers. Many bloggers are led to believe that pricing for ads is so cheap because there are so many other blogs in the marketplace. How many times has an advertiser come back with a counter offer of 20$ for a permanent ad saying there are tons of other blogs he could get for that price?

In one respect the advertiser is correct, as some figures say over 175,000 blogs are created worldwide each day. Even if it is only 10,000 per day that is a lot of competition. What he fails to note is that many of these are link farms, or a on free platforms where advertisers won’t spend money, are merely for personal pleasure, or that they are just crap in general.

There are Less Good Blogs than You Might Think

The truth is that there is a scarcity of truly great travel blogs that are professionally run and updated consistently. We all know that there are a lot of travel blogs, great travel blog. But when we really think about it how many are there in the professional travel blogging circle? I would guesstimate that there is about 1,000 professional travel blogs at any given time that are current and up to date. This number rises and falls at an even rate as people get tired of blogging and fade away, and new fresh fingers hit the keypad with dreams of striking it rich.

We have gotten this far without me challenging a major issue, “Why are you listening to the advertiser anyway?” He is not working in your interest. He is trying to get the maximum benefit for the cheapest price. But my last point is very crucial. If blogs come and go, and you have been in the marketplace with an established record for years, then you are worth more money. You are less of a risk.

Some of you might argue: “But Todd, this sounds like a text link seller. That’s not a real advertiser, he is trying to game the google system.” All advertisers are trying to game some system, whether it is google, or our own brains. The most important issue is not “What do they value your site at” but “How do you value your own site?” And to get to this point you need to ask yourself:

Is my Blog a New York Bistro or a McDonald’s?

If you are an upscale, professional blog, that attracts a certain demographic than your value is in your audience as well as in your consistency. For example, Todd’s Wanderings has a readership that’s over 60% female and most of my readers have a masters degree. These are all demographics that end up spending money to travel more than other audiences.

If you are a blog that focuses just on existing, on developing an online presence, with not thought about articles other than making sure they are somehow travel related, but they could come from anywhere, from anyone, and contain any type of editorial style, than you might be a McDonald’s. What you are offering is quick gratification, and perhaps the upsale of a happy meal with a cheap toy. My guess (yes, I am guessing a lot in this post) is that most blogs fall into this category, or at least most blogs that are open to selling links. This is the type of blog that your one of a kind, personal work of art is getting compared to.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not putting down the McDonald’s of the world. I’m just helping you to see that there is a difference, and this difference should help to determine your pricing model, and who YOU want to work with. Text link sales are quick and easy, but you won’t get rich off of them, and they have a potential for destroying your blog if you are discovered. This also must be factored into the price. A McDonald’s Blog might not care if it gets shut down as it can just reopen at a new store location. A personalized brand is not able to do this very easily.

What the Hell Does all This Mean?

Simply this, the next time an advertiser comes in WAY below your quoted price and tries to bully you into accepting based on his word that other blogs don’t cost so much, answer this way:

Blogs are not all the same, just like restaurants are not all the same but are in the same business. There is a reason why a hamburger cost $15 at a New York Bistro and only 99 cents at a McDonald’s.

If he doesn’t want to match your price that is OK. Would a New York Bistro accept adverting from Fanta? (Note, I really really like Fanta Orange). Probably not, as it would alienate it’s client base. Why would you do the same thing. This of course leaves the huge issue of how do you set prices for your blog. This is also related to your goals, your target audience, and your planned income streams. We’ll dive into these issues in a later post…yeah, I know….sorry.

So, what type of Blog do you run? Is there a really a difference in blogs? If there is, how do we set our prices accordingly?

Photo Credit

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

72 Hour Affilliate Marketing–Become a better person in the process

June 20, 2011 By 4 Comments

72 Hour Affiliate Marketing ProgrammeHello from rainy Tokyo, Japan. I’m am literally hours away from watching my first son being born and am feeling an intense mix of awe, excitement and utter fear :) While, I’ll be busy for the next few days (well, OK years), I wanted to let you all in on an Affiliate Marketing opportunity you might want to consider. If you don’t know what affiliate marketing is, basically it’s when you get paid for recommending a product that is eventually bought. It is one of my monetization strategies here as well as on Todd’s Wanderings and last month I earned around $500.

Adam Baker from Man vs Debt has created an amazing concept called the 72 Hour Sale where he and a partner gather together 22 online ebooks and courses around a certain theme. This is the second time they have done it, and the last one about Internet Business and Blogging had over 2,000 buyers in just 3 days. The concept is simple, for 72 hours you can buy 22 Personal Development Courses and Ebooks for only $97 that would normally cost $1,087 if you bought them separately.

What does this have to do with you? Last time, I bought the package and became an affiliate. I ended up earning my money back and $100 on top of it. Not to mention getting access to all the online products I had been drooling over for the past year for a ridiculously cheap price.

This time (the last 72 hour sale was 7 months ago) is all about Personal Development. As many of our travel blogging readers are also looking to improve their lifestyles, this might be a good fit to promote on your sites. Besides being a great deal for anyone interested in the subject, you also have the opportunity to earn a 50% commission on all sales, will stay an affiliate for the next time the sale comes around, and you will get to see what type of products sell well on the internet. This last point was great for me in the Online Business and Blogging theme and has given me a ton of ideas for my own products and where I might fit in the market. Now I get 23 more chances for research at a cheap price as well (yes, I already bought mine).

If you are interested check out the 22 Personal Development Package. If you want to become an affiliate you do need to buy it first and then you will have access. Since this is the case you should either: be happy to read the material or believe you can earn commissions on it from your readership due to their interests…or hopefully a combination of the two!

And of course if you decide to buy it through the links here on TBC then I also get a commission and I will be able to buy a round of beers once my son is born. If not, that’s cool too. I just wanted to let you know some of the ways I earn money from my websites to help you out. And yes, I do realize that some of us might have the same readers, and you might “steal” a few customers. That’s cool, the internet is a big place and I want everyone here on the TBC to do well and earn money from their travel and lifestyle websites :)

Good Luck!

Filed Under: Make Money Blogging, Marketing Tagged With: ,

Buisness Model and Site Structure for Niche Travel Site

March 29, 2011 By 13 Comments

This is a guest post by Mike and is an update on his area of the war for Niche Travel Site Battle. I usually just add these updates to the Niche Travel Site Battle War Room but as always Mike has produced a very nice post and I wanted to get it in front of as many people as possible.

Building niche sites is not new to me, but I saw this challenge as a great opportunity to get out of my comfort zone and try out a completely different business model. With the changes going on in Google there were several strategies I wanted to test. Before I even thought of a niche I put together a business model.

Niche Site Structure

  • Low maintenance
  • Low setup cost
  • Google Adsense revenue stream
  • Information resource site
  • One day setup
  • Forced funneled income (will explain below)

Once I knew what type of site I wanted to create I decided on a style.

Niche Site Design

  • Clean and stylish
  • No ads other than Google Adsense
  • Structured navigation
  • Short and descriptive posts/pages
  • Visually appealing

Each of the design features and site structures were decided upon solely for the purpose of the business strategy.

Business Model Strategy

I wanted 100% organic search traffic so that each visitor was looking for specific information. The site would provide a general overview of information that would entice the visitor to continue their search. The only way to continue with their search on the site would be through a profitable link. No outgoing links for more information, free resources or external navigation in any form.  This would create a forced funnel, whereby the visitor would be inclined to click on a Google Ad to move on, thus resulting in a high click through rate and ultimately revenue.

Choosing the Niche

The easiest information niche for the travel industry is a “Destination” niche.  I needed a mildly popular destination that did not have too much competition. After some keyword research I chose a few spots and did a domain name keyword match to narrow it down. I chose http://cheapmalta.net

I purchased the domain at 9 AM on February 28th and by noon I was finished with the site minus the content.  (due to time constraints on other projects the content was outsourced for $75) I had planned to write all of the content myself but I was needed on another project.

I used Market Samurai for my keyword research and settled on 15 keywords I felt I could rank number one in Google for. This would bring an average of 1800 visitors per day (in a perfect world) exceeding my goal of 50k visitors per month with an average click through rate of 28% and an average click rate of $0.63. This left me with a maximum potential income of $10,280 per month. Realistically it would reach 50% of that within six months to a year.

I made one modification to the Google Adsense revenue by adding an affiliate page for Expedia http://cheapmalta.net/check-malta-hotels/ This page was designed with no navigation so the visitor could do one of three things;   book a hotel, click the back button or click a Google Ad. I did not want this page to be an exit from the site.

Getting Traffic

The only thing left to do was get traffic. I built, and still are building, link wheels to each of the pages for the various keywords. I use SENuke (Todd here: I’m not a user of SENuke, and am just investigating it now with the free trial, but it seems expensive) for building linkwheels. In addition to that I create various Squidoo lenses, post comments on blogs, educational sites, government sites and other high page rank blogs.  The main techniques I use for link building are:

  • Linkwheels
  • Web 2.0 individual posts
  • Article marketing
  • RSS Aggregators
  • Video marketing
  • Blog Comments

I cannot use link exchange or blog rolls because I do not want any external links. This part is tricky because external links are important for SERP’s. To fix this problem I am making a list of information sites that rank high such as Wikipedia, Malta government sites etc…. No sites that have any sort of monetization. I also will be putting these links set to open in a new window so that the visitor does not leave the site when clicking.

This is a new strategy so I have no idea how it will play out. I guess we will see.

You can get all updates on each of the Niche Site Battlers over at the Niche Site Battle War Room.

Filed Under: Make Money Blogging, Niche Travel Site Battle Tagged With: ,

Travel Niche Selection and Keyword Research

March 21, 2011 By 12 Comments

niche travel site battle: select a niche and keyword researchA Call to Arms

A few weeks ago I started  hitting the war drums. It was a call to stop procrastinating and to enter the Niche Travel Site Battle. The Battle concept is simple, 5 Travel Blog Challenge members have committed to building up a Niche Travel Site from scratch and be completely transparent about our process, highlighting both successes and mistakes. You can find the first post with the Niche Site Battle Rules here. It is also a way for me to put into practice the course I took on Affiliate Marketing for Beginners where the development of a niche mini-site is the main tool.

I have made Two Important Rule Changes:

1) We can now spend as many hours as we like, but we have to keep track and report back on how much effort we are putting in.

2) We are no longer limited to 10 pages. If one of us hits on a profitable niche it would be silly to be constrained.

So, 25 pages is now the upper rubber limit, UNLESS you have a fantastic (read $$$$$, fame, rides in jet fighters) reason for increasing the page numbers.

I have created a Niche Travel Site Battle War Room where you can find all updates as they come in by my fellow soldiers: Mike from Exotic Visitors, Adam from World Travel for Couples, Kieron from Don’t Ever Look Back, and Norbert from Globotreks. The idea is that by having 5 competitors, readers will be able to evaluate a variety of strategies, learn from our wide range of tactics and mistakes, and hopefully get inspired to create your own niche sites. My own updates will go out to the full TBC crowd through the homepage as a main article. Mike, Adam, and Kieron will all update their progress here on TBC as articles for which you can find links the bottom of my own updates. Norbert will update on his own blog. You can also find ALL posts from the Travel Battlers in order through the Niche Travel Site War Room.

The updates will last for 6 months until the End of August when we will crown the winner who makes the most net PROFIT from their site.

WARNING: This post, as well as many of the initial posts are going to be long. I want them to be timeless resources for people to come back to (link to…hint…hint) and to find useful. Despite the level of detail I will not be able to go too deeply into everything, so if there is a topic you want to know more about let me know by Contacting Me, or leaving a comment below.

Selecting a Profitable Niche

Selecting a profitable niche, and doing essential keyword research go hand in hand. But I’ll deal with them separately because it makes my life easier. If at the end of this process you do not find a niche with the 4 Essential Keyword Characteristics then you should start again.

I’ll admit that I made a HUGE mistake right from the beginning. I’m not an expert in niche sites, yet, and I want to highlight all of my mistakes so that you don’t make them as well. Basically, I have gotten into a very competitive niche. A no-no, in the niche site world, but one that I have decided to follow through with for reasons I’ll explain below.

There are various ways to select a Profitable Niche. There is a lot of advice out there related to selecting niches and most start with a very broad brainstorming session. However, as we are limited to Travel this in one way helps us to focus, but also makes it more difficult. There is heavy competition for popular travel words like “hotel”, “travel” “budget” etc. This means that we have to be creative, which is good, I like being creative.

Methods for Selecting a Niche

One method of finding a niche is to list 7 Fears, 7 Desires, and 7 Needs that Viper Chill talks about as well as Pat from Smart Passive Income (the inspiration for this battle in the first place). Another way is to brainstorm a list of Irrational Passions, or Irrational Fears. In this way you are narrowing in on concepts and topics for which people are willing to spend money on. This is very important because you want a Niche that has a market. This is called buyers intent and those interested in your niche should have it or else all you’ll get is people interested in getting things for free.

The first niche I selected was Fear of Flying. I have a few friends who would love to travel but who are terrified to get on planes. I figured that people would be willing to pay for courses that help them overcome this fear. However, after doing Keyword research I did not discover any words or phrases that met all 4 of the Essential Keyword Characteristics. Yes, you have been patient so here they are.

4 Essential Characteristics of Profitable Keywords

1) Relevance to my Topic. This means simply that anyone searching for my keywords will be happy to land my on my website as it is what they are searching for.

2) Decent amounts of traffic (over 1,000 exact searches a month). If the traffic is too low than we are just wasting our time. The higher number of visitors the high number of potential clicks on my ads or sales through affiliate products.

3) Low competition. If there is no possibility of getting to the first spot on Google Search Results than it’s not worth our time. The traffic will not come, and thus the ad revenue will not come either.

4) Available domain URL that includes my Keywords. I know there are many different opinions on whether Google gives greater importance to exact match domain names. To be honest I don’t know. But where it does help is with backlinks. When people link to my site with anchor text they are likely to use the Name of my site and thus have my keywords included. If they only put the url address my keywords are still included. That’s an easy win, so I’ll take it.

Following my strategy I started over and selected a new Niche, one that I have a passion for and which I know a lot about: Japan. Can a country be a niche? You bet it can!

Japan is a confusing place. If you don’t speak Japanese it can be very difficult to get around and discover the “real” Japan. It is also one of the most popular topics on Todd’s Wanderings. Armed with my new niche I then walked through the Keyword Research steps to see if I could find keywords that match my 4 Essential Keyword Characteristics.

Keyword Research

I started out my keyword research using Google’s Keyword Tool in Google’s Adwords sections. This is a free tool that let’s you see the number of searches per month for certain words or phrases. It also helps you see what else people are searching for related to your main keyword. This will help you generate new keywords and gives you getter chances of find one that meets all 4 characteristics.

From Japan, I found Tokyo which had over 6 million searches a month and VERY low competition. This is misleading as this is for a) broad searches (anything with Tokyo in it or related to Tokyo) and b) the competition is fierce as you will not be able to get to the Top of google for Tokyo. It’s just not possible. There may be few people competing for “tokyo” but the ones that do have a lock, such as the tourism board of Tokyo!

But Tokyo is a popular search term so it was worth exploring further. But to do this I unchecked “broad” searches and used “exact” searches instead. This means I am only seeing the number of people searching for the exact keyword. The monthly search numbers dropped to 260,000!

When you start exploring long tail key words for Tokyo (such as “Cheap Hotels in Tokyo,” or “Advice on visiting Tokyo”) the search numbers go down but the competition factors skyrocket as they are targeted by most travel companies. These companies are much bigger than my little Niche Site will be. Then I saw it, my perfect (or so I thought keyword phrase and niche). Can you spot it in the picture?

Google Keyword Search

Low competition and relatively high monthly searches.

“Things to Do in Tokyo” met all of my key requirements. The competition was low, the search volume as over one thousand a month and was even higher than I had hoped at 4,400 a month. It also has buyer intention, or at least this is my theory. If people are searching for things to do in Tokyo than they are planning a trip. If they are planning a trip then they are also interested in hotels, tours, discounts etc. While I can’t compete with the Big Guys on searches for hotels in Tokyo, I might be able to find people interested in the exact same thing but bring them in through the backdoor. This is essentially my monetization strategy (but more on this in a later post).

My BIG Keyword Mistake

After getting excited, and high fiving the air after my wife showed little interest in my online marketing gold mine, I went and bought my domain and hosting from Host Gator. I decided to use a different web hosting from my other sites (on Dreamhost) so that I could benefit from the link juice of a different IP address. I found an exact keyword URL and went and spent money based on my research. The problem was, Google’s Tool only told me part of the story. The keyword phrase “Things to Do in Tokyo” was much more competitive than I ever imagined. I found this all out by using Market Samurai’s free trial period.

Before I go any farther. Everything that I’ll show below is possible to find out for free with a variety of tools across the web. It took me 1 1/2 days to narrow down my niche and keyword with Google’s tools and searching for domains with Go Daddy. With Market Samurai it took me 1 hour to do the same. I ended up buying the software as it helps with everything from research, to finding domains, analyzing competition, to monetization, to backlink analysis and more. I would suggest trying it out for free (yes, I’m an affiliate but only if you buy and I think there is value in the videos you get with the trial period).

By using Market Samurai I found that while my niche had low competition, it was the big boys who have the top spots:

Market Samurai Key Word and Competition Research

That's a lot of RED

What this shows is the Top 10 search ranking for my term “Things to Do in Tokyo.” As you can see Time Magazine is at the top! They are followed by no less than, Trip Advisor, Yahoo Travel, Virtual Tourist, and Lonely Planet. Ugh! This is where the value of Market Samurai comes in. At this point I had to make a choice: stay with this niche after spending the money, or pick a new niche. What do you think I did?

My Choice

Yes, I am competitive, yes, I want to win this friendly battle. All good sense should have sent me running to a different keyword selection. But I decided to stick it out. Why? According to common practice with Market Samurai, the more green you have in the boxes above the lower the competition. Many people argue that you should have at least 3-4 entire rows that are green (maybe some yellow). But, I think I can beat them. Market Samurai is telling me to run the other way. Normally I would agree, but in this instance I have decided to stand my ground and fight. Here are my reasons:

1) None of the posts above have sites that target my keywords exactly. Some are sites dedicated to Tokyo in general, some are sites about travel and have a page or two on Tokyo.  Some have a post about things to do in Tokyo. But my whole site is about Things to Do in Tokyo. I will focus ONLY ON building links to my main Keyword, which I have an exact domain match for.

2) Most of these pages are not homepages (like mine will be) and only have from 100-2,500 backlinks. There is room to bump the higher backlinked pages off as they are NOT focused on Things to Do in Tokyo and instead only “Tokyo”. There is also room to build more backlinks than the large sites have. In fact my strategy will easily pass these numbers.

3) I already have a ton of information about Tokyo. My wife is from there, I visit a number of times a year, and I know the city. This means I can create content easily.

4) I might create my own product for Tokyo and it would be great to have this site to help sell. Also, it will be another group of people potentially interested in my Book on Japan.

5) I’m thinking of creating a larger destination website for Japan. This will be a good chance to see how the market is and what is possible.

6) There is a WIDE range of secondary keyword phrases that I can rank for with my content. This will help me to expand the traffic numbers coming to the site in the future.

I don’t know if these are valid reasons. But they are the ones that I’m running with and it will be interesting to see if I succeed. Part of this challenge is to have a variety of strategies and I suspect that taking on Time Magazine is not in the plans of the other Battlers  :)

My Niche Travel Site

I knew from the beginning that opening up this process to public scrutiny would throw off the results a bit. After all if you click through to my niche site it might affect traffic numbers or that of the other Battlers. This is unavoidable. I do ask one thing. PLEASE DO NOT GO CRAZY AND CLICK MY ADSENSE ADS TO HELP. You will actually not be helping as the numbers will be compromised and if it looks suspicious I could get banned from Adsense. I don’t want that.

Based on everything above I created my site: Things to Do in Tokyo.

Things to Do in Tokyo

As you can see, there is still some more content that I need to put up. The creation of a niche site, how to get it up and running as quickly as possible, the key pages, and a check list of steps and essential plug-ins will be the topic of my next post.

By the Numbers

Now down to what matters, the numbers. I’ll try to keep this as consistent as possible (along with the other bloggers) so that you can follow along easily.

Time Spent: Starting from March 1st an average of 6 hours per week

Current Google Search Rank: Nonexistent! I don’t rank even on the first 200 pages

Money Spent: $10/month hosting; $12 for the domain

Backlinks: 1…the one in this post :)

Follow the other Battlers on their journey

From Norbert: Travel Niche Challenge: The Beginning

From Adam: And So it Begins

What do you think so far? Am I in over my head?

Yes, another warning. Well not a warning just a heads up. Many of the links I use here on TBC are affiliate links, this means that if you buy through those links that I get a cut of the profit and it helps me keep the lights on. As usual I will only recommend things that I use and think are outstanding. When possible I will also let you know when discounts are available.

Filed Under: Business of Blogging, Make Money Blogging, Niche Travel Site Battle, Nuts and Bolts Tagged With: ,

Adam’s Niche Travel Site Battle: And So it Begins

March 21, 2011 By 1 Comment

This is a guest post by Adam and is an update on his area of the war for Niche Travel Site Battle.

Many great resources have come from Todd’s Travel Blog Challenge site thus far, but this could be the best.  The TBC is hosting a niche blog challenge, where five of us are competing to build the most profitable niche site.  Of course there’s me from World Travel for Couples, Todd of the TBC and Todd’s Wanderings, Mike from Exotic Visitors, Kieron from Don’t Ever Look Back, and Norton from Globotreks all taking part in this challenge.  And while it may be a bit of a competition, we are all helping each other out, and the goal is for all of us to build a niche site that becomes profitable.

Luckily for me, I have been pondering a niche site since last summer, so it’s been in the back of my mind for some time now.  There are several reasons why I hadn’t done it until now, but the main one is that I simply didn’t quite know what I was doing.

There’s a lot that goes into building a niche site that is going to be profitable, and it’s not easy.  If it was, everyone would be doing it. Like I said, this had been in my head for months, and I started my research back in early February, about a week before Todd announced the niche blog challenge.  It was pure coincidence this happened.

So I thought to myself, “What is going to be my niche, my topic?”

The first of many mistakes

I know I’m going to make tons of mistakes during this whole venture, but I managed to start off on the wrong foot.  I wanted something popular, right?  Something that a lot of people search for all the time.  So I started plugging in travel related search terms on Google.  I wanted high traffic search terms.  Ones that everyone searches for.  So I came up with the idea to start a site based on the best US cities to travel in.  Great idea, right?  Everyone is always searching for travel related sites on New York City, Vegas, Miami, Chicago, and LA.  Perfect!

So I started building the site.  I even wrote a few pages.  I was on my way, right?

It was about this time that I read about the challenge.  Perfect!  Not only was I a bit ahead of the game, but now I had a support network to help.  This couldn’t have worked out any better.  Or so I thought.

Once the challenge got underway, more resources became available to me.  I had been ignorantly ignoring the importance of keywords since I built my first site about 10 months ago.  Why?  I’m not sure, but I did.  Keywords seemed to be the word of the day when it came to building a niche site, though, so I figured I should start learning about them.

I took the advice of Mike from Exotic Travelers, an established writer and web developer who knew what he was talking about.  I downloaded the free trial of Market Samurai and started learning about keyword research.  I watched literally hours of video tutorials on the Market Samurai site before I even touched the software.  I learned a ton not only about the program but keyword research in general.

A Realization

As I was watching these tutorials, I came to the realization that I may have made a bad decision in choosing my niche topic.  Turns out that this niche is probably going to be highly competitive without a very good chance of ranking highly for the right keyword search terms.

But I tried anyway.  I began using Market Samurai to try to find the perfect keyword search terms related to my niche.  I was pulling my hair out after a few hours because I was not finding much.  It became beyond frustrating after a while.

After wasting the better part of a day searching for relevant, low competitive, somewhat high paying keyword terms and coming up blank, I decided that I should switch my topic.  I know I already spent quite a bit of time building a new site, but I wanted to do this the right way.  Besides, I own the domain name for 2 years and have some content up already, so I can keep that site on the backburner while I hopefully learn how to do this the right way.

The first step you should take

If starting a niche site like this, the very first thing you should do is keyword research.  I can’t stress how important that is.  You won’t make progress by just blindly jumping into a niche without doing any research.  That’s one of the main reasons why the vast majority of websites fail.  They don’t properly research their competition.  How is little old me going to compete with Travelocity, Wikipedia, and Lonely Planet?  I’m probably not.

So it was back to square one.  I began searching all types of different things. I  began with my favorite countries and activities.  I tried a lot of different places and terms.  Colombia beaches.  Hiking Torres del Paine.  Hiking the Inca Trail.  Hiking Patagonia.  Traveling in Patagonia.  Buenos Aires attractions.  And variations of all of them.

I didn’t have much luck until I got to Vietnam.  After hundreds of searches, I plugged in cheap Vietnam travel.  Analyzing the data is a whole different challenge, but after looking it over, I thought this could be a good one.  I next checked domain names and found that cheapvietnamtravel.com was not taken.  That pretty much sold it for me.

The new plan

Vietnam was one of our absolute favorite countries, and we traveled very cheaply there, so this became a no brainer.  So I bought the domain name and started building the site.  This entire process of researching keywords, deciding to switch sites, finding a new one, and building the new site all happened within two days.  But it was about all I did for those two days.

The base of my new site is set up, but I have since been spending my time researching more keywords for my various pages.  This is what’s been giving me the most trouble thus far. I still don’t know that I have a firm grasp on analyzing the data in Market Samurai when searching keywords.  I kind of feel like I’m doing too much guesswork, but I guess we’ll have to see.

What’s next?

At this point I’m still researching keywords before I add more content and start thinking about link building, another thing I will have to learn about.  For me, this whole thing is a big learning process, and it will be slow going as I want to do it the right way.  My weeks get busier and busier with other work obligations as we approach the end of March, but I am hoping to have my site built with all content and start working on link building by the end of the month.

This is a guest post by Adam from World Travel for Couples as a part of the Niche Travel Site Battle.

Filed Under: Business of Blogging, Case Studies, guest challenger, Make Money Blogging, Niche Travel Site Battle, Nuts and Bolts Tagged With: , ,
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