Look at the top, top bloggers in every niche – whether travel, fitness, finance, entrepreneurship, self-help, four-hour work living, marketing, etc. These are the bloggers with the biggest mailing lists, the largest traffic, and the ones who always seem to get links and mentions in the media.

What do they have in common? They don’t do sponsored content or links or take many freebies.

They have built businesses and have products.

Now look at all the bloggers in all fields who complain about how “hard” blogging is and how there is no money in it.

Are these the ones who follow the best practices of the top bloggers or tend to take the most sponsored shit?

Think about it.

So the real question you need to ask yourself is:  do you want to be a top blogger or do want to take free shit and complain about why you aren’t making much money?

If you want to make some actual money and have lots of readers, follow the best practices and examples of top bloggers. Don’t do the opposite of what they are doing.  I constantly mimic what the best in other niches do and adapt it to my own blog. It’s worked.

Let it work for you.

A couple of other points:

You may be the most honest person in the world and I have no doubt that you are going into that press trip with good intentions but the road to hell is paved with good intentions. Perception is reality and if people perceive you are taking all your trips for free, they will simply stop reading you because eventually your “all opinions are my own” will begin to ring hollow and readers won’t be able to relate to your experience since what you get and what they get will be a totally different experience.

There’s nothing wrong with partnering with brands you love and creating long-term partnerships (I have one with G Adventures). What rings hollow for the public at large is stuff like “Guys, I’ve never used this brand before but you should totally use them. They are the official X of my site now that they have paid me a ton of money!” People see through this stuff.

Is it fair that magazines get away with this and bloggers are held to a different standard? No. It’s not. But it’s reality.

You’ll always find a core group of people to read your stuff but you’ll never gain mass appeal if all your posts are “brought to you by….”.

If you can only afford to do this job because you are getting free trips, you might want to re-examine your business model.

As I listened to people talk, I kept silent. I didn’t want to get caught up in the debate. I hate inside baseball. However, on my recent trip to Africa, while dealing with long 10 hour bus rides, I had a lot of time to think — and think about travel blogging and the state of the industry I did.

With all that time, I’ve decided to write.

And then I wrote some more.

And I hate wasting words so I decided to no longer stay silent but to talk about travel blogging and my opinion on what needs to be done.

Nothing I write here is meant to be taken personally; these are simply my thoughts on the business of blogging. I see too many people who should be successes but aren’t, and too many beginner bloggers being led astray, cutting off any chance of success they might have.

We all start from zero and the questions we should always ask ourselves are why did that person succeed? and how can I copy what works so I can too?

Well, here are my answers to those questions. (Note: Just blog for fun? Don’t care about making a business out of it? Awesome. Keep doing that. This post isn’t for you though!)

The Problem(s)

There are many reasons why so few of us make it beyond our own walls. Compared to other niches, our world is very small with few top bloggers, few rising stars, and few people making lots of money. Travel is a multi-billion dollar industry, and we should have a bigger piece of that pie than we currently do. I think a lot more people should be bubbling to the top and as I look at what impedes our industry and what happens in other fields, I notice a couple of things:

First, travel blogging is inward focused. Too many bloggers write to other travel bloggers, talk to other travel bloggers, and network with other travel bloggers. On a personal level, that’s awesome. On a professional level, it’s limiting. Too few of us branch outside our industry. It is a giant circle jerk. There’s too much inside baseball on people’s blogs that only ever appeals to other bloggers. In short, we don’t think big enough.

Secondly, we don’t create businesses. Most of us, myself included, are former travelers who started blogging as a way to extend our travels. Most of us think “Hey, I travel and blog. I can definitely give other people advice on travel. I’m an expert.” And then with visions of being a travel writer in our minds, we join our fellow travel bloggers in….taking press trips, selling links, and running sponsored posts — and then complaining about how hard it is to make money with a travel blog. But how many of us create business plans? Have a marketing strategy? Develop an expertise? Hire people? Contact traditional media? How many of you create products that compliment your expertise? All businesses have staff, products, and plans. Too many think “If I blog, they will come.” They won’t. Content may be king, but marketing is the queen — and, as any good chess player knows, queens are the real power.

Third, there is a huge sense of self-entitlement. I see so many people who say they are “travel writers” and “travel experts” and demand this or that but only have two readers, have never been linked or quoted in a major magazine, and are simply experts at taking press trips. Anyone who has spent five minutes in the Facebook groups can see this. It leads to a huge amount of infighting, name calling, gossiping, and a “what can you do for me?” attitude. It’s worse than high school and it’s a big roadblock to success.

Those three things create a negative feedback loop that keeps too many bloggers down. As I’ve thought about the conversations I’ve heard over the last few months, I’ve come to realize that unless there is a paradigm shift in the way most bloggers think, few will last the industry contraction that is bound to occur when the novelty of travel blogging wears off and companies start to look closer at ROI and get more selective. It’s happened in other blogging niches and ours will be no exception. What goes up always goes down.

And that’s a shame, because there are so many good travel blogs out there that — with just a little push — could become huge and profitable successes.

The Fix

Why is it that, out of the thousands of bloggers, so few succeed? It is true in any industry that a few will rise to the top, but the Internet is a large place and you could have a million followers and still be unknown. To millions, you could be the only travel blog out there. There’s no reason why we all can’t be big fishes in small ponds. You would think for all his fame Tim Ferriss would be a household name, but ask most people who aren’t Internet junkies and they will have no clue as to who he is, nor will they be able to name his famous books. Yet he has tens of millions of readers and has sold millions of books.

And the reason why our industry isn’t a smooth pyramid comes down to this one fact: only a tiny amount are actually running a business and developing a strategy. Think of a restaurant. You walk in, you sit down, and you’re handed a menu from which to order. That restaurant has something to offer you. You get food, it gets money for doing something that it loves — in this case, cooking food.

Now, let’s pretend every travel blogger is their own restaurant. Ask yourself, what’s on your menu?

For too many of us, the answer is nothing.

All businesses sell something. Every top blog in every niche sells a “product”. They have a number of selections from which customers can choose – whether it’s an e-book, a course, speaking engagements, print books, their freelance writing skills, consulting, or affiliate ad sales. Your blog is a store and you need to think of it as such. What can people buy when they come to yours?

Some tips:
I. Be an expert
Go deep. Go niche. You cannot be a travel expert, just simply an expert in a style of travel. Travel is far too big of a field to be an expert in it all. That would be like someone saying they are a science expert.

I believe a lot of it goes back to the problem that so many of us come out of the traveler tradition that we look for ways to extend our travel and think “travel blogger” sounds cool. I went around the world, I know travel, I can help others.

A trip around the world does not make you an expert on anything related to travel. Yes, you know more than the average person but you are leagues away from being an expert. In the beginning, I thought I was and it took many humbling moments to realize I knew nothing and then it took me years of work and practice to actually become an expert on a type of travel.

What makes you passionate about travel? I love budget travel. I’m cheap, I hate spending money, and sitting around for 10 hours to learn how to find a cheaper flight sounds like a perfect Friday night to me. I focused on that and absorbed everything I could about budget travel. I read books by other writers. I sought the advice of others. I made the focus of my travels revolve around the question “Where can I find the best deal?”

There is still a lot I don’t know and only a fool thinks he knows it all. I was a fool in the beginning. It wasn’t until I started to think about how to really grow my blog outside travel and was being constantly rejected that first year or so that I realized the problem was that I couldn’t provide the depth of knowledge required of an “expert.”

But expert doesn’t mean guru. It simply means a focus. Your blog should have a focus – a reoccurring theme that binds everything together. That can be anything from budget travel to adventure sports to cruises to simply stories about mishaps on the road. But you need a theme. If your blog is all over the place, you’ll lose readers.

II. Learn from traditional writers
While Pam Mandel and I don’t oven see eye to eye, I completely agree with her when she says that writing is important and bloggers should focus more on writing. It doesn’t get enough publicity in our industry but being able to tell good stories is simply the price of admission. It is the least you can do. After all, no one wants to come back to a blog with awful writing. We should all work to hone our skills; all good writers do.

And this is where blogging self-entitlement hurts us. Bloggers love to think they are the wave of the future and that print writers are passé. They think it’s all about social media, forgetting the fact that anyone can go out and buy 100,000 Twitter followers. What matters is quality content (there is so much garbage all over the Internet) and by dismissing traditional writers we ignore the valuable lesson they can teach us: that to be a success you must have quality writing and a journalistic quality of depth to your stories. How often do you see 2,500 word, detailed how-to posts? Or in-depth reporting on issues that quote sources? Or stories that really put you there?

The best bloggers in any niche do that. They take the best lessons of the old media and combine it with the new — and are powerhouses because of it. Traditional writers are great at details and form and we can learn a lot from them.

I, for one, am taking two writing courses this year to improve my narrative writings. It’s not something I do a lot on my blog but when I do I want to be able to better express my experiences better. 99.999% of us are not natural writers, yet there is never a real discussion on writing or how to improve it. I’ve heard hardly anyone ever say “I’m signing up for this writing class to improve myself.”

Improve the quality of your writing and your readership will grow.

The Fix: The Business Continues

Think of yourself as a restaurant again. When people come to your place, what are you serving them?

Text links, sponsored trips, and copious press trips are not menu items. Doing those things are like saying “Ok, I need money and no one has come into the store yet so I’m going to rent out my store to the mob for a little bit.” But what happens is the mob never leaves and the customers never come.

I can trace the rise and plateau of most bloggers (because, yes, I actually keep track) to the time they started selling text links. Now, I did them when I was starting out, and I still think that they are good money. Putting ads up on the sidebar labeled as such is not a problem. Putting something at the bottom of your post once in awhile isn’t going to kill you – trust me, your audience does want you to be profitable and succeed.

But what I see is people becoming addicted to that money and simply doing that more and more because you need money to live and travel. And then I hear “Well, text links are the only way I make money, so I can’t stop.” If that is the case, maybe you shouldn’t be a blogger. Find a new industry. Get a desk job. If you really think there’s no way to make money outside links, you never will. If you just want to pay for your next flight, go nuts with links, but if your goal is to become a professional and earn a living, you are simply shooting yourself in the foot by doing this stuff.

Your audience reads you for you, not because you got some comped nights at a hotel or because they can take “cheap flights to Tenerife.” Your audience knows those are unnatural and paid-for links and they do not appreciate them. You only have to look at the traffic and subscription rate of blogs that do this heavily and observe their lack of growth to see it doesn’t lead anywhere. I get e-mails all the time telling me they used to read a lot of blogs but stopped because they became sponsored post, link, and press trip factories.

Your goal is to be the go-to travel expert, right? Someone whose writing people enjoy reading and whose content they trust. Every link on your site tells say to your reader “I trust this website and you should too.” It’s your recommendation. Readers WILL click on those links and when they see they lead to these junk sites, they are going to stop reading you. And that is why the websites that use contextual links the most are the ones that never seem to grow.

Moreover, for too many, it seems to be that press trips are the pinnacle of blogging, as if the more press trips you take, the better your blog. But when you become a large blog, you will get more trip offers than you’ll know what to do with.

But let me say something – your readers don’t care about what you do. Sure, they are invested in you because they can see themselves in you, but no one wants to read about your awesome trip that they can never take or see photos of the seven-course, 10-star meal some tourism board gave you while they are stuck in a cubicle. What they want to read is a story that allows them to envision themselves following in your footsteps. Even if they never plan on doing it, they want to at least pretend.

And so posting videos and photos of seven-course meals you received simply because you were being wined and dined isn’t going to fly with your readers – it won’t grow your audience. After all, most of us started as travelers and people read us because they wanted to follow in our footsteps and for at least a blog post, they pictured that they can.

Too often this criticism is taken as a personal insult. It’s not. I’m just saying that we should strive to be better as an industry, that we should try to play long ball, not short ball. I hear a lot of complaints about the lack of money in travel blogging, but when asked what people are doing to grow their income, they don’t have an answer. They don’t have a plan.

You need products. You need to have something on your menu. The sites that do create long term sustainable income.

Chris Guillebeau wrote this great article where he said:

“I used to run several little businesses that produced a good income, but they were completely dependent on external factors such as Google rankings or the lack of competition in my space. It was fun while it lasted, but when efficiency entered the marketplace, I had to move on.

Looking back, I can now see that I didn’t really have a business; I was merely taking advantage of an opportunity.”

He’s right. If you are not selling anything, you are simply taking advantage of a Google loophole and when that loophole closes, you are going to be left with nothing. This year I’ve completely left text links behind. I used to have some on sites I ran besides my main site but I’ve sold them to some friends. In doing so, I lost about $30,000 USD in potential revenue. That’s a lot of money — but it forced me to monetize my site in different ways and think of products and things I could offer that can be of value to my readers as well as make money. And now, I am poised to recoup that income — and more — while freeing up tons of time to focus on stuff that actually matters.

The Fix, part 3: Why are you so ugly?

I want to make two final points.

First, if you look at big blogs in any field, they all look outward. They are all multi-media publishing houses. They are more than their blog and they network with bloggers of all sorts in all fields. If you want to be a success, you need to think about what will grow your business by leaps and bounds.

Travel overlaps with so many other niches. Why don’t the solo female travelers of the world guest blog on women’s websites? You have an empowering story… pitch it! Why aren’t the older travelers writing for boomer websites and magazines? Those who volunteer around the world could work with student and other organizations! If video is your thing, link up with other video bloggers!

The best growth will come from outside travel blogging. And once you do that, everything snowballs. When people walk by a busy restaurant, they stop and peek in. They think to themselves, “This place must be good if it is full.” People will think about your blog the same way.

Secondly, back to our restaurant analogy, there is not enough focus on design. No one wants to eat in an ugly-looking restaurant. Design is costly, but you have seven seconds to appeal to someone before they move on to the next website. If people don’t like how you look, they aren’t even going to give your content a chance. Invest in your design, otherwise you are just another blog.

Travel bloggers have been great to me, and I count many of them as friends. I love watching people grow and become better and helping them when and where I can. They do the same for me. But over the last few months, I’ve watched people tread water and too many new bloggers become disenchanted about blogging when they shouldn’t be.

My blog is not perfect. I have a lot to learn, and I am constantly getting feedback from friends, readers, and experts. A few years ago, I had drinks with Ramit Sethi, author of I Will Teach You to Be Rich. He’s one of the best bloggers I know with an audience of 160,000 subscribers. He’s a genius. We were having drinks and, since at the time his website was still focused on saving money, I asked if he wanted to help promote an e-book I was working on. He peppered me with questions to which I had no answers. Then he spent a good 45 minutes ripping me and everything I did apart. (And he’s not very tactful when he does this, either). But I took that advice and made my site better. I never took it personally. He was trying to help. I took his advice, the advice of others, and I copied their best practices — and I used it all to grow my site. Now when we talk, I take great joy when he says “I like that idea, Matt!”

We all start from zero. We all have to work for it. In the beginning, we all start from the same line. There is plenty of room for us all, but if you don’t think strategically, long-term, and about the bigger picture, you will always be treading water and complaining about how hard blogging is.

Make this year the year you stop treading water and become an Olympic swimmer. Let’s make this the year we all do.

What is it? Complicated. And that’s being kind.

Youtube search uses a combination of tags and social ranking factors. For starters, everyone (and this was confirmed by google) agrees that descriptive keywords are important. Google can’t crawl your video so it relies heavily on your title, description, and tags to determine what your video is about. Therefore, be very, very descriptive. Don’t be spammy though- Google knows if your tags are relevant or not.

After that, things get much, much more complicated. While those 3 factors form a basis for your rankings and can be enough to rank you for a weird, unpopular term like maori cultural show (i’m #3), ranking for something more competitive is much different.

For something competitive, Youtube relies on a complex and shifting system involving social factors, including:

Video views
External Links
Channel Popularity
Video Responses
Rating
Comments
Favorites
Channel Subscribers
Video Age
Embedded version of the video
How many people watch until the end
That’s how a video on can out rank an older video on

In my opinion, these factors represent about 70% of what Youtube looks for in ranking on a competitive term. What are the most important factors? Well, based on my own experiments with my channel, I would say this is the order:

Rating
Favorites
Comments
Responses
Views
Video Age
Channel Popularity
Channel Subscribers
Embedded version of the video
External Links
How many people watch until the end

I rank them in this order because Youtube seems to be about social interaction with the videos so those videos that produce the most interactions will then move up the search results or get video responses and thus more views. A video with a lot of views is of course popular and should rank high but you can manipulate view counts. My video on Scottish musicians has over 17,000 views….thanks to stumble upon not Youtube.

Next I think your user popularity is important. This is Youtube version of trustrank. Just like Google automatically ranks anything high because they are a trusted website, if you have a channel with a lot of followers, high views, and lots of socially popular videos, Youtube trusts you and thus ranks your videos higher. Back in the day, I remember there was a big to do about this because youtube changed how they ranked videos and it took importance off this so a lot of people were upset. I still think this is important though. The other factors are so minor they aren’t worth going into detail over.

Here’s an example of all of this playing out. Take the search “la tomatina.” Let’s look at the top 4 plus my video:

1. Video Number #1: This by Journeymanpictures. The channel is huge with over 79,000 subscribers and a million views. The video has 61,000 views, 59 ratings, 101 comments, and 214 favorites.
2. Video Number #2: This is by brendanmcwilliams. This channel small with 6 subscribers and 120,00 views. The video has 103,000 views, 54 comments, 44 favorites, and 30 ratings.
3. Video Number #3: This is by awheewall. The channel has 9 subscribers and 130,00 views. The video has 7,000 views, 6 comments, 10 favorites, and 13 ratings.
4. Video Number #4: This video is interesting. It’s way newer than anything on the first page but it ranks #4. Look at the channel, it has 99 uploads, 1500 subscribers, and close to a million views. The video has 2000 views, 13 comments, 5 favorites and 6 ratings.

Now my video is #6 when i looked it up. My channel has 123 subscribers and about 60,000 views. The video has 15,000 views, 14 comments, 27 favorites, and 10 ratings.

So Video #1, despite having less views than #2 has the most comments, ratings, favorites and comes from a strong channel. Clearly a winner. Video #2 has the second most so easy to see why it is #2. But why do video #3 and #4 outrank me if I have more views? My theory is that video #3 is about even with ratings but the channel is popular and video is older. So this is why video age is important. It’s not the most popular video but it is an old video and just like in Google search, age is an important factor.

And #4? This is all about trustrank. That channel is very popular and well viewed so in a short time, it’s new video could rank very high with just a few comments, ratings, and favorites.

So that being said, let’s do a little quid pro quo and test this all out more. I’m really interested in getting my video on la tomatina and I want to see if a new video, like mine on the great barrier reef, can move up quickly with sudden rush of all those social factors i just talked about as it ranks nowhere now!

If you could star them, favorite them, and leave a comment on both of them, I will return the favor for videos of your choice. Let’s help each other here.

If you want to subscribe to my youtube channel, you can find it here: http://www.youtube.com/keppiezbt

My findings? It still blows.

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

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

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

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

added bonus? LP thorntree links are do-follow.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

End Rant!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What happened to the party that supports universal health care, the end of the drug war, the environment, cutting the budget, and cutting military spending? Most Americans are for it. Why don’t the democrats sack up and do what is right. Democrats are the new republicans and the republicans are the new crazy!

I love Obama and think he’s our best bet and believe he wants a lot more than he says but it’s not the republicans who stand in his way, it’s douchebags in the democratic party. The last climate bill, heralded as a major change, is 1200 pages long and has more holes in it than the ozone layer it’s trying to save!

And that’s why Barack will fail domestically. Because Congress is going stand in his way of making the real fucking change that most americans are simply too stupid to know they need and Congress is too scared and beholden to lobbyists to do it.

Obama should use his clout to force down the throat of people universal health care, legalized pot, a smaller military, better education, renewable energy, and better infrastructure. Why? Because we are living in the 21st first century, not the 20th century and every other country is leaving us behind.

We spend the most money for health care and are #37th in the world for it!! It costs 3,000 more dollars to build a car in America because of health care costs. That’s why we build them all in Mexico and Canada. We all know health care is broken but when we talk about a public/private plan like most of Europe has, people talk about a government bureaucrat telling you what health care you will have! Someone already tells me what health care I can have- it’s called my HMO. And it costs them 20% to do that when medicare spends 3% on admin costs.

And let’s face- the war on drugs failed. We can tax the hell out of pot and make a ton of money doing it! Because who gives a shit if dad tokes one up in front of the TV after a day at work and I’m not paying to keep Grandpa Joe in jail because he wanted to cure his glaucoma. Isn’t that a republican issue anyways? What happened to keeping the government out of people’s lives? Weren’t they for that? I guess Jesus got in the way of principle.

Moreover, defense secretary Gates said we spend more money than the next 11 nations combined on defense and 9 of them are our allies!! Something tells me Germany and Japan aren’t gonna bomb us anytime soon and England isn’t gonna try to take back the 13 colonies! You ever think maybe…just maybe..most people hate us because we have a base EVERYWHERE! The anti-war party is now the pro war party and the isolationist party is now “lets kill everybody with nukes party.”

And education- after teaching in America, i realized we are so far behind the rest of the world, I’d never in a million years send a kid to public school in America. We cut, cut, and cut. And we don’t fire teachers when they do an awful job. And when obama says this- who attacks him? The right? Nope. THE DEMOCRATS! Because god forbid we made each state teach the same thing and made teacher accountable when they failed or paid them for when they did good.

Seriously, being back in America the last month and watching the news as made me realize the US is truly fucked and most Americans are too busy watching MJs funeral or listening to Glenn Beck to see the forest through the trees. And when Obama says if we do this, we’ll be better off long term but right now, it’s gonna be painful- politicians and Americans whine and whine and whine because they have been told their whole lives that nothing bad will ever happen and they will never have to sacrifice. So instead we don’t fix the roads, keep farm subsidies, and put it all on the visa because god fucking forbid, America, you actually had to pay for the stuff you wanted the government to do.

And so that is why Obama will fail because, at the end of the day, Americans don’t want to sacrifice, they want a bunch of stuff they don’t want to pay for, and Congress wants to protect their piece of the pie rather than do what is right and needed. And so 4 years from now, we’ll probably elect Obama again simply b/c the republicans won’t have a better option and Americans will still wonder why life isn’t better when it’s because you won’t really let Obama do what he wants to do to help you.

Because if we did that then we might actually become a modern country that lives in the 21st century. You know sort of like Taiwan, where you can get country wide wifi, free health care, and cheap education. That America, is something we should all try to aim for!

End rant…

My location independent lifestyle affords me the ability to do what I want, when I want. So I do that and I end up spending a lot of money. Not so good. I’ve pretty much spent all that I’ve earned this year, which isn’t good. Next week, I meet with my accountant to figure out how I’m going to pay my taxes and what I am going to owe. I’m also going to figure out how to write off my travels as a business expense…I mean after all, I run travel websites and all.

Realizing that if I don’t save any money soon my trip to Europe is not gonna go as smoothly, I’ve decided to shelve some of my trips around the US while I am. I’m going use the fact I’m staying with my parents to really start saving money. No more freewheeling spending. Sticking to the budget.

I leave for Europe on August 23rd and by then I want to save 5,000 dollars as a rainy day fun. That way in case I have any dip in income, I’ll have some money. It’s also a wake up call that, maybe I should go and spend all my money. I’m at the point in life where I should have a savings. I don’t. Maybe it’s time to do one adult thing….