Travelblather

I just checked - I published 23 posts in 2011. Just about one a fortnight. I had some help from some great guests too.

So, looking back, which of my posts do I think are really insightful? Which ones do I think I'd tell a newcomer to Travelblather to read? Here's my top 5 for 2011. Interestingly(?) they are often posts that didn't get that many comments. Perhaps because they are more distilled and emphatic with less room for discussion? What do you think?

Free Sucks - Seriously I hate it
This theme percolates through much of my writing here on Travelblather. The idea that free is always good is frankly lazy and stupid. It typifies the mindset of the dumb consumer endlessly feeding on stuff that they are thrown - just because they can. With no thought about why it's free and what the implications are longer term of accepting it. Free is often really, really bad. This post explains why.

Forget Content - Think Curation and Connections
One of my first posts of 2011, this I think remains pretty pertinent - why create yet more content just because you can if someone else has done a great job already? With the zillions of new pages of content being added all the time online, search engines are struggling to make sense of it all. Maybe real people hold the final answer!

Choose Your 'Friends' Wisely
Many commentators suggest that social media came of age in 2011. Did it? I'm not so sure. But one thing is for certain, our online connections will have increasing importance as we go forward - in all sorts of ways. Some good, some bad. Maybe we need to think more carefully about who we are 'friends' with online and why?

Will Quality Content Beat Social Connections?
Just one comment on this post. But for me it's a bit of a call to arms for content creators. I feel strongly that the skills we possess are so undervalued in the online world. I remain convinced - as I say in this post - that quality, niche content written by experts will outlast the current excitement about social media and the social graph.

Endemic Corruption Or Just A Travel Press Trip?
OK. This one did garner a lot of comments (over 50). As often happens when the comments snowball, they went off topic quite a bit. There's some really interesting innovation going on with the travel blogging community as they seek to monetize their work more aggressively. I admire their boldness, but because travel bloggers are publishers as well as writers they risk alienating their readers if they get too caught up in chasing the bucks too overtly.

Thanks everyone who has read and commented in the last year. It's been great fun!

Any posts you found particularly useful? Anything you'd like to see more or less of in 2012? I'd love to hear what you think.

I have blogged on this topic before but it was back in 2009 and I feel it needs re-visiting. The whole web feels built on the premise that stuff should be free. And if you subscribe to Chris Anderson's view this is a wonderfulworld where it can only get better.

Would you pay to use Facebook? Pay to use Hotmail? Pay to use Twitter? Even pay to search using Google? For a lot of people that idea seems ridiculous. But think back a decade or so and the idea of stuff just being given away free would have seemed equally crazy too. I don't know how we got here. Most people would say it's a pretty great thing. But in many ways I don't like it.

Free in my opinion sucks.

Free means customer service often isn't up to much
So if your Facebook account falls over or your Hotmail stops working, what do you do? Whinge on twitter about it? Struggle with posting the info on a forum and hope someone will help? More likely cross your fingers and wait for it to get fixed. If you were  to pay say $10 a month or whatever, there'd be an immediate loss of revenue if you quit due to the problem and if you told all your mates about it and they started to quit too it would hurt the company's bottom line. You'd have protection under consumer law I'd imagine too. You paid for a service, the provider has an obligation to provide it. If it's free. Well, tough.

Free means you're a guinea pig
The 'forever Beta' disease could be another way to describe this. We never get a finished product. It's always being tested, mucked around with, changed. Just as you thought you knew how to manage your privacy settings on Facebook - whoops they all changed again. I really hate this 'fail fast' crap. It's an excuse for launching tons of junk and hoping some of it sticks. Google in particular does this so much. Remember Wave? Ever even heard of Hotpot? Blah.

Free means it could all get taken away from you
It was delicous a month or two back. The rumours were that Yahoo would sell its smart little web-based bookmarking gizmo and who knew what might happen then. UK readers - do you remember Friendsreunited? Or how about Freeserve? If you're lucky, when the business goes down or runs out of cash it will get picked up again by someone else with deep pockets - which is ultimately what happened with Delicious, thank goodness.

Free means the company you are dealing with is dumb
Of course it's quite easy to get loads of people to try stuff out if it's free. It's crap - but so what, it's free. You can't expect too much from something free now, can you? How did we get to a situation where it was seen as cool to just launch something and have no idea how you'd make money from it? No wonder the financial system went into meltdown a while back if investors were happy to pony up cash for no reason other than 'quite a few people like us'. Dumb.

Free means you will end up paying anyway
The 'fremium model'. What a load of bunk. You get a bit of something in the hope you will then trade up and pay for the real deal. A good example - I've been looking at apps for the iPhone. There are lots of free apps to places - they seem to offer much the same as the ones you pay for. Except you then discover that you've only downloaded an app with next to nothing in it. You have to pay to get the full version. And it constantly bugs you with pop-ups to do so.

Free makes it hard to choose
If you're in the market for say a hotel room in Seville you can make your choice based on cost among other things. You have a budget of around 100 dollars for a night you can immediately discount say 80% of the hotels because they are much more or much less. If everywhere was free - how would you work out which was right for you? You could certainly do it, but it would take much much longer. Price is a valuable yardstick for helping us choose. Right now how do you decide which webmail service to use? Yahoo? Google? Hotmail? I don't know either. And which social platform? Twitter? Facebook? Google +?

Free means they make the rules
Facebook has privacy settings set to 'on' for everything. Do people want that? Seriously? MSN publishes lots of free content - but you have to wade through pages to read it because they need to hang as many ads on as many pages as possible. It's the most hopeless reading experience imaginable. Your data and habits are being quietly mined by companies like Google and Facebook and the powers that be have been cowed into accepting that that's OK because the products you are using are being given to you free. Check out this fascinating piece about Google and the way it makes the rules to ensure it makes money whilst giving the impression its impartial.

Free means the product could suck
In a market where a big corporation with buckets of cash gives things away for free it squashes competition. Free is anti-competitive. There could be thousands of brilliant Facebook-like Social Media platforms, Search Engines, Webmail products and more out there, but we won't ever get to see them because the likes of Google, Microsoft and Facebook give their products away for free so new entrants find it virtually impossible to compete and stay in business. And free content often conforms to this rule. How much spammy crap content clogs up your search results on a daily basis? It looks great in the search results, but click on the link and you find it's a load of waffle.

Free means someone is working for peanuts
This isn't always the case, but often for start-ups trying to compete in the web space (where big corporations are squashing competition by giving stuff away for free) the only thing to do to try and compete is to try and do stuff at virtually no cost too. The number of times I have been approached to write stuff for free or give away my back catalogue for free to new content websites on the vague hope that I might one day make some money from ad revenue or whatever. I just tell people politely that I don't work for free, but doubtless a lot of people trying to get a foothold on the ladder are prepared to do this. My experience is that if you start writing for nothing, peanuts is all you will ever get paid.

What do you think? Ever wished you could pay for something but have to accept a poor quality free thing instead because the market can't provide anything else?

I recently wrote a feature for the Sunday Telegraph about gorilla trekking in Rwanda. It was the first commission I'd had from them. I was impressed that along with detailed information about how to lay out the fact box and about payment, there was also a document describing syndication and copyright terms.

This for me is a first - after a decade of writing for all sorts of publications. Often the most you'd get from a commissioning editor was a hurried email which might have mentioned the fee they were paying you. Never in all this time has anyone openly discussed syndication or copyright.

I have never written again for The Guardian because I got so hacked off with the way their travel editor at the time commissioned stuff over the phone, didn't commit to publishing dates and would never confirm a fee on email. And, check out this piece I wrote for the Daily Mail - now available for people to pay to read on another website. Did I get anything for this? Of course not. Was it even discussed? No.

I can't reproduce the complete document from the Telegraph here as it runs to a couple of pages.  This is the crucial bit, which is taken from the covering letter as it's made even more explicit there. (emphasis in bold is theirs)

We will, where possible, seek to syndicate your work to other publications and will pay you 50% of all syndication fees we receive if it is sold as an individual piece.

So thumbs up to the Telegraph for at least addressing this issue and explaining it - to a degree.

I was pretty pleased to discover that my feature also got published in the Sydney Morning Herald a week or two later. I was looking forward to 50% of the syndication fees as promised in the T&Cs documents.

Several weeks later after an unreturned call and an unanswered email I got through to the syndication department and was informed that unfortunately my piece was taken from a feed subscription service that the SMH takes from the Telegraph. So it wasn't sold as an individual piece. So... no cash.

I was told that I could request my features not be included in feeds so that this kind of thing wouldn't happen. I did so. (Why on earth would any writer want their work republished without further payment?)

Why no fee for articles published via the feed service? The impression I was given was that they couldn't keep tabs on which features a particular subscribing newspaper published and it was too difficult to administer. Is that my problem? I don't think so. What makes a piece published via a subscription feed any less worthy of a cut of the syndication fee?

It's ironic that in attempting to make some moves in the right direction, the Telegraph sensitised me sufficiently to this situation to spur me to write this blog post. But I think it's time all newspapers and magazines set our proper terms and conditions that state explicitly the situation with copyright and syndication. Frankly it's gone on long enough and it's lousy business practice. Of course most freelancers won't complain because they are dependent on these very publications for their next commission. Last thing they want to do is risk pissing them off and losing any further work opportunuities.

And this kind of thing is not just limited to syndication on the sly. What about newspapers republishing features commissioned for the print edition on their own websites too? (I should point out that the covering letter I got from the Telegraph made clear that they would publish my work on 'any platform' they chose, so they cover their backs on this point.) A while back getting stuff reproduced on a newspaper's website as well as in print was kind of handy - something I was happy to just let happen. It meant I could link to it to show people examples of my work. And the websites of all these publications were running at a loss. But these days this stuff is making people money. The Guardian's annual revenues from online in 2009/10 were £37 million according to PaidContent. The Guardian plans to make digital its main focus going forward, not print.

That huge back catalogue of features commissioned for the print editions of these publications and quietly published online too is now making them a lot of cash. I wonder what proportion of the content on their websites is not really theirs to publish? Where no agreement exists otherwise, does the copyright not remain with the author once the print edition has run their feature?

What's the worst example you've experienced of this kind of thing? And the best? Anyone else doing a better job than the Telegraph?

Here's the second of two guest posts from Mike Gerrard about making money from travel websites. Make sure you check out his first post about making money with Adsense too if you haven't already.

Ebooks
I added an ebook hotel guide to our Pacific Coast Highway site in March 2010, as an experiment, and it sold just under 1000 copies in its first year. No ‘real’ publisher could afford to put something that only sold 1000 copies, but if your website has built up decent traffic, you can do it. The ebook was only short and sold for $4.99, but almost all of that income comes directly to you. Not long after I did the ebook, Amazon launched CreateSpace in the USA, which allows you to publish your own printed books using Print on Demand. They then allowed you to upload your own books to the Kindle, and other publishers followed suit. So the experimental little ebook went onto Kindle, into print, onto the Nook, into the Apple Store, and sells several copies a day from those various sources, on top of the ebook sales direct from our website. I recently updated and expanded it for a 2011 edition, which is already selling better than the 2010 edition.

So even if someone has never heard of or visited our website, but goes to Amazon and searches for something about the Pacific Coast Highway, they’ll find our book alongside Lonely Planet and the rest.

Affiliate Income
Affiliate income is where your website receives a commission for income generated by a click on your site. The amounts paid vary enormously, but they can generate another healthy income stream. The way they work is simple. You apply to join an affiliate scheme, such as Amazon, and then the link you put into the page which takes the visitor to Amazon also includes your personal affiliate code. This ensures that if the visitor then buys the book, you get a percentage. A book may not earn you much, but if someone books a round-the-world flight or an expensive hotel room for two weeks in New York, it is money well worth having. There are many companies operating affiliate schemes, which enable you to put ads or links on your site from numerous big names like BA, Air France, Expedia, or TripAdvisor.

For me, affiliate income doesn’t work yet. The perceived wisdom is that you need to have something in the region of 100,000 PVs a month before you notice anything significant, and we’re not quite there yet. I do have some affiliate accounts but the income has been minimal. However, other people do report success on much fewer PVs than that. One colleague recently made £350 from one affiliate flight sale, and David Whitley, who publishes both www.AustraliaFlightBargains.com and www.Bestflightsales.com, does make money this way.

Book Reviews
When I first added some book reviews with an affiliate link to the book’s Amazon page, I earned nothing for months. I almost gave up bothering. But eventually the income did start to come in, and almost every day now I earn a little something from Amazon. What’s important is that you get a commission on everything that someone buys in the Amazon session generated by the click from your site. So if they decide to buy a netbook and a netbook case for their trip, along with a guidebook, then you get a commission on everything. And that did happen to us recently. I’ve also earned commissions because people have bought things like cat litter, Yorkshire Gold Tea, 365 Sex Positions, a box of 100 screws (not connected with the previous purchase), The Modern New Testament, Michael Jackson CDs and re-usable ice cubes. Unfortunately you don’t know who bought what, so there’s no chance to add another income stream - blackmail.

Advertising
I don’t chase adverts for our websites, but that’s because it’s not something I want - or have time - to do. But it is another way to bring in income. Elsewhere on Travelblather Chris Caplow, who publishes www.andalucia.com, says that private advertising sales are far more valuable to him than AdSense. Even so, I was approached by a whale-watching company who wanted to advertise on the PCH site, so while it only amounts to $400 a year, that’s not bad for something that only took me about 30 minutes to implement.

So there you have just some of the ways you can make money from a travel content website. I haven’t even touched on some of the other important factors for me. One is the independence it gives you from editors and publishers. I haven’t pitched a story idea to a newspaper or magazine for ages - at least a year, probably longer. Another is that the whole adventure is great fun. I love building website pages, writing my own stories, and watching the income grow. Not long ago Tom Brosnahan told me that he was now a very happy man, as he got to do the two things he enjoyed most in life, alongside travelling - building websites and spending time with his family.

What’s not to like?

My recent post about the travel content website Simonseeks and the problems it's been facing monetizing its content despite large amounts of investment set off a flurry of brilliant comments about how to make money from writing about travel on-line. Here's the first of two follow up guest posts from Mike Gerrard - who is doing just that. Making money from travel content.  Thanks  for your insights Mike!

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In December 2007 I earned my first money from Google AdSense for my first travel content website, www.Pacific-Coast-Highway-Travel.com. It was a massive $1.47.  I was very slow building up the site because it’s something I do when I have some spare time. It still only has 151 pages indexed on Google, and that includes housekeeping and other pages which carry no adverts. Even so, the income has steadily grown. In January 2011 it was over $500 for the first time. In February it was over $600, in March over $700 and in April over $800 (so the Google Panda change did us no harm at all).

When I began the site I heard a lot of cynical comments. Some people said no-one could make money from a travel site because they had a blog and it earned peanuts. Others said they didn’t click on ads so didn’t believe a site that relied on ad-clicks could make money. One travel writer I know, who I encouraged to start his own site, said ‘come back and tell me when it’s making money’. I never did go back and tell him, but that same person is now building his own site, though now I’m two sites ahead of him, as I’m working on two more: www.Greece-Travel-secrets.com and www.Beyond-London-Travel.com.

As for the person who doesn’t click on ads - well, neither do I, normally. But that doesn’t matter. Out of every 100 visitors you get, anywhere from 3-8% will click on an ad on any given day.

People do click on ads, whether Google’s or someone else’s.

Another travel writer told me that it was OK for me because I was writing mainly about California, a lucrative market. But she lived in Berlin, how could she compete? I did some checking on one of Google’s many useful tools and discovered that ad rates for Berlin hotels, for one example, are just as high as for Los Angeles hotels. I do sometimes feel that people look for excuses not to have a go, that some people have already made their minds up that it won’t or can’t work. Well, their loss.

I wasn’t cynical because I knew two people who were making considerable money from their travel content websites. They were my heroes and gurus: Tom Brosnahan of www.Turkeytravelplanner.com, and Durant Imboden of www.EuropeForVisitors.com. Both sites have several thousand pages now, and while I don’t know how much they earn, a combination of rumour and mathematics suggests comfortable 6-figure incomes.

Niche Markets
There are other cynics who say that the web is overloaded with travel sites, and you can’t compete with the likes of TripAdvisor. Well no, you can’t. So you don’t. There are plenty of travel niches waiting to be explored, and ever travel writer is an expert in something, and usually several somethings. It was my wife’s idea to try doing the Pacific Coast Highway, as she’d written three stories about PCH for her SW USA travel pages on Suite101. Month after month, those three pieces were her three most visited pages, by a long way. There was no decent PCH site around, although there were several very good sites about Route 66. So we decided that should be our niche. We’d give it a go, and if it failed, it failed. But we had to do something, as print markets including our regular guidebook work were shrinking.

Site Build-It!
There are many ways to build a website but we had, at that point, luckily stumbled upon a service called Site Build-It! (SBI). I’ve already written about it, so won’t repeat what you can read here.

Why do we pay them $299 a year for each site, when you can use many other cheaper and even free services? The difference is that most services only allow you to build a website. Anyone can do that. SBI teaches you how to build a commercially successful website, and the initial $299 investment with them was the best chance we ever took.

I actually signed up with them with the intention of building a crime writing website, crime writing being another of my passions. But SBI asks you to come up with three ideas for potential websites, and crunch some numbers to see which of them is the most commercially viable. I did my crime writing idea, an idea for a travel site about London, and my wife’s PCH idea. The numbers crunched far more profitably for PCH than the other two. SBI taught us how to look for niches that were neither too big (meaning more competition, less profit) nor too small (less competition, but smaller advertising rates). No matter what area of travel you write about, somewhere there’s a sweet-spot for a website. And no, it isn’t too late. It’s never too late.

AdSense
AdSense provides about 2/3 of our income at the moment, and currently brings in just under £500 a month. It’s far from being a living wage yet, but the growth in the last two years has been so huge that this might well happen before too long. AdSense is easy to implement, and once the ads are up there you can just ignore them and be happy to know that you’re earning money 365 days a year, and even when you’re asleep. It’s nice to go off on a trip and come back to find you’ve earned a few hundred pounds, even though you’ve not lifted a finger.

But there's lots more to it than just AdSense. In my next post I’ll be covering some of them – in particular ebooks, affiliate income, book reviews and direct advertising.

What's been your experience of monetizing your travel website? Do you use AdSense?

Be sure to read Mike's follow up post which covers more ways to make money from travel content.