Travel Media

Archive for May, 2009

Ever wondered where travel bloggers get their money to sustain their travels?

They get the money from writing about and taking pictures of their travels. Basically, they get rich from traveling the world and enjoying their lives. They just document it so that others can read about and enjoy the adventure.

Travel bloggers have taken advantage of some of the most lucrative and easiest business models today, getting rich via Internet blogging.

You have to have at least basic Internet skills, decent writing skills, and a bit of marketing flair. Although, let me stress that all of these can be learned as you go along with your blogging. And the further you blog, the better you become and the more traffic your site will get.

Let me give you an idea on how to blog about your travels and get rich while doing it.

1.    Own a Blogsite

Not the free ones like, Blogger, Myspace, etc. Buy a domain. It’s just about 15 bucks. Chump change of an investment to get started raking millions.

All you need to do after that is to install a wordpress theme, put some content and there you go. Money machine!

2.    Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and getting traffic

If you’re not sure what SEO means, don’t worry. You can get help with this by researching it on the Internet. Basically, you just make your site easy to find around the World Wide Web.

Link building, social bookmarking, joining social media networks, and enhancing page ranking… these are some of the process of making your site more accessible. It is one of the most important steps so you will gain an audience and eventually a stream of income.

3.    Implement PPC advertising in your site

To get started, put some pay per click advertising on your site. You earn money when readers click on the ad. The more traffic you have the more chances that someone will click the ad. It is free and can be used immediately. You can use Adsense from Google.

Pay per click won’t make you rich but it will help bring in a steady stream of passive income.

4.    Be an affiliate marketer

Once you have a steady stream of traffic. What you have to do is advertise an affiliate product. When your reader buys the product you earn a commission for every sale that was referred from your site. You do this by promoting the product just be sure that it relates to your blog posts and content. Marketing a totally irrelevant product is silly and might turn off your audience.

Commission rates are usually high. Mostly, more than half of it will go to your earnings. Affiliate marketing is very profitable indeed.

5.    Create and sell your own product

If you have that entrepreneurial spirit, things can get interesting and even more profitable. It is your own product you will sell. You get all the money not just the cut from sales.

The tricky part is deciding what kind of product you are going to create and sell. For starters, you can write a book, create a video, or engineer an offbeat invention. Be creative.

The proliferating travel industry of different countries and places provide an excellent opportunity for those who love to explore various attractions of the world. And with the increase in number of travel enthusiasts around the world, now there are wonderful opportunities for those who wish to pen down their experiences. The idea is to make travel guides and manuals which will not only provide knowledge to other travellers, but will also fetch you good money.

There are many organisations that have found immense potential in promoting travel guides and tourism in different countries and regions. Some of these organisations focus on only the major attractions of the world like Mount Rushmore and The Grand Canyon, while some focus on the swanky cities of the world like New York etc. Some are country or continent specific like Australia and Singapore and some do not have a finite range, they just take on the whole world at large.

You can either associate with them and start making travel guides for these organisations or you can also opt to work for different travel magazines and other journals and periodicals where they promote travelling to some extent. You can get in touch with many online travel guides and journals and provide them the manuscript of your experiences or you can also have your own blog and share your journey with the whole wide world.

There are multiple resources where you can publish your travel guides. But remember that your travel guides should follow certain rules which can be either tacit or explicit. For instance, you should keep the language simple and comprehensive. Your readers should understand what you are trying to say. You should also keep it interesting so that you can excite your readers about the place you are discussing. Plus there are other guidelines that frame travel guides which you should adhere to.

In some ways travel writing online is similar to that in the print world. Readers still want the facts about a location, maybe an interesting perspective, and some useful advice. However, this doesn’t mean you can just write the same article for both a magazine and a website. There are some important differences.

The first has to do with how the readers find your article or page. They see it in the table of contents of a magazine, but online, people find articles using search engines. A man types in “hiking in yellowstone,” for example. Perhaps your web page is about exactly that. But if it’s titled “My Weekend Wilderness Walk,” he’ll probably never find what you wrote. You have to optimize your writing for the keywords that people are using when they search online – a whole topic in itself.

This is true whether you’re building a page, or writing an article for free distribution. But for the latter there are still other necessities. People not only have to find what you’ve written, but they also have to take the next step: visit your website. Otherwise you get little value from distributing your articles.

Whether submitting your article to an online directory, then, or to another website, you need to include a working link to your own site. You also need to give the reader a reason to click it. The link will normally be in the “author’s resource box” at the end of the article, sometimes titled, “About the Author.” This is where you get to “advertise.”

A good article is not enough. You have to sell the reader on visiting your site, because even the best travel writing may not do this for you. How do you do this then? In the resource box.

If you have a free ebook, you might say: “Click here for the free ebook, ‘10 Tips For Traveling To Spain.’” You have to at least make the web site sound interesting, perhaps with a tease like, “Discover the insider secrets of getting cheap plane tickets at…” Of course good writing alone may build your reputation, but for maximum value you need to get that click through to the site.

Advantages Of Online Travel Writing

The examples above are not about selling your articles, because that isn’t the way to make travel writing pay on the internet – a big difference from the print world. You may be able to sell your articles to some sites, but the pay is generally poor. This is why writing online is normally all about promoting your website and/or products.

How do you make money then? Here is a typical scenario: I write an article on traveling to Mexico, and submit it to fifteen article directories, where it’s taken and used on other websites as well. Eventually it’s in forty places online. In the resource box at the end of the article, readers are promised something valuable or interesting if they click that link and visit my website. On the site they can buy my ebook, click on the ads which I get paid for, or visit the companies who pay me a commission when I send a buyer to them. Here are four advantages of putting your travel writing online:

1. No need to sell your writing. You never have to find a magazine or newspaper to buy your articles, and no editor can reject your writing. Build a website and sell your own ebooks, or sell ad space, or link to affiliate products, and you can start making money in a few weeks.

2. Small investment. There is no need to even spend money sending out your manuscripts. You can start making money with your travel writing this week by creating a free blog where you post tips and promote affiliate products – no investment required. Starting a website is inexpensive as well.

3. Online articles are short. Internet attention spans aren’t very long, and directories want shorter articles for fast loading of pages. Your articles will usually be between 400 and 1000 words for these reasons. At that length, you can probably write a few good ones tonight.

4. You get to work from anywhere in the world. I’ve written articles while in a hotel room in the San Juan Mountains of Colorado and in an internet cafe in Ecuador. You can even put new pages on your website from any computer connected to the internet, wherever you are.

One benefit which is common to travel writing online or off, is the tax deductions you get. Your vacations can become deductible expenses (talk to your accountant). In fact, if you start a free blog with the aim of making money, you’re in business.