Garaphernalia 7.5

I’m writing this post in response to this March 3rd article by Lara Dunston. I’m commenting here because my comments aren’t being posted on the site in question and I would like to defend myself. I’m the person she is talking about. The subject she is talking about is MY need to use guidebooks. She wrote an article about ME and then got all in a huff when I tried to respond.

Here is the background:

Feb 28, she writes an article titled Dubai: destination re-branding urgently required – from ‘playground of the rich’ to the complex compelling place we know it can be . I make one comment in the article about how I didn’t think Dubai was that great of a tourist attraction (something which I stand by). She replies to my comment and then ….

On March 2, she writes a full post in response to my comment on how I really need to use guidebooks titled: There’s more to beaches and malls in Dubai: the case for using a guidebook . The title of which came directly from a line in my comment in the previous article.

So this article is about ME. You will notice there are no comments listed in this article. I wrote a lengthy reply, as I was the impetus for the article. I mean, that seems fair right? You write an entire blog post about ME, take the title from ME, and quote ME you should let ME respond, right?? She never approved my comment. (You should also note that I previously wrote a controversial article on why you don’t need a guidebook) So much for “spirited debate”.

Now if you read the March 3 article where there is all the angst about commenting, I’m accused of “imposing (my) opinions on others, taking the topic to a place that we really weren’t interested in going.” At this point in the “spirited discussion”, I have made a single comment which got an even longer reply and a full blog post that was directed at me personally. All my comments were blocked after this.

Also, I do not even know how it is possible to impose my opinion on someone else, let alone in the comments of another person’s blog. Having an opinion isn’t imposing an opinion.

There was another March 1 post on some Australians who were arrested in Dubai. I made a shorter comment pointing out how she never addressed the facts surrounding the case. People were/are held in Dubai without being accused of a crime. I’m a big lover of freedom and I don’t like that. She approved a pro-Dubai comment but blocks mine which questions the actions of the Dubai government. (this is all really ironic considering that the Dubai government censors the internet and suppresses political dissent) If you are going to defend a government which suppresses speech and can imprison people without due process, then you should expect to defend it. My comment was directly on point to the subject of the article.

She accuses me of be insulting, obnoxious, imposing my opinion on others. If that is the case, prove it to the world. Let everyone see how obnoxious and insulting I am. I’m not the one hiding anything. I made my comments with the expectation of them being public and didn’t post them anonymously.

There never was a spirited debate. She doesn’t seem to like any disagreement, especially on the subject of the government of Dubai. The topic was probably going to “a place that we really weren’t interested in going”. It is hard to defend what the Dubai government is doing. All my comments were on point to the subject in the article which she wrote.

Its her website and if she wants to block comments she can. But I have a website too and I can use my platform to defend myself if she is going to malign me without a chance to reply. I’m not the one hiding anything.

Oh, as an aside, I don’t block comments on this site so anyone is free to comment or disagree with me, so long as the spam filter doesn’t catch it.

My Twitter experiment has been a huge success. My 2009 goal was 7500 followers. Two weeks into the year and I’m at 4,200 already. As you can see in the graph, since I’ve turn auto-follow on, my following rate has gone crazy. Once I got into the Twitterholic top 1000, it took on a life of its own. I can pretty much go on autopilot at this point and make my 2009 Twitter goal.

Everyone that follows me gets a link to my RSS feed, which I think has helped boost my subscribers. Moreover, a large Twitter following makes it much easier to meet people when I go to a new city.

Twitter has been working very well for me, but I’m not sure how well it would translate to another blog. I get a lot of people who discover what I’m doing and think its neat. I’m probably going to lay off the Twitter now for at least a few weeks. I’m going to be moving around a lot in the next few weeks, so I need to focus on content and not marketing.

I am at a crossroads with where I want to go with Twitter. It all has to do with what you can use Twitter for. Unfortunately, the two things are sort of mutually exclusive.

There are two schools of thought when dealing with Twitter. 1) Follow as many people as possible in an effort to get as many followers as possible. 2) Only follow the people you actually know or want to talk to.

You will find many of the people in the top 100 most followed Twitter users take the first approach and have tens of thousands of friends. If you follow them, they will follow you. The problem with this approach is that you cannot listen to tens of thousands of people. I tried this once and got to about 500 people before I gave up. I was missing what people were saying and couldn’t focus on the people I wanted to listen to. Once you have over 500 “friends” you are using Twitter for marketing and broadcasting more than for communications. You can’t have individual conversations with that many people, no matter what you say. Not at a personal level at least. It is however, probably the superior way to use Twitter to increase your exposure.

The second option lets you talk to people and follow all the tweets of the people you want to listen to. You wont have hundreds or thousands of people drowning out the voices of those who are important to you. The downside is that you probably wont reach as wide an audience as if you took the shotgun approach.

I currently follow about 100 people and have almost 2,100 followers. Of those 100 people, about half are people who either don’t know me or are people I never talk to. That 100 could easily be 50 or less if I really wanted to pare things down. Most of the people I talk to on Twitter read this site on a regular basis 🙂

Ideally, I could get the best of both worlds if I could create a client side “super friend” where I could pay extra special attention to people I really want to watch.

I am leaning to turning auto-follow back on, then using Friendfeed as my method of following the people I actually want to follow. That would be the optimal solution. Most of the people who contact me I do not follow, so it is all done via reply. That would probably stay the same if I followed a ton of people, as following too many is functionally the same is not following at all.

Remember to follow me on Twitter 🙂

About 1 year ago I made the decision to start marketing my site more aggressively. At the time I had about 100 RSS subscribers and the readership on my site wasn’t much more than friends and family.

Now at the end of 2008 I’m looking at 1,000 subscribers, almost a 10x increase over the course of the year.

As far as I can tell, I have the most popular travelogue on the internet. I have no way of verifying if that is true, but I can’t think of any others which are bigger, and I am familiar with most of them.

In the larger category of travel blogs I’m one of the larger ones. Not too many have 1,000 subscribers. I’m also near the top of people in the travel space terms of Twitter followers with over 2,000.

So things aren’t too shabby.

My goals for 2009 are as follows:

• 5,000 RSS subscribers. (5x increase)
• 7,500 Twitter Followers (2.5x increase)
• Average 100,000 visits per month (5x increase)
• Have a book published
• Get my podcast on a regular schedule and done in a quasi professional manner

Doing this is going to require a totally different approach from what got me to this point.

The travel blogging space, is in the big scheme of things, pretty small. The largest independent travel blogs which I know of are only about 2-3x the size of my current site in terms of subscribers. Most of the action takes place with the large corprate sites with multiple bloggers. I don’t really even like to consider myself a travel blogger as I don’t write about traveling in the bigger sense of the word. I just write about myself and what I do.

Also, if I’m already the biggest travelogue on the internet, I’m not just growing my site, I have to fundamentally create a new blogging niche. That is going to be the hard part. There are no established sites out there that are doing what I’m doing at the level I’m doing it at. Most of the advice given by the “pro bloggers” involve their success in niches which already have tons of blogs and tons of followers. I don’t think much of it is going to work for me.

How am I going to get from here to there? A 5x increase seems like less than a 10x increase, but 4,000 is a lot more than 900.

• Site redesign. I’ve hired a company to do a professional redesign. I’m hopping that I wont have to worry about this for a long time once it is done. I hope it will launch in early to mid January.
• I’m going to start a newsletter. I’ve been waiting to see if this is really worth the effort, and the evidence seems overwhelming at this point. I’ll hope to launch this alongside the site redesign. I hope to have the newsletter out biweekly.
• Create an ebook. I’ve actually started on this. It will be very photo heavy, so it wont be as much work as writing a real book. Many sites have had success with this as an incentive to subscribe to a site.
• Increase offline and non-travel industry exposure. If I am to grow the niche, I have to get exposure beyond the travel world and even beyond the internet. The best way to achieve this will be via the book and the associated marketing around it. I’ll basically have to market the book aggressively.
• Get back to the US. As counter intuitive as it seems, I’ve always had the biggest spurts in traffic growth when I was settled in a city for a few weeks. Actually traveling gets in the way of blogging. Being in the US for a few months should allow me to focus on marketing and let me network with people I wouldn’t be able to do when I’m on the road. Managing that time in the US will be important. I don’t want people to think the site is dead or that I’ve ceased traveling. I plan doing some traveling in the US to take some photos. In particular, I may drive to San Francisco and take photos and camp along the way.
• Podcasting. It always comes back to this. I’m having a hard time keeping up with photos and text. The video is just too much for one person to do on top of everything else. On my next trip I’m going to be bringing someone along to serve as a producer/cameraman/editor. I have no clue who this is going to be yet.

This will require a lot of work, but I think it can be done. One thing working in my favor is that I’ve noticed you get more people following you as you get bigger. The more Twitter followers I have, the more Twitter followers I get. I’ve seen other sites get a spike in subscribers once they hit 1,000.

I think the economy might help me. As more people cut back on traveling, traveling vicariously might be more appealing….or maybe not. I have no clue.