I love the Internet because of its transparency. I wanted to address a post made in the GBN group on Facebook that I believe is self promotional but others may or already have disagreed.

The posts format goes a little bit like this.

“Hi travel bloggers we’re new here please check out our new travel websites. Here’s one that’s a travel website and here’s another that offers advice on how to travel blog.”

Innocent enough, right? Well not if you know what you’re looking for. It’s my belief that the first website is being used as a thinly veiled attempt to detract attention from the second. After all the first one proves they are big travel fans so they probably just want to be part of the community for the right reasons?

The main purpose of the post is to build a sales/marketing funnel. To push all those people who gave their email through the funnel as many times as possible to sell something (probably their ebook), potentially an ebook or an affiliate product.

To do this you have to get people to your website, then once they are there you need to really impress them with some great engaging content (not much about travel blogging but more about marketing). Once you’ve read that great content, you’ll want some more right? Or at least want to know how to get your traffic to sky rocket out if this stratosphere? So just enter you email address, it’s free!

You won’t just receive spammy emails from signing up, “Internet marketers” don’t want to scare you away… They need to build trust. Don’t believe me? Then read this article on it from the man himself, A Wildly Profitable Timing Template for Email Marketing It’s a well trodden marketing path that’s been practiced for a long time.

So, after receiving numerous helpful emails you’ll receive another helpful one with a pitch to their email or affiliate products. In order for the travel blogger to be hooked into the claims and pitches don’t be surprised by claims of greatness including massive traffic.

Signing up for emails, work shops or training courses aren’t always a bad idea, but make sure you do so with people who have been there and done it not just some marketers wanting to make a living from travel bloggers.

Such people include:
Dave from gobackpacking.com with Travel Blog Success
Art of Travel Blogging

Nomadic Matt 

If you’re looking for help with WordPress then try Chris at RTW Labs

As for GBN, where is the moderation?

If you’re a nervous flyer then look away now.

Planes struggled to land at Bilbao’s Loiu airport in high winds on Wednesday. Some planes were unable to land and four flights were diverted due to the adverse weather.

Photo by redjar

Is Google + Building AuthorRank Data?

If it were a dead horse then this one has been flogged to the bone. Yet, has anyone ever come to a decisive conclusion?

So, who will come out on top in the future?

The winner is…

My answer is both.

The true winners will be a mixture of journalists and bloggers based on Google’s AuthorRank.

The lines are blurring between bloggers and journalists and Google’s AuthorRank could be the deciding factor between who is successful and who struggles to survive. The internet is a level playing field open to pretty much anyone, but who decides who’s a good writer and who isn’t?

Well, potentially Google.

Authorship tagging

So you’ve implemented your authorship tagging on your travel site and it’s pretty cool to get your Google + profile photo appearing next to your article, right? Well, this could just be the tip of the iceberg.

If you scratch beneath the surface you’ll realise that enabling your profile photo to appear in the search results is actually more of a by-product of the overall goal.

Authorship tagging in Google results

The idea is that AuthorRank will be a gauge of your reputation as a content creator and will have an impact on the ranking of  search results.

AuthorRank

Google is looking to identify articles written by an author as well as the level of the articles engagement and popularity. This is done via Google + shares, plus ones and potentially comments. There are also rumours via a patent that Google is looking to release website commentating functionality with the likely goal being to measure article engagement.

All this information can be gathered to produce AuthorRank and Google has a patent on it.

Walled Gardens and Google +

With the authorship tagging Google can identify the author of a piece of content, so in theory they could actually still compile AuthorRank without Google + data but with data from other social networks such as Facebook and twitter.

As both these social media networks won’t allow Google to access their data (they are so-called “walled gardens”) Google has little choice but to turn to Google + to determine what content is engaging people.

This is why building an audience and engagement via Google + early on could prove to be a huge head start despite comments by some in the travel community suggesting their audience isn’t on Google +. One thing is for sure, their audience is on Google search.

At this point in time Facebook, Twitter and Pinterest will have little effect on influencing AuthorRank unless they open up their content to search indexers. A move that is highly unlikely.

The theory is that Google will start to use AuthorRank as a metric along side page rank to determine if a piece of content will rank well. With Googles authorship tagging, writers can write for any website yet the content is still attributed to them.

No matter whether you are a top blogger or a great journalist, potentially you could find yourself getting work based on your AuthorRank.

What will it all mean?

So what does this mean for bloggers? To build good AuthorRank will require producing content that engages people and moves people to share, comment and plus 1. Potentially it could see the slow death of mundane poorly written content and top ten lists as only the most captivating and best quality will drive traffic.

What will it mean for journalists? Most likely that they will need to be involved in social media and be aware of what types of content are driving engagement. It will mean that journalists can build their own online reputation (AuthorRank) from their own blog or other websites.

Overall it will mean that there is no journalist/blogger divide, just those that have good AuthorRank and those that don’t. The writers that produce great engaging content will float to the top.

Perhaps AuthorRank is the answer both journalists and top bloggers have been hoping for?

Useful Articles:

- Author Rank

- How Authorship (and Google+) Will Change Linkbuilding

Real Time Foursquare Check-ins

Tomorrow I’m off to visit Poland.

It’s a country I’ve never been to so I’m extra excited at having the opportunity to see what the country has to offer.

Poland is one of the host nations for the  2012 UEFA European Football Championship (the other host is Ukraine) so it’ll be an opportunity to see what the country offers football fans besides the competition itself.

A Single Poland Trip Hub Page

I won’t just be posting the articles about the destination a week after the trip or simply tweeting here and there or adding the odd photo to Instagram.

I’ll be supplying coverage from our Poland real-time hub page where you’ll be able to follow when and where I check-in to on Foursquare with Google maps, view photos (from Instagram) of where I am and follow my Twitter coverage. All from one place.

Whether I’m sight-seeing around a crazy old town bustling market or sampling the local vodka, all the highlights will be all in one place.

You’ll also be able to comment or tweet at me whilst out in Poland, I’ll be awaiting feedback.

Check out our coverage from a weekend trip to York in England for an example.

Stay tuned to our twitter feed or even our home page as our real-time coverage will start early on Friday 13th April 2012 until 17th April 2012.

Our trip has been organised the Polish National Tourism.

Real-Time pages updates

Our Real-Time blogging pages are still in beta and we’re slowly making enhancements. Recently we’ve added the following:

- Location labels of Foursquare check-ins to Instagram Photos 

Now you’ll know (if we choose to reveal) exactly where the Instagram photo was taken.

- Foursquare icons

We’ve added Foursquare icons to our check-ins so that it’s easy to identify what type of place we’ve check-in to.

- Instagram Photos

We’ve increased the limit of the number of Instagram photos displayed on the page and added text from Instagram photos to display when you hover over the photo.

- Google Maps view follows the trip

We’ve set the centre view of the map to be the latest check-in. This allows you to easily view where we are in real-time, for example our check-in at London Heathrow. You wouldn’t be able to see this without zooming out as the centre was previously set on the destination, Poland for example.

If you are going traveling and would like the opportunity to cover a trip this way in real-time, drop us an email at editor@travmonkey.com.

Real-Time Foursquare Check-Ins

It has been something that had been bugging me for a while, being on a press trip or even just on holiday and tweeting, checking in yet not everyone was able to visualise the trip.

Non techie people that I knew just either weren’t on twitter or just couldn’t keep up with the commentary. People do find it difficult to visualise the trip as a whole and there was no way of getting a high level overview of the what has gone on.

This is usually why when developing anything for the web you really should put yourselves in your readers shoes, in reality not everyone is that savvy with social media platforms such as Twitter,  Foursquare, Instagram etc.

Sometimes we have to simplify things for people.

Twitter limitations

Tweeting on a hashtag is useful but not everyone follows and scrolls through the entire feed, a more likely scenario is that users pick up on the odd tweet coming through without bring able to visualise the trip as a whole.

Foursquare check ins are great but again how do people get an easy overview of where you’ve been on that trip?

Instagram Photos in Real-Time

The idea

It was only recently that I started to experiment with Instagram, having just purchased a new iPhone. I was pretty impressed with the apps ability to produce some stunning visuals with very little effort and I knew that it was the perfect travel app.

I began experimenting with instagram pages but soon realised that to give a general overview in real time Foursquare and twitter integration was needed. Our real-time pages bring together three slightly disjointed tools to paint an overall real-time picture of a trip that’s not only quite exciting for the traveler but also intriguing for the readers.

Twitter Hashtag

The Real-Time concept

For example, if you’re tweeting that you’ve eaten something amazing, let’s see an awesome Instagram photo, some tweets of your environment and lets actually see where you are too and in real-time on the same page.

Our real time pages bring together three slightly disjointed tools to paint an overall real time picture of a trip that’s not only quite exciting for the traveler but also intriguing for the readers

Better Coverage

This real-time concept gives a extra dimensions to a trip,  adds more engaging content and coverage for a tourist board or travel company. This is valuable coverage that exposes the great work that travel bloggers are already doing on their travels and presents it in a digestible way for readers.

Potentially the real-time coverage can be generated by a group rather than just one individual, these pages can present the central landing page for a press trip where all coverage and content can be found.

Take a look at our first test of real time blogging when I tested it out in York, England.

You Too Can Blog in Real-Time

So your not that impressed? The average time on this real-time landing page was 19 minutes, quite a high figure especially considering it had over 350 page views.

On TravMonkey.com we are always looking to improve, to try new things and this is one if them. We are currently allowing existing users to sign up to try real time blogging on their travels, those that aren’t an existing user can express their interest by emailing editor@travmonkey.com.

City Break in York, England in Real-Time - from March 30th 2012 to April 1st 2012.

Making Money Travel Blogging?

Like moths to a flame or magpies to shiny things, people are drawn to claims of money-making.

Especially when it involves something they already have a passion for, isn’t that everyone’s dream?

Treating it like a business

Travel blogging is no different. It seems that people are scrambling to make money and treat travel blogging like a business.

These ideas that have a canny resemblance of the claims that originally sprouted from money-making blogs, but is it all just a mirage?

Many successful money making blogs are eventually self fulfilling in that those that claim to be making stupid amounts of money eventually gain lots of dedicated followers based on the claim, whether or not it was true in the first place.

How do you make money?

Sadly these days it often seems like the first question people ask you at travel blogging events, “how do you make money?”, “do you do this full-time?”. The truth is, I don’t do it full-time and I don’t do it for the money. I do it for the passion for travel and technology, that is why I’ll still be doing it on some form on 10 years time. If you are one of those looking to make money, choose something that you have real expertise in and that you have niche knowledge of, travel isn’t it, travel has zero barriers to entry.

Dreaded back links argument

I’m not going to talk about the ethics of buying or selling back links but more about why these practices aren’t a good idea if, like many have stated, you are going to treat your blog as a business. The practice violates search engines rules and although it’s not illegal or necessarily unethical it can be potentially damaging to your website.

Recently I’ve noticed many travel bloggers looking to make money from links in sidebars, homepages as they attempt to “monitise” their blogs to make money and live the dream life of blogging for a living.

If travel bloggers should be treating their blogs as a business then surely selling SEO back links is a very poor long-term business strategy? Yes you many make some money, but in the process you degrade your website not just for users but in terms of search.

Selling back links is a vulnerable revenue stream and as search engines evolve you could see the revenue from these links disappear over night. Especially if Google and other search engines devalue back links and rely on other signal more such as social. Those reliant on the back link trade will be left with no areas revenue.

Google’s 2007 pagerank update

Lets look back at the basis for this argument. Back in 2007 Google released an update that targeted sites that were selling links, many sites were hit, including some major publishers. Although website owners had previously been warned many continued to sell links, whether or not they didn’t believe the warnings or perhaps the revenue stream was just too tempting to shut down. Either way their revenue was hit hard.

Over optimisation warning

Fast forward 5 years and there’s a warning from Google’s  Matt Cutts (head of Google’s Webspam team) about “over optimising” your site.

Here’s a snippet from Rob Snell’s transcription of the entire session:

“normally we don’t sort of pre-announce changes, but there is something that we’ve been working on in the last few months. And hopefully, in the next couple months or so, in the coming weeks, we hope to release it.

And the idea is basically to try and level the playing ground a little bit. So all those people who have sort of been doing, for lack of a better word, “over optimization” or “overly” doing their SEO, compared to the people who are just making great content and trying to make a fantastic site, we want to sort of make that playing field a little bit more level.”

Whether or not Google will target those buying or even selling links is anyone’s guess but there’s no doubt that they could be a potential target.

There has also been some chatter in the travel blogging community recently about link buyers pulling paid links and in some cases asking website owners to apply “nofollow” tags to the links to ensure they don’t pass page-rank or look like links for the purpose of boosting rankings. Is this an emerging pattern? Has something spooked these link builders? Was it the over optimisation warning and echos of the 2007 update? Or maybe just a coincidence?

Either way it highlights that you aren’t actually treating you blog as a business by solely relying on selling links.

Creating real value

Most savvy established bloggers have moved beyond simply selling paid links to sell a product from their site. Whether it’s selling ebooks, a subscription product, app, magazine or even publishing your own book, if you want to create real long-term revenue streams as a travel blogger you have to think beyond selling links.

Interesting Resources

How Dare You Tell Me To NoFollow My Sponsored Links

Google’s stance on paid links

Photo by 401K

We’re always looking for quality content on TravMonkey.com, it’s been one of the sites core values for along time now.

Last week we launched our travel photography section and we’re looking for top quality submissions in the form of your photographs and also photography tips based articles.

Your profile instagram integration

As well as the addition of the travel photography section we’ve also introduced a new beta Instagram feature.

You can now display your instagram photo feed on your profile page so no matter where you are in the world your TravMonkey profile page can display those wonderful sights and scenes from your travels.

You can simply edit your profile and populate the “Instagram Username” field with your username, leave it blank if you don’t wish to display your feed. Here’s my own profile with my instagram feed:

TravMonkeys Profile with Instagram Feed

As with most aspects and functionality on TravMonkey.com the photography section and profile pages will be constantly evolving and improving, we’ll be adding features and responding to feedback from our contributors and readers.

For now we hope you find our changes useful and enjoy the photos that have been contributed so far. If not, feel free to send us your feedback.

Travel photo contributions

If you wish to submit a photography tips article you can register for a profile and submit via the site. If you wish to contribute your photos, we consider top quality photos (DSLR quality) that are 940px in width. Contact editor@travmonkey.com if you wish to submit a photo article.

It feels like a bubble when bloggers with sites that are clearly in need of attention in terms of content and design are preaching at you about how to be a blogger and Facebook groups are full of claims of how much traffic people get.

There’s a trend of bloggers wearing shirts, smart trousers in an attempt to professionalise something that has no barrier to entry.

Travel bloggers are more knowledgeable?

This wouldn’t be so bad if PR’s or tourist boards really knew how to differentiate. Unfortunately they don’t, because as of writing travel bloggers are more knowledgeable about the subject than those that are engaging with them. This is a dangerous thing.

Not only for those who promote destinations, but for those that are producing great websites and superb content. After all why should those who shout the loudest yet not put the hard work into their website be seen as something that can bring value? Ultimately they won’t.

Unfortunately this could undermine those who have put in the hard work over a number of years as the industry figures out that their investment wasn’t actually worthwhile after all.

Content will always be king

There are those riding the crest of the wave without the substance, yet making it seem like they have a valuable product. Promoting yourself in this manner will mean that sooner or later you are going to need to balance the level of promotion with the quality of your product.

As time passes, PR’s and companies will become more savvy and the act of smoke and mirrors won’t quite cut it. Those that have worked so hard for so long will be left doing what they’ve always done, producing great things, being passionate and keeping a level head when surrounded by hype.

After all, it’s the shallow streams that make the most noise.

Two TravMonkey.com writers are in contention to be sent to Barcelona as part of EasyJet’s inaugural flight to Barcelona trip.

If you’ve read either Frankie Thompson’s or Neil Barnes’s websites and articles, you’ll know that they have a real passion for travel and would do a fantastic job with their coverage for EasyJet.

They need your votes (via twitter) in the next 48 hours (10am UK time, 15 March 2012), so get on Twitter and give them a tweet!

The Writers

Here’s the details of our two talented travel bloggers, feel free to take a look at the Twitter feeds, websites and profiles on TravMonkey.com.

Frankie Thompson

http://www.asthebirdfliesblog.com/

@bushbirdie

Checkout Frankie’s articles on TravMonkey.com

Neil Barnes

 http://www.backpacksandbunkbeds.co.uk/

@packsandbunks

Checkout Neil’s articles on TravMonkey.com

They Need Your Vote

First of all, they need your vote! You can vote by using the following statement on Twitter:

- To vote for Frankie Thompson:

Tweet

I am voting for @bushbirdie in the @easyJet #eJblogger trip to Barcelona http://bit.ly/zG0ZGe

- To vote for Neil Barnes:

Tweet

I am voting for @packsandbunks in the @easyJet #eJblogger trip to Barcelona http://bit.ly/zG0ZGe

*Please note, retweets won’t count only original tweets will be counted as votes.

It would be great to have your support for two very talented and passionate TravMonkey.com travel writers.

Good luck!

How does your site rank in Google?

Our top travel sites in Google have been published for February (they are always a month behind the current month).

We’ve just published our updated results for the Top Travel Blogs in google and the Top Non-Independent Travel sites.

We released the top travel blog results on Google + first so don’t forget to follow us there to get updates on the results on a monthly basis.

Unfortunately due to corrupt data we can not compare this months results to those of last months. If you would like your blog or travel site to feature next month drop us an email at editor@travmonkey.com.

For updates to these rankings subscribe via the following channels:

Blog RSS Feed

Google +

Twitter

Facebook

A TravMonkey article with right hand sidebar take-away data

It’s easy to forget when you’ve just been slaving over a blog post that for the user it’s important that the article also contains useful take-away details.

It’s a good idea to include any helpful websites and resources that relate to the topic you’re talking about. Details such as opening times, prices, currency, websites, resources and useful things to note all improve the quality of the overall article. This take-away data improves the overall usefulness and relevancy of your post for the user.

Wikipedia is Useful

A recent example of this that was highlighted was Wikipedia. Wikipedia is a perfect example of how to focus a page around a particular topic. Their pages supply important data as well as useful links to related content.

I’m not saying you should turn your website into Wikipedia but it’s useful to note why their pages rank well and also why users find them particularly useful.

It’s important to remember to include extra relevant information, resources and links with the articles you are publishing. If you aren’t then you’re missing an opportunity to rank well and to give users the information they are often looking for.

Articles should be focused, the heading and page title should reflect the body of text and if possible some sidebars items should be relevant to the article being viewed. Not only does this help in search engine terms but for users who have reached this page from search it supplies them with information and navigational options.

Quality Raters

As far back as 2005 Google has been employing a worldwide focus group to review its search results and determine the quality of the pages that rank well in its search. Those involved in the focus group are known as Quality Raters. SearchEngineLand.com recently had an intriguing interview with a Google quality rater that gives a good insight into what they and Google are looking for to rank a web page well.

The most interesting aspect of this interviews was the quality rater revealing a test they had to take in order to get the job. In the test they had to rate search results based on Vital, Useful, Relevant and Off-Topic or Useless.

Take-away Travel Data

It’s important to note that Google actually use a human element to improve their search results and for me means that I should be aiming to provide the best possible page when users land on it. I try to hit the “Useful” catagory with my posts and on occasions, “vital”. This reenforces for me that a post shouldn’t simply rely on having text describing an event or place but I should take it a step further and provide take-away travel data in order for the user to find the post “useful”.

It’s this take-away data that could be the difference between your post being “useful” or just “relevant”, or in other words ranking on page one of Google or just ranking somewhere on page two onwards.

We’re always looking at ways to improve TravMonkey.com, not only for our users but for our writers too.

We’ve made some minor updates to the site to improve the overall experience.

Bio Update

We’ve added a “Bio” profile field for our writers so that they have the opportunity to give a brief overview of who they are and what they do. This was previously the “about us” field.

Bio Website Icon Update

About Us Extended on Profile

The “about us” field has been updated so that writers can add up to 1000 characters of text about themselves on their profile page. Splitting these two fields frees the writers from being limited to a small number of characters that was being used both at the bottom of the authors articles in the bio and also on their profile page.

Website Icons

Travel Links Website Icon

We’ve also added a home icon to our writers “Bio” section so that users can visit their main website directly from the article rather than only through the profile page. Writers can still add their Facebook, Twitter and Google + options to the “Bio” section by populating them. We’ve replicated the home icon for the writers websites on their profile page too.

Twitter Button Removal

We’ve removed the twitter button with follower count from the “Bio” in favour of the twitter icon for consistency.

Facebook Login Removed

We’ve removed the “login with Facebook” option to discourage spammy accounts and users who don’t fully populate their profiles.

We also adding one or two measures to speed up the site so it should be running pretty quickly.

Do have any feedback about TravMonkey.com? Let us know by leaving a comment below.

So I was watching the video Men Who Jump Off Mountains Part 2 on Travelllll.com a few days ago.

It’s pretty breathtaking and impressively shot using GoPro cameras and DLSR’s.

It did cross my mind just how amazing it would to actually do this, watching the video it looks so smooth and graceful. Well any thoughts of taking up wing suit flying quickly evaporated after watching this accident.

Make sure you watch the video right until the end.

On Saturday 25th of February I’m off to Chamonix on a snowboarding press trip.

I was last in Chamonix three years ago attempting to improve my snowboarding but my strongest memory is of three of us rodeoing up the button lift before someone plugged the emergency stop.

I may be a little rusty, but I’m really looking forward to pushing my skills to the next level and with a just little under a week on the slopes it should be the perfect opportunity.

The snow trip is being organised by Travelllll.com and Expedia and the team consists of Lezaan Roos from Travelllll.com plus Lea Hajner and Peter Anegg from tripwolf.com. We used Expedia’s handy new Facebook app, Snow Companion to plan as well as  vote on preferred destinations and accommodation.

We’ll be in Chamonix for a week and you can follow all action on the hashtag #ExpediaSnow, I’ll be using this hashtag on Google + too.

Photo by  Maria G.I.

Have you been to Chamonix or are you a regular? Have you got any tips for us? Places to drink and eat etc?

Google seems to be ramping up their efforts to attract publishers to Google +.

Last night Chris Richardson (theaussienomad.com) tipped me off with information that his authorship tagging on his blog was finally being shown on Google’s SERP (Search Engine Results Page). Having previously verified my own and other travel writers (on TravMonkey.com) articles via Google’s rich snippet mark up testing tool I was interested in seeing whether our own articles had the authors profile photo and information alongside them in the SERPs.

Sure enough there it was, but unlike Chris’s profile information mine also had information about how many people had circled me on Google +. The only conclusion we could reach is that I’m currently more active on Google + than Chris.

Authorship Tag Rolled Out To A Wider Audience?

The authorship tag has been around for a while but this is the first time I’ve noticed my own profile consistently appearing as well as fellow travel bloggers profiles. I was also surprised to see information about how many people have circled me in Google +, perhaps my efforts are baring fruit already. It will be interesting to monitor authorship stats via Google webmaster tools to see exactly what impact this has on traffic.

Google + Profile in Search Results

In the search for “how to travel the world” you can see my profile appearing next to the result. Although Matador Network is ranking no.1 the profile photo on TravMonkey’s result draws attention and hints at authority, this is likely to make click through rate higher.

Google Profile Search

In the US version of Google (Google.com) users are also presented with a “more from Paul Dow” link that performs an profile search. You can test out Google’s profile search for yourself.

It all indicates that Google seems to be slowly turning the screw, pulling users into Google +. After all, if other results in the SERPs have a profile photo and information about the author, their click through rate is likely to be higher.

I also checked to see if other authors from our site had been included in the search results but they hadn’t as of yet.

Google’s advantage lies in the power of their web search and numerous products available from which to leverage. Engaging, building authority and audience in Google + has a direct impact on your presence on the worlds most popular website. Other social platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest etc don’t have this power at their disposal.

It’s only a matter of time before you can’t afford to ignore it in favour of social networks with less external reach.

*Update

After having a look into Google Webmaster tools it seems that my authorship tag was picked up on the 10/02/2012.

Here you can circle TravMonkey.com and Editor Paul Dow on Google + for regular updates.

Has your authorship information appeared in Google’s search results yet?

Put yourselves in your audiences shoes.

This is the sound bite I get from my first session at social media week, a extremely interesting and effective session about “Social Media for Events” hosted by Like Minds.

Registered for an event, or am I?

Social media week in London had got off to a good start, that was until I got into the office and checked my email. Apparently the session “Social media workflow for news organisations and media outlets” was over subscribed so an email politely tells me to not bother turning up that very same evening despite being signed up and confirmed. Charming, why have I been accepted as attending, why when I revisit the event page does it say “attending”?

I’ve even left my gym kit a home safe in the knowledge that come six o’clock I’ll be attending his event. Well there’s that thought shattered. I don’t mind the event being over subscribed but you shouldn’t give people the impression that they are attending, when in fact they maybe not. Imagine if I’d traveled to London just for social media week to find out that actually the key events I thought I had committed to, hadn’t committed to me. It’s unprofessional and makes the socials media mantras being preached in event rooms seem hollow, after all you should practice what you preach. Is social media week listening to its audience?

Communication and User Journey #fail

I could live with the one event telling me extremely late in the day that despite what I had planned, I was not attending. Fine, it sometimes happens. But this wasn’t the only case (I only signed up to 3 events), the “Google / Google+ What’s going on and how it impacts your business!” event led to much confusion. I was mostly confused as to how professionals in social media and marketing came up with such a convoluted registering system?

Firstly, registering on the social media week website was not enough, you had to scroll all the way down to the bottom of the page. Then find a linkedin link, login in, read some more confusing text, find the next link (amongst the choice of two) then click that before registering. Confusing? That’s just the start of it. Obviously no one has ever sent these people on a conversion optimisation course.

Then I received an email about the event, leaving me bemused.

“Please note that although you have clicked “Attend” button on Social Media Week’s website, this is fact is not an acceptance of your attendance, “

Ok that’s fine, I’ve already followed the long winded system of navigating around linkedin to register…

“Therefore, because you have NOT registered on LinkedIn and have not received a confirmation from myself, I regret to share that you cannot simply turn up due to the mentioned health and safety reasons. “

Erm, well I did register on LinkedIn? But I didn’t received a confirmation from you?

This poorly executed registering process left me confused to whether I was actually registered or not? In the end I actually didn’t attend. Only one out of the three events I registered for went smoothly, the other two failed in their execution. It left me a little disillusioned with both social media week and the companies involved in the particular events, in the end I gave up on social media week.

Simple Unified Registering System

Having said that those involved in the Social Media for Events (Like Minds) did a great job, provided a very interesting pannel discussion and useful insights for anyone at any level of expertise in social media. The registering system worked as it was supposed to, click the attend button and be confirmed – if there are still places available.

In future, social media week should use a unified event system for registering attendance that has to be followed by event hosts. No one wants to click on numerous links to different web pages/sites to confirm attendance, especially not to find out later via email that you were not in fact confirmed because you didn’t receive an extra email. Also, nobody wants to have their attendance to an event confirmed only to be cancelled the morning on the day of the event, why confirm a place in the first instance?

One of the key points I took from social media week was to put yourselves in your audiences shoes. Some companies hosting events at social media week have failed to do so.

Photo by br1dotcom

Google real-time Analytics

What has happened to me? I feel a nervous twitch. I feel like I’m missing something, for two seconds I can’t remember what it is. It’s like that strange feeling when you know you got something you have to do but you can’t quite remember what it is. Then I realise, it’s the internet. My phone’s battery has died, it’s left me stranded on my own to ponder, check out my environment, in all honesty i feel a little lost.

I’m stood on a speeding commuter train heading out of London, internet-less. I’ve become so accustomed to being online all day, every day that I feel a little bit weird without my smart phone crutch. Maybe my brains starting to become wired a different way, looking to monitor, survey, respond every few minutes.

Notification Society

It’s a testament to the real-time nature of the Internet that being offline for longer than a day seems like I’ve missed out on so much. I even take my iPad to meetings these days as I’ve felt that coming back from a hours meeting means my inbox must be overflowing or 1000′s of notifications and tweets have come my way.

I’m known for having more tabs open on my browser than anyone can possibly make use of, but I’m switching, monitoring and responding. Such is the way of anyone using analytics or social media tools today. Twitter, Facebook, Google +, pInterest, two email accounts and Google analytics real-time all baying for attention and flashing with notifications.

Maybe the way we operate is changing? Changing into an online validation society? Nobody has ever really wanted to login to an empty inbox unless it’s a work email but now we don’t need to keep logging in as notifications flash up on iPads and android tablets or numbers update on social network browser tabs to let us know that they need our attention.

Craving that response

We crave the notification, we update our statuses and upload our photos for social validation via comments and likes/plus 1′s. We tweet and hope for responses, after all if no one responds you feel the opposite to when they do. You keep checking, over and over, surely someone will respond…?

When someone does reply you feel validated and get a minor buzz that’ll keep you posting and keep you checking. Google real-time analytics take things the next level as you monitor in real time the effects of your tweets. Why did no one click through to your website? You monitor users finding your website via keyword searches in search engines. It’s all in real-time and very addictive.

I’m in a routine of getting up and checking my notifications every morning, I can’t really remember what life was like without this constant monitoring. What was it like when you didn’t have that thought in your mind when you wake up that you had to do something, had to respond or check to something? Were we less stressed? What effect is this having on our attention span?

Can we leave it behind?

After all this distraction in our lives shouldn’t travel be the best outlet of escapism to detox from the constant pressure to respond, check and monitor?

I’ve always been a believer in leaving technology behind when traveling, I even published an article about it – should I take my laptop traveling? Since then technology has evolved quite drastically, perhaps if I was to write the same article now I would be about smart phones and tablets rather than solely laptops.

Traveling should be about the experience but our constant need to being connected 24-7 could be damaging part of the beauty of traveling. Before I left for a two year wander around the globe I really wanted to get away from the constant connection to technology, at the time it was the constant staring at a computer screen all day and my mobile phone that I wanted to run away from. I wanted to travel to remote places knowing that in a way I was completely on my own with no connections, even if it was only for a week or two. There was a great sense of freedom.

Sometimes I do wonder how people travel yet seem to be online for more than 50% of the trip? Does this not degrade the travel experience to be sat behind a laptop screen or sat huddled in an Internet cafe when you should be out taking in the offline world? After all you travel so far to get there, it seems strange to hunt down WiFi just to get some social online validation.

Obviously some people are required to carry technology and to be online whilst they travel. Perhaps they earn a living by doing so. For these people there is little choice but for those traveling for leisure it does seem like there is a real opportunity to have a detox from their Internet intensive lives.

Technology is a wonderful tool, it helps us to communicate, educate, network, socialise and to have a voice, but how much is too much?

Would it hurt that much to leave it all behind you when you travel?

How does your site rank in Google?

After a slight delay we’ve finally compiled our list of top travel blogs in Google.

The latest results are split independent travel blogs and non-independent travel sites (coming soon).

The results work like this: We take the estimated traffic from keywords a site ranks in the top 20 of Google US or Google UK then rank this figure against other travel sites. It’s a useful guide to how well sites perform in these search engines.

If a particular site doesn’t appear it could be because there is a lack of data or perhaps the site is too new. We also can’t include all websites that use a sub-domain as traffic for the whole domain is taken into account.

We are working on our non-independent travel site rankings and they will be published very soon.

- Top Travel Sites in Google

Pinterest an early revenue generator

Pinterest, seemingly everyone’s favourite social network at the moment has already found a way to monetise its users submissions.

I first ran across an article on LLSocial.com but it looks like some bloggers were discussing the issue in January.

Pinterest will modify links from your pins  if they point to ecommerce sites that have an affiliate program associated with them.

It uses a service called skimlinks that will automatically add affiliate links to links where they point to a product that has an associated affiliate program. These links contain Pinterests own ID, so drive affiliate revenue back to them.

GalavantMedia raised a good point on Twitter highlighting that if you’re not paying for something such as Facebook, Google etc then you are the product. It’s interesting to note a relatively new social media platform such as Pinterest attempting to drive revenue so early on whilst other recent social media sites like Google + refrain from doing.

“GalavantMedia
@traceyctt @TravMonkey Always remember: if you’re not paying, you’re the product. See also Facebook, Google.”

Some bloggers have commented that the lack of transparency has left a bitter taste in the mouth, whilst other commentators really don’t see the issue with making money in an non intrusive manner.

Source : llsocial.com

What do you think? Did you know this was happening?

Do you care?

Do you know the top things to do in Barcelona?

Many bloggers have focused criticism on certain types of articles that they believe have been done to death. Produced over and over again.

The discussion has often been focused on articles such as “things to do in…” a city, place or country, with the point being made that it’s yet another article covering the same topic.

An overview of sights

I actually think these articles are a really good starting point for readers. They give a great general overview of the main sights to see in a place. Whilst these articles don’t need to go into huge amounts of detail, they don’t need to because if I am really interested in a certain aspect I can do more research – its beauty is in its simplicity.

Negative responses from travel bloggers on the lack of originality or creativity of these articles doesn’t really matter because our own target audience aren’t travel bloggers. When a average user searches for ” things to do in Barcelona” they will often find themselves on our website where we hope to supply them with a quick overview of some key sights. Users searching for this information don’t want a whimsical tail of how enchanting I found Barcelona. We are giving our readers what they want based on search terms and analytics data.

Digestible travel information

Of course we do also publish more feature diary entry articles but it should not be forgotten that articles such as “the top 10 things to do in…” serve a purpose if executed in the right manner. The article should be as useful as possible to the user without overloading them with information, this could include supplying links to other pieces of relevant content on and off your site. The focus should be on thinking how useful the piece of content would be for someone who have just discovered it by searching or clicking on the articles title.

The titles themselves are pretty basic but straight forward. Users searching via search engines are much more likely to search for “things to do in Barcelona” than “enchanting sights that I found in Spain’s second city” for example. Once they reach the page you don’t want to display a mass of text as it’s not as digestible as breaking the content into logical headings or a list of sights to see.

As heading text is also often used as the anchor text for links, having a descriptive an obvious heading is beneficial in terms of usability for those clicking upon links. Users then land on a page with relevant information rather than something they didn’t want to consume. It also helps in search engine terms as they attempt to understand via the anchor text what an article is all about, titling an article in a less descriptive (perhaps even print way) is less helpful for both users and search engines.

Focus on your audience

When I was away at the new year I used a basic, concise, helpful article on things to do in Burge. It did exactly what I wanted, it gave me a simple overview and starting point of sights to see. This is all I wanted from such an article, it proved useful and I’d definitely use the website again.

In my early blogging days I would blog about absolutely anything, but I soon realised that my audience were looking to consume something that was much more useful. This change in focus resulted in a much more successful and above all useful resource for my target audience.

Firstly define your audience and cater to their needs. Don’t just write for other bloggers unless that is your target audience, monitor you analytics and ensure you give your users what they want even if that is another ” things to do in..” article.

We’ve published many an article on things to do when traveling to different places, our list follows below. If you would like to submit an article on things to do in a city you have traveled to or even perhaps lived, please see our write for us section.

Things to do in London

Things to do in Berlin

Things to see and do in Singapore

Things to do in Amsterdam

Things to do in Dublin

Things to do in Madrid

Things to do in Moscow

Top things to do in Barcelona

Things to do in Paris

Things to do in Beijing

Things to do in Buenos Aires

Things to do in Bangkok

Things to do in New York

Things to do in Barcelona

Things to do in Manchester

8 Reasons to visit Romania

Photo by ctsnow