Garaphernalia 7.5

So you’ve planned your big trip and you are thinking of starting a travel blog to chronicle your adventures. You are thinking that you might even put some advertising on the site and make a little money to help fund your trip. Here are some hints and suggestions I’ve learned from running my travel blog for the last 18 months that can help you out.

For the purposes of this article, “travel blog” will be referring to a travelogue, or a blog about your actual travels, not blogs about the travel industry, airlines, hotels, interesting things you read about in the news from around the world, frequent flier programs, or travel gear. While they are “blogs” and are related to “travel”, that is not the focus of this piece.

Things you need to know

The biggest blogs on the internet tend to do with politics, technology, sports, and celebrities: ie. popular culture. While many people will put “travel” on a list of interests, that interest doesn’t really translate into making popular blogs. When people are interested in travel, they tend to research specific things about where they are going. Unlike the above-mentioned areas, travel isn’t something which most people follow like they do sports teams or politics.

There are tens of thousands of travel blogs out there. Probably more than any other single category. There are dozens of sites which do nothing but host travel blogs. Most, however, suffer from the same problems:

• They are updated infrequently. When you are on the road, it is difficult and time-consuming to update your website, so it usually just doesn’t get done. You can’t really work on your site if you are sitting on the beach.
• They are usually just a diary of daily events. Most of the writing seems to be like a journal entry rather than an article. Reading reports of what you ate every day gets boring for most people.
• The intended audience is friends and family. Most sites are intended as a mechanism to let people you know follow what you are doing and aren’t written for a wider audience.
• The trip eventually ends. By the time you can build up an audience (and it does take time) your trip is over. There is an enormous graveyard of old travel blogs out there for completed trips. It may make for a great memory going back and looking at it, but a dead site can’t carry an active audience. Most big blogs have had years to develop an audience and you won’t have that luxury.

So before you even leave the door, you have a bunch of things working against you.

Managing your expectations

If you can have an idea of what is facing you, you can better manage your expectations for what you can get out of your blog. Some things you could shoot for:

• Integrate into a pre-existing blog. If you already run a blog on some subject, try to just integrate your trip into your blog. The shorter your trip, the better it works. If your blog as some sort of area of focus, try to keep your updates at least tangentially related to your topic.
• Just set up a blog for your friends. You might get away just posting photos on Facebook, which is what about 99% of the people I see in hostels doing. Another option is to use travel blog hosting services like Travellerspoint or BootsNAll. They have simple blogs you can set up with tools which are specific to travel, like maps. They host thousands of similar travel blogs and have communities you can participate in.
• Set up your own site. Taking the step from a pre-made site to a site you manage yourself is an exponential increase in work. There are a lot of technically oriented people who just like to do that sort of stuff, so that isn’t a problem. Getting your own domain name, finding a server, getting a design is all an investment in time and money.

Marketing

If you’ve read all of this and still want to be the Jack Kerouac of the internet, then you really have your work cut out for you. Contrary to popular belief, if you write a better post on mouse traps, the world will not lead a path to your site. Building traffic to your blog takes time and a whole lot of marketing. Unless you are already an internet celeb, you won’t have the luxury of hitting the ground running.

You are one voice in competition with a lot of others out there. You’ll need to get an education in search engine optimization (SEO), social networking (Facebook, StumbleUpon, Digg, etc), guest blogging, copyrighting, and photography.

I’ve found tremendous success with my Photography. While everyone brings a camera along on vacation, a simple point and shoot usually won’t cut it if you want to make photography a centerpiece of your site. You’ll at least need some sort of SLR with a halfway decent lens. You will probably need a laptop as well if you want to do any photo processing on the road.

Podcasting is also an option, but that also requires a lot of work if you are going to do all your editing from the road. A laptop is even more vital if you are going to do video editing, as I have never seen video editing software at an internet cafe. (I doubt if most internet cafe computers could even handle video editing).

The thing to remember is that everything you want to do has to be done away from home. You will often have limited or no access to the internet, so much of the marketing which other blogs can do, you can’t.

Conclusion

I’ve just scratched the surface of running a travel blog. In a nutshell, it is just like running a regular blog, but harder. You are constrained by time zones, internet access, and working in a niche with traditionally hasn’t been the most popular of areas.

All that being said, the hurdles can be overcome if you work hard and smart. You may need to spend some time at the computer instead of the beach once in a while, but if you are willing to make that sacrifice, you can run a successful travel blog.

There is something I’ve noticed with people who launch blogs. They usually end up in various blogging networks (Entrecard or BlogCatalog), following blogs about blogging (Problogger) and Make Money Online sites, and end up spending most of their time trying to attract traffic from other bloggers.

I’m here to tell you it is a losing strategy.

Bloggers are one on the worst groups you can spend time trying to attract, yet it is the one group which new bloggers spend most of their time trying to attract. The reason is they seem to be the low hanging fruit. When you have zero traffic, you can go to one of the blogging network sites like MyBlogLog and suddenly get lots of “friends” with little effort. Likewise, sites like Entrecard can bring you hundreds of visits per day and all you have to do is click on hundreds of pages per day.

The thing is, all those other bloggers are just like you. They only care about jacking up their own traffic. For the most part, the traffic you get from them isn’t real. It only exists so far as you are willing to perform the charade for them. Moreover, the size of the group you can target is only so big.

I laugh when people on many of the blogging boards talk dreamily about A-List bloggers like Jeremy Shoemaker or Daren Rowe. I have nothing against these guys personally, but walk down the street and find out how many people have ever heard of them. The answer is zero.

Bloggers target other bloggers because they are easy traffic, not because they are good traffic. They are online, accessible, and desperate for traffic just as much as you are. Like eating raw sugar, you can get a quick traffic rush, but in the long run, they are just empty calories. (and I should note, I put myself in this category. I do follow about 100 blogs, but most of them I discovered on my own and are subjects that interest me. I don’t follow them just because they follow me.)

The real audience you want to target are the average internet users who are interested in your subject area. They will most likely be using Yahoo, AOL, or MSN as a portal, and they are much, much harder to attract than bloggers. They may not know how to use RSS. There are, however, millions and millions of them. They are the protein, the real meat of what you can develop a following from.

This is why you see so many MMO and BAB sites. They are just going for the low hanging fruit and copying what they see others doing.

There are no easy tricks to attracting that big pool of average users. The fact that they aren’t as internet savvy means you have your work cut out for you. I’d suggest going directly to forums on major sites, and avoid the blogging networks.

Just to provide some balance, I want to give an example of a site which looks normal and provides a good analogue to the Romeuy site.

Also above me in the Blogging Idol contest is Homedesignfind.com.

The site is professional looking has as a very definite niche. If interior design is something you are interested in, this is a site you’d be very interested in. My guess is that the number of blogs dealing with this subject is much less than the number dealing with gaming.

Like Romeuy.com, the site has only been around for a few months. Unlike Romeuy, however, we are talking almost an order of magnitude fewer subscribers (low hundreds, not low thousands). This shows good growth, but it doesn’t jump out as fishy.

Hits are greater than subscribers. When you see a spike in subscribers, you see a spike in hits. It isn’t monotonic. After spikes, you still see small dips. There are no massive drops in subscribers. The big increase in subscribers occurred a full week after the contest started.

This looks like a standard subscriber graph. Every major site I’ve seen shares the same characteristics:

1) Feedburner hits > Feedburner subscribers
2) No monotonic increase in subscribers.
3) No extreme daily drops of greater than 75%

There is a contest being run at Daily Blog Tips right now called “Blogging Idol”. The contest is pretty simple: Get as many RSS subscribers as you can during the month of July.

For full disclosure, I’m entered in the contest and I’m currently in about 4th place, so I do have an incentive in making sure that the contest is run fair. The website I have in the contest is Everything-Everywhere.com.

Odds are, even if what I have to say in this post is accepted, I wont win. I’m cool with that, but I sure as hell don’t want a cheater to win. The current leader of the contest is Rome of Romeuy.com, and Rome is a cheater. EVERYTHING about his RSS stats reeks of fraud, and there is NOTHING which points to a legitimate increase in subscribers. Everything about what he has done defies statistical probability to the point where it should be taken are prima facia evidence of fraud. If this were a court of law, the statistical evidence would be enough for conviction. Everyone has been tiptoeing around saying outright that he is a fake, but I’ll step up and say it. Romeuy is a Fraud.

The Basics
If it looks like a duck, and walks like a duck and quacks like a duck, it is probably a duck.

Romeuy.com is a gaming site started a few months ago. There are very few examples I can think of where a blog has been launched and has managed to get over 1000 subscribers in a short period of time. The only examples I can think of are when well-known bloggers or celebrities launch new blogs and the new blog is heavily promoted on other websites. In other words, there needs to be traffic, buzz and links before there are subscribers. I dare say it is tautological.

Romeuy.com is a gaming site without any particular focus. It doesn’t focus on a niche like World of Warcraft, which might drive a particular group of fans to the site. Moreover, game sites are a dime a dozen. I know because I used to run one (Stomped.com) seven years ago.

Links

The site has few incoming links. If you go to Google and search for link:romeuy.com you will get a whopping FIVE links. Oddly enough, all five links come from the same website. A make money online website. Even more oddly, that make money online website has the EXACT same layout as Romeuy.com. In fact, the make money online site in question is owned and operated by the very same person behind Romeuy.com.

Does operating a MMO site make someone guilty? No. Does it raise suspicion? Oh yell yes. In fact, all of the fake RSS numbers I’ve seen in the past, with the exact same statistical signatures as the Romeuy.com site, have been MMO sites. Even many MMO sites operators who are legit will tell you that the niche has gotten a bad reputation because of the number of shady blog operators.

For the purposes of this discussion, Romeuy should be thought of as a Make Money Online site, not a gaming site. There is another MMO site he is associated with as well. He seems to have more irons in the MMO world, than in the gaming world. (I believe his MMO site also has fraudulent RSS numbers, but he didn’t enter that in a contest. MMO sites with fake RSS would raise a flag much quicker)

So, this guy is getting record levels of RSS subscribers with ZERO links coming from other gaming sites. How about Technorati? They show 77 links, with the majority coming from other MMO websites. Most of the links are also generic links to the site, not links to specific articles, which you’d expect if there was some sort of Digg or Slashdot effect going on.

Moreover, if you take out links dealing with the Blogging Idol contest, there has been no real increase in links during the time which his RSS numbers have been exploding. Certainly, his site doesn’t exist to the rest of the gaming world.

As another bit of evidence, his Google Page Rank is 0.

Traffic

I will hold it out as an axiom that RSS subscribers is, in general, a reflection of traffic. To subscribe to a site, people have to first visit the site. Moreover, not everyone who visits a site will subscribe. Many people don’t like RSS or just prefer to visit a site on a regular basis.

In addition to the amazing increase in RSS subscribers without incoming links, we are also to believe that he has done it without an increase in traffic. If you look at his Feedburner data, you see the remarkable fact that his RSS subscribers is several times larger than the number of hits he has incoming. Not visits mind you, but hits (or as feedburner is most certainly counting it, page views). That means that number of actual people going to the site each day is even less.

Go and look at the Feedburner data for any site which you believe actually has a lot of readers. You will find the Feedburner hits to be greater than the subscribers. Again, this pretty much has to be true by definition. People have to come to the site to subscribe. I’m going to get into the numbers with even more detail, but I believe that when subscribers > hits, by Feedburners own data, that should be prima facia evidence of fraud.

Check his Alexa data. His Alexa ranking is 273,312, which very odd for a site with so many readers. If you look at the traffic numbers, you’ll see no spike in traffic during his increase in subscribers. In fact you’ll see no growth at all.

I realize that Alexa is far from perfect, but it is usually in the ballpark, at least by an order of magnitude. Even if Alexa isn’t evidence by itself, it certainly doesn’t contradict any of the other fishy things about this, and is another bit of evidence which goes on the pile.

He has an Entrecard widget on his site as well. His popularity is 17, which means over the last 5 days, he’s gotten 17 clicks on his widget. Not 17 people mind you, but 17 clicks, 5 of which could have been his other MMO site. Traffic isn’t coming from Entrecard.

Also, compare his comments with other gaming sites with supposedly similar number of subscribers. You’ll see anywhere from 20-100 comments per post. Certainly some will have big spikes. He doesn’t.

Hard Data

If you look at any Feedburner subscriber chart, it shows behavior like the stock market. The overall trend might be up or down or flat, but with any short period of time you will see fluctuations in the data. This is due to how Feedburner counts subscribers. The act of subscribing is nothing more than telling your RSS reader to go to a particular XML file. If your RSS reader doesn’t poll the XML file, Feedburner wont count it. This is why you see dips in subscribers all the time. Weekends or holidays, some people might not check their RSS.

This is why any trend which shows a monotonically increasing number of subscribers should be suspect at face. That is just how the system functions in the real world.

The dips are usually within bounds however. The biggest dip I’ve seen my RSS numbers take in one day (other than the February ’08 Feedburner problems which had every site show a dip in subscribers) was 15%. Even a 10% is usually pretty big and rare. I had a big dip about a week ago which was 9%. This is also a statistical signature of any Feedburner graph. The graph wont be perfectly smooth, but it shouldn’t have wild swings either. Just like the stock market goes up and down on a daily basis, you wont see a 90% drop in the stock market in one day, only see it go back up 90% the next. Historic one day drops in the stock market are in the neighborhood of 10% (the 1987 Black Monday drop was 22%) . While it is possible, the wilder the swing, the greater the improbability of it happening.

Lets look at the Romeuy.com Feedburner graph. There are multiple things about this which should strike you as fishy.

1) There are more subscribers than hits. As stated above, and by other bloggers who have investigated RSS fraud, its pretty much evidence of fraud by itself. (I should note that in almost every article on this subject you can find where someone investigates a case of RSS fraud, it shows up with the same signatures you see here).

2) Except for a few MAJOR swings, the RSS numbers have been monotonically increasing since June 12. When they go up, they never go back down. (more on the decreases later). Not only are his subscribers not visiting the site, and not finding it via links, but they are visiting every day, and in increasing numbers every day.

3) The biggest one day increase was on June 28, when the subscribers when from 463 on June 27 to 713 on the 28th. What happened on June 28th? The final $3,000 prize for the Blogging Idol contest was announced.

4) Since June 28, you will notice two days with enormous drops in subscribers.

June 28 – 713 subscribers
June 29 – 48 subscribers
June 30 – 759 subscribers

July 5 – 934 subscribers
July 6 – 49 subscribers
July 7 – 1000 Subscribers

The first drop was a 93.6% daily drop, and the second was a 95.1% drop. Such drops are really unheard of. It would make more sense if they dropped to zero. The webserver might have been down or something. But they didn’t drop to zero…..

AMAZINGLY, they dropped down to almost the exact same number each time: 48 and 49.

What could explain this?

The Smoking Gun

The fact that 95% of the subscribers are failing in unison means that they are using the exact same system, whatever that is (probably email. That is how most RSS scams work. Get bogus email addresses). The fact that they check every day without fail and the numbers are monotonically increasing shows they aren’t human beings. They don’t show the stochastic behavior which humans systems display (stock markets and every other legit Feedburner graph being good examples)

The extreme dips plus the monotonic increasing subscribers pretty much shows that there is some sort of automated system behind his amazing increase in RSS subscribers.

All other anecdotal evidence (Alexa, Technorati, Google, Entrecard, Feedburner hits) points to this site being nothing special and not one which has an enormous number of followers. NOTHING points to the contrary.

Conclusion

This stinks to high heaven and it should be obvious to anyone who is in anyway familiar with RSS numbers.

Romeuy.com is a mediocre gaming site without 50-60 real RSS subscribers, the rest of which have been purchased from a service like RSSxplosion.com (I wont provide a link to them. Cut and paste it yourself).

With a $3,000 prize, even if he spent $1 per subscriber, he’d still make a profit.

Most people like to play nice and don’t want to cause a fuss and point fingers. Everyone has been dancing around this, but no one has been willing to come out and say it. ALL evidence points to fraud. NO evidence points to real subscriber growth. I think the burden of proof is on the other side now.

Sometime last December when I was in Hong Kong, I decided to get serious about my blog. Prior to that I had done nothing in terms of promotion or marketing. Part of the process of taking my blog seriously was going out to learn all I could about blogging. Even thought I have been keeping this website as a personal website since 1998, I never considered it a blog. At first I just did all the HTML by hand, and only later did I install MovableType and WordPress.

Part of the education involved reading sites which dealt with the subject of blogging. I currently subscribe to over a dozen such sites, and there are tons more out there. Many of which can be lumped into the Make Money Online category.

For the most part, I’ve found these these sites to be completely devoid of actual information to help bloggers. They mostly tend to be fluff pieces or they just state what should be common sense. The article which pushed me over the edge is one from Problogger. The article is titles “Why Being a Better Writer Affects the Performance of your Blog”. No shit.

You can read the article yourself, but the rest of the article is just repeating the title over and over. Being a good writer is better than being a bad writer. If that wasn’t something you couldn’t figure out yourself, there is no hope for you anyhow.

Another winner type of category is the numbered list: “X ways to do Y”, “Z reasons to do W”. You have probably seen them. They to are usually just lists of common sense things.

What is seriously lacking is data. Hard data where someone tests something and then tries to determine what sort of results it got. Even if data is bad, it would at least be an attempt to try and get some truth rather than just spout broad platitudes.

The blogs about blogging genre has sunk to the level of the self help section of the bookstore for the world of technology.