Garaphernalia 7.5

This post is probably going to piss a lot of people off.

I considered writing it earlier but have been putting it off until now. This a response to an article written by Alastair McKenzie at Travelllll.com: Why Community is Crucial for Travel Bloggers. Read it now if you haven’t.

I like Alastair and I consider him a friend. I also totally understand where he is coming from. Applauding the benefits of community is like extolling motherhood. Not many people are going to argue with you.

However, I have found the focus on “community” that many bloggers develop is ultimately distracting and counterproductive to what they are trying to do: create a successful blog.

Let me back up a bit.

Last year, immediately after Facebook launched their groups feature I started a group for travel bloggers. The group grew quickly and became the largest group of its kind for the travel blogging community.

Eventually, however, I realized something. I was spending more time on the travel blogger group than I was on my own Facebook page or my own blog.

• I was getting sucked into arguments that didn’t mean anything.
• I was letting myself get agitated over things that shouldn’t have mattered.
• I was answering questions from people who didn’t bother to take 5 seconds to do a Google search to find basic information. They wanted everything handed to them.
• I didn’t know most of the people in the forum. They were part of the “community” but they weren’t my friends. I’ve never spoken to most of these people nor had they ever introduced themselves to me.

None of this was helping me move the chains forward on my own stuff. (that is a euphemism from American football that means making progress).

I’ve noticed that there are a lot of bloggers who have replaced the “community” with making progress on their own site. The spend more time talking to bloggers, commenting on other blogs and talking about blogging than they do actually building and engaging with their audience.

I know many people who are considered respected travel bloggers who seem to mostly engage only with other bloggers and have never built up an audience outside of that community.

Back in March, without any fanfare, I left the travel blog group I created on Facebook and all other blogging forums.

The amazing thing was, no one noticed. I didn’t get a single comment or question about where I was or what was going on.

I was able to take all that time I spent on the “community” and put it back into my own projects. The result was a net positive for me. I got more work done and didn’t have my blood pressure rise every time someone said something stupid.

It isn’t just forums, however. Professional organizations have been about as unproductive. I’m a member of SATW, NATJA and IFWTWA. Has there been any real benefit to being a member? No.

As a blogger I’m not looking for freelance work. The conferences they put on offer very poor professional development, usually on topics that have nothing to do with what I do. I’ve never been contacted by someone in the industry due to my membership. At best they offer discounts on some services, but that is it. (Why am I a member? Good question.)

I have many friends who are bloggers. I like talking to other bloggers and I enjoy answering questions about blogging. I even have attended conferences like TBEX for the last several years.

However, bloggers are not my business. Too many people use community as a substitute for an audience. They start a new blog, get involved in the community and then get sucked into it. Other bloggers are the low hanging fruit to get traffic and comments, so that is where they start and where they stay.

I’m all for community, but not when it gets in the way of what matters.

You aren’t going to make a successful blog by pandering to the community. You needs to reach out and engage with people who don’t have blogs.

I have a big problem. I don’t write nearly as much as I should. This is primarily a result of the amount of traveling I do. It is hard to sit down and write when you are constantly moving.

This month I’m going to be in one spot. That means no moving around and more time to focus on writing and getting things done.

One thing I’m going to try and do this month is to post something beyond my daily photo every single day in October. Podcast, photo essay, article, whatever.

I have some suspicions about what will happen, but I’ll talk about those once the results are in next month.

My background is as an internet guy. Since I saw my first website back in 1993 (it was a page from the Library of Congress showcasing items from the Vatican Museum) I’ve been doing something, one way or another, online. When I started to travel, my first and only idea was to make a website to share my adventures.

When I started I knew nothing of the travel media industry. I didn’t know how travel writing worked and I would have never pursued writing for another publication because I’m pretty sure that no one would have hired me. To be fair, I wouldn’t have hired myself.

As my writing and photography has improved (I hope) and as my stature in the industry has improved, the option of actually writing for publications has been put on the table.

The problem is, now that I potentially have the ability to write for other publications, the business case for doing so has disappeared. In fact, the more I’ve learned about the business, the less appealing it has become.

Here is a few of the reasons why I have no desire to pursue freelance opportunities:

1. You just don’t make much money. I was talking to Spud Hilton, travel editor at the San Francisco Chronicle last year and I asked him how much you could make by having an article appear in the Chronicle. I assumed (and I had no basis for my assumption) that it would be around $1,500. It turns out the actual rate is $500. You would need to sell 100 articles at that rate to bring in just $50,000….before taxes. Even if you were to triple the rate, you are still looking at doing a lot of work for not much money. I wont even bother to talk about the abysmal rates you get for publishing online.
2. Many publications wont cover costs. Many large magazines and newspapers don’t accept stories from sponsored trips. They also don’t cover the costs of your trip. That means that the $500 you get has to cover the costs of taking the trip, which is not a sustainable business model. I know that many writers will try to spin multiple stories out of one trip, but it doesn’t change the fact that the economics still suck. I’m amazed that this isn’t a bigger issue in travel writing circles. There is something fundamentally wrong with a business where revenues can’t cover costs.
3. It doesn’t advance my core business. Being in print doesn’t help you online. I’ve been mentioned in some popular magazines. I’ve had friends who have been in print. If you can’t click, it almost certainly isn’t going to result in people visiting your site. From the standpoint of a blogger, there is far more value in being in the NewYorkTime.com than there is in being in the New York Times. Moreover, people seldom pay attention to who wrote an article. I usually get offers to meet with readers in every major city I’ve visit. I don’t know of any print writers who have that level of interaction with readers.
4. It is a hassle. I can write anything I want on my site without anyone’s approval. The moment you have to start pitching someone else, there is an enormous amount of overhead associated with getting a single article published. Unless you have previous relationship with an editor, you will have to deal with a lot of pitching and rejections.
5. There is a limit to what you can make. Take the most you can get for an article and multiply it by the number of articles you can write in a year. That is limit of what you will make. This is assuming you get a great rate for every article and can pump out many of them. If you own a publication, there is no real limit to how much you can grow. I don’t know why I couldn’t grow my site to 10x what it is currently. It will take work, but it is possible.
6. There isn’t much of a future. If you read my previous post on the advertising revenue for travel magazines, I don’t think there is going to be a big future in writing for print. The market for online writing is horrible. I’m not sure there is a point to investing effort into something which there isn’t going to be a big future.

I know there are plenty of people who make a living doing freelance writing, but it just isn’t something that appeals to me.

I have had my writing appear on other websites, but it is always without payment and it is intended to serve as a promotional vehicle for my primary website. I also never have to deal with the issues I listed above: sponsored trips, dealing with editors, and traffic generation.

I’ve been on many a press trip where the first question asked of me by writers is “who do you write for?” When I tell them I write for myself, I usually get a look of pity. The reality is, owning my own publication (aka a blog) has far more upside and potential than writing for others ever will.

I’ve just completed the annual TBEX conference, held this year in Keystone, Colorado. Here are a few of my thoughts on this year’s event:

• This was by far the best TBEX ever. It was not only well run, the parties were top notch, the networking was great as was the attendance.
• This was probably the best conference I’ve ever attended. This is no exaggeration. I’ve attended dozens of conferences in and outside the travel industry. In terms of a straight return on investment, it was easily the most productive conference I’ve ever attended. It was also one of the most fun.
• The industry is warming up to bloggers. I don’t think anyone should get too excited, but things are starting to change. There were many great companies represented, but there were even more who weren’t there.
• Big companies still haven’t figured it out. There were several big companies who spent a great deal of money sponsoring the show. Having talked directly to them, I still get the impression they still really don’t know what they are doing with bloggers yet. They know they should be doing something with bloggers and sponsoring shows is something they are used to doing. I still haven’t seen any projects with bloggers by big companies in the travel space that I’ve been impressed with.
• Medium size companies do get it. Almost all of the medium size companies I met with did seem to have a much better strategy of how to work with bloggers. That includes some of my sponsors, some companies I didn’t meet with (but I got reports from other bloggers), and some companies I met with for the first time. I was very impressed with the direction some of them were heading. I am eagerly awaiting to see what projects get hatched by bloggers over the next few months.
• There are a lot of bloggers. Nothing new here, but I was amazed at the number of people I met who had sites I had never heard of. I like to think I keep abreast of these things, but I clearly do not.
• The closing keynote made no sense for a blogger conference. Having a guy who doesn’t blog tell bloggers how he makes money not blogging really wasn’t a good fit. I don’t disagree with some of his general points of working hard and having an expertise, but writing guidebooks and doing freelancing really isn’t the business plan for most bloggers.
• I can’t really comment on the sessions. I only attended one session other than my own. My entire time was spent in meetings, which was a testament to quality of the networking opportunities.
• There is enormous potential to grow. Prediction: TBEX is going to become HUGE. This is going to go well beyond blogging. I think this is poised to become the new media show for the whole travel industry. There is no reason why companies and destinations couldn’t attend for their own sake to learn about new media, beyond just going to meet with bloggers. If TBEX keeps its strategy of keeping costs low for content creators (which they intend to do) this is going to become more and more attractive for industry people. I think word of mouth is going to make TBEX very popular next year. I think there will be double the companies/destinations present and over 1,000 attendees.
• TBEX is a must attend show for new media people in travel. If you are in the travel industry in any sort of marketing, public relations or content creation capacity, you need to come to TBEX. If there was only one conference I could attend each year, it would be TBEX.

I haven’t heard any serious complaints about TBEX this year. Even skeptics came away saying it was a great conference. I know I’m gushing, but this weekend was probably the most productive I’ve had in 6 years of running my blog.

Grade: A