Garaphernalia 6.0

I often tell people the story of how I started to take my blog seriously back in December 2007 when I was in Hong Kong.

If that was my great blogging awakening then I’m currently undergoing my second great awakening.

The first step in this is creating an editorial calendar. So far everything has been sort of willy-nilly as far as what I post when. By creating a calendar I’ll know exactly what and when something will be going online. I have an idea what I’ll be doing every day of the week now, which is actually a rather nice feeling. I’m starting the posting schedule on Monday. Here is my tentative lineup:

Monday: Links and misc
Tuesday: Gear
Wednesday: Destintation
Thursday: Commentary
Friday: Photography
Saturday: Podcast
Sunday: Other travelers

I have more than enough destination articles to stay busy forever. Gear and photography is something I’ve done in the past, but not extensively. Nonetheless, a lot of people enjoy reading those posts.

Commentary will be almost anything that isn’t about blogging. I might occasionally do an article on it, but no more than maybe once or twice a year.

I’m also going to be opening up the site a bit more allowing some guest posting, but only for particular subjects. I will never take unsolicited guest posts from people just for SEO.

I’m also setting a goal and limit of editing 500 photos a day. Maybe less. I have 5,800 in my queue right now and I think it will be better if I go through them slowly rather than doing them all at once.

Finally, I’m close to finalizing my guest post strategy for August and September. Hopefully, everyone will be sick of seeing me soon

As far as traffic goals, I’m setting a rather short term goal: I’m going to increase the total number of visits to my site by 50% in August. That seems like an enormous one month jump in traffic, but I think I can do it by just writing and not doing anything special. My organic rate is pretty high and I think I can boost that by just giving people a reason to read something.

I’m also looking to boost subscribers by 2,000 in August. That might be a bit harder, but we’ll see. Half that number would be acceptable.

I’m also looking to feature other travelers on my site ever Sunday. This something I started earlier in the year but never kept up with. I’m not looking to feature travel bloggers per se, but that is obviously a big group of people. If you have an interesting story and would like to be featured, let me know.

A few weeks ago I received an email from the San Antonio Tourism board to help promote a contest they were running. They only thing they were offering was all the incredible traffic I’d be getting from them

Needless to say, I declined.

I’ve seen this song and dance before and I knew exactly what was going to happen. In a few weeks a bunch of travel blogs were going to start promoting this contest. Sure enough, that is exactly what happened. I’ve seen this happen with consumer electronic companies, hotels and other tourism boards. They have a list of travel blogs and work their way down the list until they find enough people who are willing to do whatever they want for free.

If you are running promotions for companies with nothing more than a vague promise of “traffic” or “exposure” then quite simply you don’t deserve to make money from your blog.

Think about the following:

1. If they had the amount of traffic they are promising, they wouldn’t need you. Think about it.
2. If a dozen other blogs are taking part in the same program, then whatever benefits they can bring to the table will be diluted by a factor of 12.
3. By doing promotions for free, you are setting your market rate. That rate is zero. You are worth zero.

Here are a few rules to consider when working with companies who want something from you:

1. Don’t be afraid to say no. You aren’t losing out on anything if you don’t do something for free. If anything, by holding out you are increasing your long term value and not wasting your time. This is a marathon, not a sprint.
2. Don’t believe promises of traffic. Unless it is a media company you are talking to, they almost certainly can’t deliver you traffic.
3. Demand exclusivity. Why would you want to do something that a dozen other bloggers are doing? I always ask to see who else they are talking to. Ideally I want to be the only one they work with, or if not, it should be a very small number. If they are contacting everyone, there is no point in participating. You don’t get ahead by being part of the pack.
4. ALWAY get something in return. Even if it isn’t money, get a trip or something. Do NOTHING without some sort compensation.
5. Don’t fear your pricing. Everyone is worried about pricing themselves too high and not getting anything. Stop worrying about it. There are a ton of companies in the world and there will be another. It is better to have a company pass on you because you are too expensive than to undersell yourself.
6. Don’t apologize. It isn’t greedy to ask for something in exchange for what you are bringing to the table. It IS greed to ask people to do something for free. If they say they have no budget, just tell them how sorry you are that they got stuck on a doomed account.

No matter how big your blog or what size your audience, there is no reason to ever provide promotion to a company or organization for free.

Almost one year ago my father passed away.

Since then my blog has been in a funk. Initially it was his hospitalization that was the cause of the slow down in output, but after that I sort of got into the habit just not posting as much.

I also have found myself exhausted after almost every day on the road with little time to write or to edit my photos. The last three months have been especially bad. I’ve been behind on almost everything and trying to juggle both traveling and running what is now a small business from hotel rooms around the world. I’ve missed a bunch of podcast episodes and pretty much haven’t been on the ball.

What I am doing now isn’t working.

When I get back to the United States next week I’ve decided to reboot my blog. For all practical purposes I am going to treat it as if I’m starting over from scratch. Here is some of what I’m going to try to do:

• Post a non-photo every day. I’ve used my daily photo as a crutch sometimes. I could just pick a photo from my archives and say I’ve done something for the day. It just isn’t enough. I’m going to spend several hours a day writing and try to write ahead if possible. I have some very unique ideas for different types of posts, things I haven’t seen other bloggers do.
• Redesign my site. When I got my custom theme it was pretty cool. Now it isn’t. There were no Like buttons when I launched it. It has gotten slow and messy over time. I also need to get rid of the black background, at least for the main text area.
• Get the book done. I’ve been sitting on my ass for ages about this book. I have a much clearer idea of what I’m going to do. Now I just need to execute.
• Set a schedule. Keeping a schedule is next to impossible on the road. Once I’m in a bit more stable situation for a while. For the first few weeks I’m back, I’m going to set a set time to edit photos, a set time to write, etc.
• Keep off Twitter and Facebook for most of the day. Obviously these platforms are important, but having TweetDeck open all day isn’t very productive. I’ll have a morning session and an evening session and that’s it.
• Get a personal life. I’ve seen a more of the world than most of humanity ever will. However, I haven’t spent much time with any one person in several years. I no longer have a core group of friends. I haven’t been in a relationship since before 9-11. I’d like to find a way to rectify that.
• Guest post. Part of rebooting will be going back and trying to get exposure to a whole new audience of people. It will probably be much easier for me now than it was when I first did this several years ago.
• Balance travel and work. Travel is the core of what I do. I have to find a way to balance working and travel. I can’t just be in backpacking mode anymore. I have to be selective in where I go and what I do. I also want to do more adventurous things and visit some more out of the way places. Those are always the best trips.
• Set goals. I set very specific, quantifiable goals every year I have had my blog….except this year. I think it shows. I have some in mind and I’ll be posting them later.

I think you have to change things up every so often, and four years seems to be the point where I have to reinvent myself.

I’m excited.

I got bored today and took out the old spread sheet and tried to see if I could get some numerical support for some of the hunches I had with how well Klout and PeerIndex correlated with various Twitter metrics.

For the purposes of this test, I took the 50 accounts from the InfluencersinTravel.com list of independent travel influencers.

I then created a spreadsheet in Excel and imported the following data for all 50 people on the list:

• Klout Score
• PeerIndex Score
• Number of Tweets
• Number of Followers
• Number of people following
• Ratio of followers to following
• Number of Twitter lists

(4 of the 50 people did not have PeerIndex accounts or did not make their data public)

I then plotted the data for Klout and PeerIndex scores vs the various metrics and put a trendline on the data with a corresponding R^2 value. A value of 1.00 would be a perfect correlation.

Correlation with Followers

The most obvious thing you’d think would factor into a score would be the number of followers you have. Here is the data:

PeerIndex scored correlate much more strongly than Klout scores with the number of followers you have. In fact, the correlation with Klout seems to be so low that it looks like Klout doesn’t even use it as a metic at all. The correlation between Klout score and followers was the lowest of anything I measured.

On one hand, I think that the size of your audience does in fact have something to do with your influence. After all, if you are only influential with 20 people, you aren’t really that influential.

On the other hand, there are many people on Twitter with inflated numbers of followers. This is usually done by auto-following whoever follows you. You can usually filter this out by looking at the followers/following ratio. That is what I looked at next:

Follower/Following Ratio

The key here to remember is that a high ratio means you have many more people following you than you are following.

Again, there is almost no correlation with Klout scores with the ratio. It correlates slight more than with the number of followers you have, but not much. You can follow every spammer, bot and porn star and Klout doesn’t hold it against you. (Read about how one guy got a bot to get a Klout score over 60)

Number of people following

The next thing I checked is how score correlates with the number of people you follow. I wasn’t even sure I should do this because I’m sure neither company actually uses the number of people you follow as a positive metric. It would make no sense and would be very easy to game. I figured it would be a very small number for each service.

I was wrong:

Wow. Klout correlates FAR more with the number of people you follow than the number of people who follow you!! Either there is something really messed up with the data set I used, or there is something really wrong with Klout.

PeerIndex score correlates less with following than it does with followers (which makes sense), but the difference isn’t that great and it is half that of Klout.

Twitter Lists

Next I checked Twitter lists. Someone who is influential you would think would be placed on Twitter lists more than someone without influence.

Both scores correlate high with Twitter lists, which is what you would expect. PeerIndex has a higher correlation, however. Almost 50% higher.

Tweets

Finally I looked at the thing which I suspected would correlate the highest: number of tweets. One thing that I don’t have data for is retweets. The closest thing which would approximate that with the data I had was the total number of tweets. If you assume an average number of retweets per tweet across all of Twitter, then it would make sense that total tweets would correlate with retweets.

The correlation between Klout score and total tweets was the highest of anything I measured. It was 4x greater than the correlation with PeerIndex.

I have personally observed many people who stopped tweeting briefly because of a trip and saw a drop in their Klout score. I wasn’t surprised to see a high correlation.

Conclusion

If you want to increase your Klout score you should follow as many people as you can and tweet as much as possible. The person with the highest Klout score on this list has both the highest number of tweets and also follows the largest number of people. Both tweeting and following people are things which are under control of the user.

If you want to increase your PeerIndex score, get people to follow you and put you on Twitter lists. These things are not under the control of the user, so it would seem much harder to game PeerIndex. The person with the highest PeerIndex score had the largest number of follower, second most lists and the highest ratio.

While any measuring of “influence” is inherently subjective in terms of what you think determines influence, PeerIndex seems to me to be better than Klout if for no other reasons other than it correlates with things which make more sense in terms of influence. The highest factors that correlate with Klout score and factors which anyone can control themselves. This makes it open to gaming.

Notes

• All the data I used is available here on Google Docs.
• 4 people did not have PeerIndex data.
• One user had over 10x the number of followers than anyone else. It was such a larger outlier I removed the data point to see how much it effected overall correlation. Because it was only 1/50th of the datapoints, it had very little impact so I left the data point in.
• Klout also considers personal Facebook accounts in determining its score.
• PeerIndex considers Facebook, LinkedIn and other sites in determing its score.

The next livestream travel blog mentoring session will be on Monday, March 21 at 9pm EDT.

I had previously announced it was going to be Thursday, but I have to change it because the bandwidth in the hotel I’m at sucks and I have work to do.

The previous session was recorded and is available here: http://www.ustream.tv/recorded/13261631