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Review: 25 Blogging Secrets

May 23, 2011 By 8 Comments

25 Travel Blog SecretsThis is a review of 25 Travel Blogging Secrets- Money and Blog Successfully by Vago Damitio. A few things upfront so that you know where I’m coming from:

1)   I’m not getting paid for this review, although I did receive the report for free under the agreement that I post a review.

2)   The links here go to Amazon.com for which I’m an affiliate. So if you do buy the report then I get a very very small (did I mention small?) commission.

3)   I am uncertain if it is wise to post this review.

Now that we understand each other, let’s dive into the report.

Under the Hood

Vago presents the 25 tips to blogging that have helped him earn tens of thousands of dollars through his travel blog. At a short 5 pages this is not an extensive study of the travel blogging world, but it is a pretty comprehensive list of very important aspects of blogging, and travel blogging in general.

Tips 1-7 are of a general blogging nature. This covers everything from how to save money on a unique theme and logo, to making sure people can connect with you.

Tips 8-15 are all about Making Money. We all (at least here on the TBC) want to make some money and Vago does a good job of offering some concrete advice. He lists his top affiliate money makers which by itself is a very useful resource.

Tips 16-22 are all about Content and Blog Creation. This section deals with how to get great content, how to set yourself apart in the large field of Travel Blogging.

Tips 23-25 deal with Marketing and Promotion and here he offers some ways for bloggers to outsource the marketing side if that is not their strength.

In general, I learned a few things and was happy to see a number of strategies that I employ myself. I like that it was not too long or overwhelming. Many new travel bloggers need help just getting started and can easily quit early if they feel overwhelmed by everything that goes into creating and maintaining a successful travel blog.

The Bad

At a price tag of $7.99 (available on Kindle) I’m not sure the information is worth it when you can buy a similar, full book for the same price. This is not to say that the report is not valuable, just that I don’t think it would be worth it for me.

Each of the sections, while relevant, are a bit too short. I’d like to see more concrete examples and steps for new travel bloggers to take to put each of the suggestions into action.

The Verdict

If you are a new travel blogger, and you are looking for a place to start then 25 Travel Blogging Secrets- Money and Blog Successfully might be worth your while. This is why I hesitated to give this review. For the more experienced blogger out there I don’t think you will find anything earth shattering that will turn your blog around. In fact you can easily find most of these tips floating around the internet.

But for the beginner, or those who do not want search endlessly, this could be a nice way to get started. There is a value in having a strategy, that has worked, presented all in one place. However, I’d rather see some more meat on the report to justify the price or a reduction in price.

Of course I may just be influenced by the cheap price of e-books in general these days…which is not great for us authors but which certainly has made the buyers happy.

Have you bought the report? What do you think?

Filed Under: Nuts and Bolts Tagged With:

E-mail List Building Strategy

April 18, 2011 By 15 Comments

How to build an effective e-mail list using a free gift and follow up automated messagesThis is a How To post, but bear with me as I go into a bit of background. Building and e-mail list and  gaining subscriptions to your blog are powerful ways to both help increase traffic numbers but also help you monetize your blog. By the end of the article you will know how to:

 

1) Build an e-mail list that also contributes to your RSS count

2) Give away free things and not feel guilty for it

3) Skin an alpaca, make a warm coat, and not cause any bodily harm to the alpaca

4) Tell when I’m being serious and when I’m exaggerating…maybe

5) Get your free Lonely Planet book put together by your fellow travel bloggers

E-mail What?

It seems that everyone talks about the importance of building an e-mail list for websites. An e-mail list allows you to connect more personally with your readership, and when the time comes offer something to them.

Why is this important? By subscribing to your e-mail list the reader has already shown an interest in your blog or writing. This makes connecting with them easier. It also allows you to deepen your relationship with them and eventually turn their interest into an action. This action could be as simple as coming back to your site, sharing it with others, or buying a product from you.

I was not entirely convinced on e-mail list until I started building one here on TBC and then used the service to help with my Blog4Japan campaign. I have to admit, the ability to reconnect with those already interested is amazing. Here on TBC I use my list to send out updates on new posts. This works for me as I don’t published too often (1-2 times a week max) and thus I don’t annoy people (hopefully). But you can also set it up to send out newsletters that go out automatically after a certain number of posts. This is what many travel bloggers do. Just make sure to customize the interaction with personal details or contests only available to subscribers. Everyone hates useless crap in their inbox!

Human Nature works both For and Against You

It can be difficult to build up registrations (through e-mail or RSS) as human nature usually falls on the reserved side when it comes to taking action or committing an e-mail address. This is where incentives come into play as human nature also loves free, useful things. By offering a free gift to subscribers you are able to reward them, and get them in the habit of taking action on your site.

My goal on Todd’s Wanderings is to get as many eyes on my writing a possible. A reminder to those who have already shown an interest is a good thing. I also want to eventually sell my own books. This means letting those who already like my writing know about my amazing new book, which is a good thing.

But I also like to give value to my readers. I want them to be happy they are following and getting to know me. Until recently I didn’t have the proper reward to give them so I didn’t begin being an e-mail list. I was only using facebook, twitter, and RSS. As of this month I will have a great new reward:

A free Lonely Planet e-book that I managed the development of and which features not only me but 39 of my closest travel blogging buddies. BAM!

Free Lonely Planet BookYeah that’s right, a Lonely Planet book. I’m super excited about this project, giddy about the release, and psyched that it’s free. But just because it’s free doesn’t mean that I can’t derived value from it.

Building an E-mail List

Yes, I promised you a How-To portion so this is it. But first (or is it third by now?) the basics. An e-mail marketing service allows you to manage e-mail distributions to your followers (those who register). This can be automated as well as done manually. I use Aweber as my service.

The main reason I chose Aweber (which costs a monthly fee) over MailChimp (which has a free version) is that all e-mail subscribers get added to your RSS count. This means more authority and credibility in one place.

Aweber is also the most established in the internet marketing industry, has the best delivery rates, has a more intuitive interface (to me), I can use my open brand (MailChimp’s free service carries its logo), and it allows me to do affiliate marketing. I’m planning to expand my online businesses so this makes the most sense for me (yes, niche site related).

That being said, if you don’t make money from your blog, or don’t plan to in the future, than Mail Chimp might be a good option for you. But for me, it’s Awber all the way, and so this guide is based on this platform.

Heads up. If you sign up with Aweber I do get a small affiliate commission. Thank you for your support.

How I plan to Reward my Readers

You would think that after such a long introduction that I’m going to share the secrets of astrophysics with you. Actually, Aweber makes it super simple to set up a reward system for those who sign up for your e-mail list. It took me less than 5 minutes to set up a new list, and create a follow up e-mail with the link to where the e-book can be downloaded.

Step 1 Create the list

Create an e-mail list on AweberThe first step is easy, you hit “create new list”, create a name for the list, and then you brand it with your particular website details. This is exactly what I’ll be using for when the e-book is released.

Step 2 Create a Confirmation E-mail

Create a Confirmation Message on AweberNo one wants to automatically be added to a list, especially if someone else added them without their permission. By setting up a confirmation message that gets sent automatically you are showing that you are concerned about the readers’ privacy. We only want people on our blogs who want to be there.

Step 3 Create a Follow up Message

Once you have created the basics of the e-mail list all you have to do is hit this pretty green button.

Create a New Follow Up Message on AweberThis will take you to a text editor where you can craft your e-mail that will be sent after the subscription is confirmed. There is a lot that goes into creating appealing Copy in this message. But for now we will only focus on the nuts and bolts of getting the message out.

Create a Follow up Message on AweberYou can style this with HTML, choose from a number of different templates, or even just send it as a simple text message. The key is to include in this message the link to where the subscriber can download your free gift. In this case the place where the cleverly crafted “INSERT LINK HERE” is written.

This will eventually take the subscriber to the place where Lonely Planet is hosting the e-book for automatic download.

The best part about this, and the reason I don’t mind spending money on it, is that once it is all set up everything is automated. From people signing up, to receiving their gift, there is nothing more you need to do. You can even add a sequence of e-mails that offer an e-mail course, or timed announcements. The only limit is your creativity and the interest of your reader. We don’t want to contribute to more “suck” in the world.

Unsubscribe

I know, I know. A number of you are thinking, “Won’t people just subscribe to get my free gift and when unsubscribe?”

Yes, they will.

But two things to keep in mind here. One, do you really want these types as long term readers? Maybe, maybe not. But what those left are the committed loyal readers you are looking for.

Two, it’s your job to draw them into your blog. You have enticed them with your sex siren call and great free gift, but your job is not over. You need to give them a reason to stick around. This is partly about aligning your voice with their interests, having outstanding and compelling copy in your e-mail, a sexy fake image in your profile (kidding…maybe), and also about not sending them crap afterward. You need to send your readers quality content, or make it exciting for them to stay subscribed. Yes, I’m leaving this hard part up to you.

I hope you enjoyed this tour through the world of e-mail marketing. For those of you wondering where the instructions are to the alpaca coat…I have land I would like to sell you in Florida :)

As always, comments, praise, criticism, and free beer (for me) are all welcome below.

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Filed Under: Build Traffic, Marketing, Nuts and Bolts Tagged With: ,

8 Tips for Going Viral With StumbleUpon

April 4, 2011 By 41 Comments

How to help your article or blog post go viralThis is a guest post by Jeremy.

Have you ever wondered how some posts go viral with 100,000+ hits on StumbleUpon and others only get 23?  Or why two of your posts of equal strength and style differ in the amount of traffic you receive by several orders of magnitude?

When using StumbleUpon, there are many tips throughout the internet that are designed to help you maximize your ability to get stumbles.  The sad truth to this is that StumbleUpon is as elusive as figuring out Google or other large SEO factors.  The amount of metrics that go into determining what is good and what is bad make it impossible to decipher.

After years of playing with StumbleUpon, having an account blocked, and another become successful, then lose that success only to regain it again, I’ve figured out a few things that should be looked at loosely when trying to send traffic to blog posts.

1) Account Strength is the Beast

StumbleUpon lets you share many posts, make friends, and even have reviews of your account.  The more of these you have over more random sites, the higher your account will be rated.  This is simple; StumbleUpon trusts the views of users with hundreds of shares and a pattern of quality submissions than a spammer who only has a few dozen.  I did not even begin getting 100+ views on a stumble until after 50 unique reviews, and that is a modest count.

Try this: A great way to strengthen your account is to stalk sites that you know will get many reviews on StumbleUpon – like Matador Network.  Be the first to review a post immediately after it is live, and let the people behind you fill it with likes.  Your account gets stronger significantly from this.

2) The Friendship Double Edged Sword

Having friends on StumbleUpon is a great way to strengthen your account.  Your stumbles get a boost because people are friends with you, who in turn make you appear to be a trustworthy source.

Sharing recently stumbled articles with your friends, unfortunately, does absolutely nothing to get a post viral.  StumbleUpon cares more about organic likes than your friends liking a post just because you are connected.  With this, a post that gets 20 thumbs up and 5 reviews from friends may be stuck at only 50 views.

3) Organic Likes are Better

An organic like is someone who thumbs up or reviews your page that you are not connected with.  In order for this to happen they must stumble upon your site either by the toolbar or reading your site on their own.

When they thumb up your post or review it without any encouragement, the benefits are more substantial as this is a sign of an actual quality post.  It is possible for you to get one thumb up after a post from someone you don’t know who has a strong account, and end up with 600 or more views.

Remember: You can only get organic likes from your initial discovery if people are actually around to read your post, so submission time is key.

4) Submit Your Post at the Right Time – Staying in the Cycle is Key

When traveling Asia, I would submit posts at the equivalent of 3am, 4am, 7am EST time.  My StumbleUpon returns were low.  Why is that? No one is using StumbleUpon at that hour.  A post can’t be looked at if no one is clicking the Stumble button. Better hours are between 5 and 10pm EST when more people are at their computer.

When you submit, you get an initial boost of shares based on the post criteria (through means that are still unknown) and the strength of your account.  The rest of the traffic you get is from people that the post is shared with, and how many thumbs up you get.

If you get zero thumbs up, the post will fall out of the StumbleUpon sharing, and may never get traffic until someone boosts it in the future from reading your site.  If you continually get thumbs up and reviews from this initial burst, the sky is the limit and you will stay in the network for some time – the key to being viral.

5) What Posting Criteria is Good?

It is hard to say on this one. Since StumbleUpon is so secretive, everything is always purely speculation.  My best articles are always authoritative and not personal stories, making the use of the program even harder against us travel bloggers.  List posts also seem to do well as a site is deeming the “Best of” with authority and are generally easier reads.

The other major topic that you’ll see from time to time is photos.  We all have amazing photos, and it is important to showcase them front and center in any post you want to get stumble traffic from.  A post without photos is meant for certain doom.

Try this: You can get a feel for this by selecting the ‘travel’ topic and stumbling 20 or so posts just to see what comes up.  Here are the first few that I got:

“Mondays are for dreaming: Ten dream-worthy moments”

“7 Epic Journeys in SE Asia”

“Hohenzollern Castle – photos”

“Top 10 Man-Made Wonders: Amazing Monuments”

“Ultimate Guide to Packing Lists: 45 Tips for How to Pack Light”

“Mopeds in Mykonos – photo essay”

“Thailand Travel Photography”

See the trend?

The Pitfalls of StumbleUpon

Even with all of these tactics, there are a few thoughts you should keep in mind when submitting to StumbleUpon.  A few pitfalls will mean certain doom to a post and you will never get traffic to it again no matter how hard you try, unless a major player likes your page.

1) Review a post if you are the first thumbs up.

If you get a prompt for a review when you thumbs up a post, for the love of everything good, review it! A post with a like and no review is like the kiss of death and it takes a really strong SU account to bring a post back from this.  Ever see a post of yours stuck at ’1′ and no more, only to take 8 likes and 4 reviews to get it to boost to 50? This might be one of the reasons for the problem.

2) Small photos have an equally bad effect.

This may be a stretch, but from what I can tell, StumbleUpon really likes photos.  When you submit a post, a photo should be large enough that it gets grabbed by the thumbnail image on the SU discovery page.  If it is too small, the photo will be a generic image of your blog or blank.  That does not give a lot of credibility to your post, and seems to have a negative effect.  I’ve found that bigger than 240x300px does the trick, but this is an estimate.

3) Don’t Over Promote and Remember to Actually Stumble!

It is easy to say do not over promote your own pages, as a history of repeatable behavior is the sign of a spammer.  Break things up by actually using your SU toolbar and stumbling for posts, liking them, and giving reviews.  Forgetting these may flag your account and reduce your potency.  But even though using the toolbar is great, you still have to vary your discoveries from many sites in order to keep the appearance of being random!

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With these thoughts in mind, your StumbleUpon account can become very powerful.  But with that power, it is only as good as your organic likes let you become.  If you continually submit a string of posts that do not get likes, you will stop getting the critical initial traffic.  Be sure to balance the amount of discoveries you have from powerhouse sites and our independent blogs to ensure that your account gets ideal traffic on both ends.  Remember – It takes both an initial boost from your account and continual boosts from random users to go viral, and balancing that is very, very tricky.

For more great tips on using Stumble Upon check out Go, See, Write’s How-to Guide on driving traffic using Stumble Upon.

What is your secret trick to get traffic from StumbleUpon? Help us out and submit below!

Jeremy is the primary author of Living the Dream and Free Travel Contests, as well as co-author of the travel food blog The International Food Project. He has traveled to 34 countries throughout North America, the Caribbean, Europe, Asia, and the Middle East and currently planning his next long term adventure for 2013.

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Filed Under: Build Traffic, Nuts and Bolts 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: , ,

Blog Homework 8: Discover New Blog Real Estate (you have More Google Page Rank Than you Think)

February 10, 2011 By 37 Comments

Find Internal Google Page Rank for all PagesI know, I know, I have been promising that I would post a homework on creating an advertising page and media guide. Each time I sit down to write the homework I discover an essential task that you need to accomplish before having a compelling advertising page and pitch.

You have More PageRank than you think

With the recent Google Page Rank update many travel bloggers are either rejoicing or burying their sorrows on a beach with fruity cocktails. Either way, you are happy. But I might be able to make you even happier. Chances are you have more Google Page Rank than you first thought. Many bloggers only consider the PR of their homepage and forget that as links build to other pages and posts they might be gaining PageRank.

Why Does More PageRank Matter?

Like it or not PageRank is ONE factor used to determine advertising rates. If you have a low PR than it is in your interest to use different criteria to set your prices. But if you have high PR than you might as well use it. Having more sites with PageRank means that you can sell more advertising space and at different rates. An advertiser might not have a budget for placing an Ad on a PR 4 page, but luckily you can offer a PR 3, 2 or even 0!

How to find the PageRank of all Internal Pages

I have yet to find a comprehensive online tool to search through all pages on your site. The best I have found so far is: http://www.diagnosticoweb.com/internal/ (the site currently is down). But this will only return 100 pages, which means you might miss some important ones.

I recently found http://www.cleverstat.com/en/page-rank-software.htm which is a free desktop application that you can extract URLs and then search for PageRank in bulk. My search returned 4,821 urls on Todd’s Wanderings. That’s a lot of  PR potential.

Once you have different PR pages, you need to be able to have advertisements only appear on those pages. You don’t want to sell an as for only the Homepage and have it show up on all pages. This would defeat the purpose of finding new ad space. I use the WordPress plug-in Widget Logic (just search for it in the add plug-in section). This lets me control which widgets appear on certain pages.

Todd’s Wanderings has a PageRank of 4. However, after searching I found a lot of pages that had been upgraded that I never knew about:

Page Rank 3: 12 pages

Page Rank 2: 25 pages

Page Rank 1: 8 pages

I have found the tool to be mostly accurate but curiously some page ranks don’t show up in my Firefox SEO tool bar and I had to use a PR checking website to confirm.

Today’s Homework

Today’s homework is to use the tools above and find out how exactly how much PageRank real estate you have. You can then use this information in your advertising pages, or in the price listing that you send out after contact.

Extra Credit: If you have already determined your prices, and you know how many ads your accept per page, calculate how much possible revenue your blog can earn.

As this is more of a personal homework assignment we are not linking it to he forums.

However, we’d love to hear what you discovered, how much you think your blog is worth, and any plug-ins that you use that are better than mine!

Photo Credit

Filed Under: Build a Better Blog, Nuts and Bolts 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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10 ways SEO can make your travel posts – and blog – Better

January 31, 2011 By 42 Comments

SEO tips and tricks

This is a guest post by David Robert Hogg.

Many things are said about Search Engine Optimization (SEO) – a good many of them wrong and misinformed. The most common of the critiques is that there is a trade-off between writing for your readers and “writing for Google”. A compromise between having a blog focused on content, readability and character, and a blog that is optimized to be scanned, indexed and searched.

Not only is this untrue, but more often that not good white-hat SEO tactics will make your blog better. Better for your readers, better for you, and better for the people that want to find what you’re producing – be it a product, information, or entertainment.

Good SEO tactics – the kind of SEO that you could proudly append to the bottom of any post, describing to your readers what you did and why you did it – can make your blog more readable, accessible, and just plain better.

Here’s how.

1. Focus.

Write posts that are detailed and thorough yet sharp and well defined. Posts that could be mistaken for entries in the encyclopedia. Great stories that have a distinct theme and subject. This is what readers want and it’s also what search engines want.

Search engines don’t like long unfocused and rambling posts (they don’t know how to index them) and neither do your readers (they find them vague and usually boring). And even you – the blogger – benefit on this one. One of the biggest challenges bloggers face is thinking up enough interesting topics to write about. When you go throwing 3 or 4 different subjects into a blog post, not only are you confusing your readers, but you’re also blowing off what could have been 3 or 4 different posts. Stay focused and everyone wins.

2. Conciseness

Similar to focus but more concerned with word choice as opposed to themes and topics. Trim the extra words from your posts and make sentences crisp, clear, and streamlined. Computers are not as smart as people when it comes to deciphering meaning so if your readers are having trouble with passages then so is Google. Make sentences short, easy to understand and memorable.

Also watch your use of pronouns, hackneyed phrases, and generic verbs.

Let’s look at 2 example sentences:

A. “When we got there everyone was waiting impatiently.”

B. “When we got to the hotel all the other guests were waiting to check-in.”

They’re both describing the same scene but the first one assumes the reader knows what you’re talking about (and some might not). The 2nd one is not only more clear but also has a number of keywords that people might actually be searching for. Hotel, guests, and check-in are certainly much more commonly searched than everyone and impatiently.

This might seem like writing for Google, but it will often make your writing more clear and easy to read. Remember as well: not everyone reading a travel blog has English as their first language.

3. Use headings and sub-headings within a post

Common SEO advice is to use keywords and keyphrases in headings and subheadings; and bold them in a couple of key sections throughout the text. Sounds like common tactics in the print industry long before Google was founded.

Headings, blockquotes, and bolded text grab peoples eyes and arrest their movement down the page when they’re starting to scan. They also make it easier for search engines to determine the main topics of a post or page.

4. Use a diverse array of media

People love posts with images, charts, and videos – and so do search engines – so use them. If you make videos embed them on their own page within your website and be sure to transcribe the audio into text that will appear below the video. This is good for Google and Bing – it tells them what this video post is about – but also good for readers. It allows them to quickly scan the content to see if they want to watch it, and also allows visitors with a slower connection to consume this information even if they’re not able to stream the video.

5. Post ideas

Do you want to know what topics search engines are interested in? Use a keyword tool to find out what words and phrases are being searched for.

Do you want to know what topics people – and your potential readers – are interested in? Use a keyword tool to find out what words and phrases are being searched for.

These are not separate ideas. As a blogger you should be interested in solving some demand – an answer to a question, a desire to be entertained, a need to feel motivated and inspired – and search engines are in the business of solving these demands by finding you.

Obviously you’re doing your readers a disservice if you’re writing posts just because they appear in a keyword tool. So stick to what you know.

But using a keyword tool is akin to emailing your friends and asking – “If you were writing a post on mountain climbing what topics would you want covered?” Keyword research tells you what the answer would be if you had 2 billion friends.

6. Load Time

Google has stated clearly that load times are one of the signals they use to determine quality of a page. Readers undoubtedly like fast loading pages as well. [Todd here, we have a very helpful discussion in the forums on how to increase the speed of your site with some simple WordPress plugins]

7. Use descriptive names and tags for images

Though search engines have made huge strides with image recognition software they most definitely are not using it on all images on the web. By using keyword rich file names, employing descriptive alt and title tags, and making smart use of captions search engines will have a pretty good idea what the image is about. Clearly humans are not as dependent on these hints but a good caption and title tag (the text that shows when you mouse-over an image) will give readers a much richer understanding about the context, location, and details of an image.

8. Use a descriptive URL and directory structure

Google likely uses URLs and directory structure to attempt to understand the subject of a post and so do readers. The URL string can often be the link text for a post and the only thing a reader sees when making a guess regarding a post’s subject.

9. Have an easy to navigate website

Google doesn’t index everything on a site so attempting to have the majority of your posts 1 to 3 clicks away from your homepage can make it more likely that all of your posts will be found by search engines. Readers like this too, and few things are more annoying – or will have users clicking away from your site faster – than making content hard to find.

10. Make awesome resource pages.

Google and people both love resources pages. If you’re planning a trip to India there’s nothing better than a list of high quality links to good information. The trouble is, resource pages are hard to do well. To the uninitiated resource pages can seem an easy and thoughtless attempt at attracting links – but they’re not. To do them well requires a lot of legwork, regular updating, and a keen eye for knowing what people are interested in.

What SEO tactics do you use that also benefit your readers? Are there any SEO tactics that you think come at the expense of readers?

David Robert Hogg blogs about traveling the world with kids at My Little Nomads and does blog design and SEO at Rocket Blog Design. You should follow him on Twitter here.

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