Garaphernalia 7.5

I was astonished at the response I got from my comment on this article about why your blog doesn’t have more traffic.

I probably have had over 30 people who in one form or another asked to be part of my offer to mentor bloggers. I didn’t realize the response would be so great from just a comment.

What I’ve decided to do is a series of webcasts where I’ll be talking about blogging and traveling and answering questions. I’m guessing each session will run 60-90 minutes.

I’m not going to be talking in the abstract. I’ll be using my site as an example of things which have worked and things which have failed. I’ll also be mentioning other sites to show examples of what I think are good and bad practices.

There will be no cost to these webcasts. They will be open to anyone and everyone. I will probably be running them on ustream and I will try to record the sessions.

Here is a tentative list of topics I’ll be discussing:

1. Authority, expertise, and personality. Why the hell should anyone listen to you? Personal positioning and branding.
2. Working with and in the travel industry.
3. Expanding your audience outside of the travel blogger echo chamber.
4. Building a following as opposed to getting traffic.
5. Monetization: Beyond selling links, Adsense and affiliate marketing.

You’ll notice this isn’t the usual “SEO and make money” approach to blogging you often hear.

I’ll also be working a small number of bloggers on an individual basis. I’m mainly going to be working with people who are somewhat experienced bloggers and writers. I think this is the best use of my time.

I’ll be taking questions during the livestream and you can all leave questions in the comment field of this post. Avoid extremely broad questions like “How do I get traffic?”, because that just tells me you haven’t put any thought into this. If you have to ask a question that broad, I don’t think I can help you.

Also, the reason I’m doing this is because it is in my self interest to improve the state of the online travel media industry. The stronger it gets, the more it will help me. There is a LOT of bad advice floating around out there and I want to do what I can to set people straight.

I’ll be providing details for the time of each session about 48 hour before each one. Because of my travel schedule, I can’t plan too far in advance. I’ll be announcing it here and on Twitter.

I’m planning on doing the first session on Friday, March 11 at 9pm EST.

Paul Miller resigned from Engadget the other day. Engadget is an AOL company and Paul resigned because of the growing view he sees at AOL that content is becoming a commodity.

Indeed he is right. More and more large companies are taking the view of Mao Zedong that, “quantity has a quality all its own.” Leaked AOL documents show their desire to pump out more “content” to get more pageviews to get more ad revenue. Their recent purchases of the Huffington Post and Techcrunch are part of this trend of trying to grab as many pageviews as possible.

AOL isn’t alone. Yahoo purchased a content farm, Associated Content. Demand Media’s recent IPO gave them a market capitalization larger than the New York Times. USA Today has added Demand Media content to their online travel section.

It seems that there is a very big budget arms race going on with very larger media players all based around pumping out tons of low cost content and amassing as many pageviews as they can.

How can an individual blogger compete with this? We don’t have the budget, staff or Google authority to get away with even a fraction of what the big boys are doing.

The answer is simple: we don’t.

You can’t win if you try to play their game. It’s impossible.

If you are an independent blogger you have to think like an insurgent fighting a modern, organized army. You need to engage in asymmetrical warfare.

Insurgents can’t buy aircraft carriers. They don’t have jet fighters. They probably don’t have anything more than old pickup trucks and AK-47’s. They have to think outside of the box and do what they can with what little they have.

Likewise, as a blogger you might have nothing more than a hosting account with WordPress and a Twitter account. It might seem like you have an impossible fight on your hands, but if you rethink the fight, you can achieve some big things.

1. Terms of victory are different. Occupying forces have to win. Insurgents just have to not lose. The big military force have expenses many orders of magnitude greater than the people they are fighting in an asymmetrical war. AOL needs tens of millions of unique visits and billions of pageviews to break even. They have expensive office space and (comparatively) large staffs. You are probably a single person with almost no overhead. Getting 1% of the audience, or even less, could be a huge victory for a single blogger, where as it would be failure for a big player.
2. You are committed. An invading force will eventually pull out. The people who live there can’t leave. The people who are fighting for their homes and family have a much greater incentive to fight. Everyone who works for AOL is an employee. They might get fired tomorrow or leave for a better job. Unless you die or decide to quit blogging you probably aren’t going anywhere.
3. Locals know the landscape. One problem occupying forces have is knowing the local culture, language and landscape. Guerrilla forces know the locals and where to hide. Likewise, a company like AOL, nor any of their websites, will ever be able to develop personal relationships with their readers. You will wont see meetups, discussions in comments and personal opinion in the large corporate blogs like you will in smaller blogs. Being a person and being personal is a huge weapon for the little guy.

Remember, the great promise of the internet was never making more money. It was reducing costs. This bodes well for the little guy.

You might never get the traffic of an AOL blog, but that doesn’t matter. You might only get 1-10% of the traffic, but you can have 100-1,000x lower costs.

You can find success in a world of SEO’d content farms by just redefining victory, using the tools at your disposal, and playing to your strong points.

Viva la blogosphere!

I’ve decided to dust off the ol’ personal blog and use it to write about things which I don’t want to put on my main site. I think the best way to get into the habit of writing is to write, and I don’t always want to write about things which I’d put on my travel blog, so I’ll just stick them here.

The first subject I want to address is the very thing I’m doing on this site: keeping your blog on-point.

There has been a trend I’ve noticed during the last several months. People start a travel blog because they are about to take off on a long trip. As they learn more about blogging, SEO and social media, it starts to consume them and pretty soon their travel blog spends more time talking about blogging than it does about travel.

People……no one is interested in this!

If you draw a Venn Diagram of people interested in blogging and people interested in travel, you don’t get both circles, you get the tiny hunk in the middle.

The total universe of people who are interested in travel blogging is pretty small in the big scheme of things. Walk down the street and ask people if they are interested in blogging or if they are interested in travel? I think the answer you get will be pretty obvious.

Moreover, unless you have been running a blog for years, you probably don’t have much to add to the conversation other than rehashing what you’ve read on other sites.

It is easy to get suckered into writing about it because other bloggers leave more comments than average readers. It appears that you get more action on those type of posts, but the reality is you are just limiting yourself to the echo chamber.

If you want to reach a wider audience you have to stay on point and stick to the subject that got you started in the first place: travel.

I have on occasion discussed business issues on my site, but for the most part, I stay totally away from such discussions. People aren’t interested and if there is too much inside baseball, it turns casual readers away. I would never have posted this article on my travel site for precisely that reason.

My advice: stay on topic and leave the insider discussions to blogger forums or Facebook groups where you don’t have bore the public.

…or better yet, start a personal blog.

Here is how the Q1 went for my 2010 blogging goals:

1) Google traffic: 2,000 visits per day
I’m hovering around 300 per day. I also haven’t taken much action on this front. This is a priority for the rest of the year.

2) 10,000 Facebook fans
Under my previous rate of growth, I was expected to hit 4,000 fans at the end of the year. I will now probably do that by the end of may. The growth has increased, but I still have a long ways to go. Thankfully, I also have 9 months left to do it. I think, but cannot prove, that the new Facebook changes will help in this goal. I could see myself between 7,000-9,000 at the end of the year.

3) 12,000 RSS/Email subscribers
Making progress but still a long way to go.

4) PR6
Done.

5) Have my photos published in at least 2 major media outlets
Half done. I have a bi-weekly photo essay for the WashingtonTimes.com. I am working on some others and I think this is very doable.

6) Monetize my site and reach a break even point
I’ve taken some big steps in this direction and I think it is very achievable considering my current traffic.

7) 250,000 visits per month
Done. I should do around 320,000 visits in April. I just have to keep it up. Jan 1 to March 31 had 702,000 visits, almost averaging 250,000 per month. 400,000 in a month is not out of the question by year’s end (but it is also not guaranteed either)

8) 1 long form, featured article every 2 weeks
I have yet to do this.

The things I need the biggest work on are conversion. I am weak in this area right now. If I can just increase my conversion rate a bit more, I should be able to meet my RSS and Facebook goals. I also plan on launching a forum on my site in the next month which should increase traffic.

Goal #4 is officially completed!