#79 – How to make money from a travel blog

Or thinking “shop window” rather than “advertising platform”.

Reasons for starting a travel blog
People start up blogs about travel for many different reasons. Some want to share their travel experiences with the world, some blatantly can’t find anyone to pay for their witterings and thus put it online so that it can be read by two men and a particularly bored dog.

Blogs of professional travel writers
Of the professional travel writers that keep a blog, they generally fall into two categories. Some are excellent travel writers that like a space to share their thoughts on things, and aren’t trying to make money from it. An excellent example is that of Lara Dunston’s Cool Travel Guide – she’s a writer I have a huge amount of respect for, and she uses her blog as both a vent and an opportunity to draw attention to things that editors don’t necessarily go for.

Commercial enterprises
Others (such as Traveling Mamas) are clearly commercial enterprises – the purpose is to make money through advertising, affiliates etc.

Monetising a travel blog
I am the wrong person to ask about monetising a blog. This blog makes me a laughably feeble amount of money, and this is the nature of the beast. Regular subscribers to a blog are the ones that are least likely to click on advertising – they come for the read.

Travel planning equals clicking and booking
To make money from a website, it is best to put together a comprehensive travel planning site – the visitors to such a site will be looking for specific information and to book things. They’re far more likely to go to a couple of pages then click through on an advert.

Who is the reader?
A travel blog is highly unlikely to give a significant return in this way. But the key thing is not where the reader goes afterwards, but who the reader is.

Contact from editors
In the last week, I have been contacted by two editors who read this blog. Both have offered me some work (and some rather interesting work at that). I also happen to know that a couple of other editors I have not worked for read it – they have contacted me and told me. Alas, one doesn’t have a freelance budget and the other works in a field that I know nothing about. Even so, it can only be good news.

Shop window rather than advertising revenue
And this is why I have come to realise the real value of having a travel blog. It’s not about getting the traffic or advertising revenue - although that’s certainly a nice bonus if your readers are so inclined – it’s about giving yourself a shop window. And if people like what they see in that shop window, they may just come and ask you what’s for sale.

#78 – Make use of the active present continuous

Or strapping the reader into the rollercoaster seat.

Disclaimer
A word of warning here. Not everyone will agree with this, and some editors will possibly regard it as the worst piece of advice in history. But I think the active form of the present continuous tense really lends itself to travel writing.

Demonstration
I’ll demonstrate rather than try to explain. Here are two examples of the same intro. Which do you think reads better?

Example one
The huddle was so tight that a scrum could have broken out at any minute. A 17-stone shaven-headed man attempted to barge his way past a couple of ten year olds in order to get a closer view. Other kids tested the shoulder of their weary parents in a bid to get a height advantage.

Example two
The huddle is so tight that you half expect a scrum to break out at any minute. A 17-stone shaven-headed man is attempting to barge his way past a couple of ten year olds in order to get a closer view. Other kids are testing the sagging shoulders of their weary parents in a bid to get a height advantage.

Report vs running commentary
I prefer the latter. Others won’t, but I think it has the advantage of taking the reader to the situation and making them feel they are a part of it. Example one is a report of an incident, example two is a running commentary on an incident in progress. It’s the difference between watching breaking news of a major event and a sober studio analysis afterwards; the live match versus the highlights package.

Adding zip
Keeping writing in the active makes it more arresting - it’s more dynamic to read. And using the present continuous straps the reader into the rollercoaster seat rather than allowing them to look on at a distance. This technique isn’t always appropriate, but I feel as though it adds zip to a travel story and offers a better sense of place.

The Glamour of Travel Writing

Not so much a tip today as an insight into the life of a travel writer. I wrote this piece for Ninemsn.com.au a while back. I thought I'd republish it here, as I think it serves as a superb put-off for anyone thinking that the life of a travel writer is all glamour...

Sunday
Day spent trip-planning. Have articles to write on Spain, France, Monaco and Morocco and somehow have to pull them all together in one trip. This involves interminable negotiations in three languages I don't speak with five separate tourist boards, booking flights from odd airports at ungodly hours and praying that it all comes off. Please let the tourist boards offer me free hotel rooms and please don't let them fill every minute of the day with guided tours of really boring places that no-one would want to read about.

Monday
Currently researching a guide to James Bond film locations across the world. Getting the info on where is easy enough, the problem is needing to know what happens in each film. And that means watching every single bloody Bond movie, all 21 of the buggers, in the space of a fortnight. Today it's Licence to Kill and The Living Daylights.
Conclude that Timothy Dalton was a somewhat underrated 007, then set about finding out exactly which place doubled as the Mujahideen hideout in Afghanistan. It's Morocco, apparently.
Google my own name, partly to see if anyone's printed my stories yet and partly out of sheer vanity.

Tuesday
I've been putting it off for ages, but at some point I'm going to have to write that 2500 words on a stunningly average Italian city that I felt about as much affection for as I do for rocket salad.
Just a few vitally important things to do first ... like read every newspaper on the Internet, do some shopping, clean the bathroom, watch the entire fourth series of Peep Show on DVD, Google my own name seven times, book a random flight to Lithuania. Damn. How did it get to 7pm?
Watch Roger Moore mug his way through Octopussy and The Man with the Golden Gun.

Wednesday
My editor wants a piece on wacky theme parks around the world. I hate theme parks, haven't been to one since I was 12 and don't know of any suitably crazy ones offhand. This, naturally, means a whole day of typing vaguely useful phrases into search engines and hoping something good comes up.
This is our dirty little secret — half the time we're not jaunting off around the world seeing weird and wonderful places, we're hunched over a computer, copying everybody else's lists.
Bear this in mind next time you see a piece on the world's Top 10 Beaches or Luxury Hotels. The writer has probably been to two or three of them at best. And on the menu tonight, Moonraker. No, I just can't do it. There's a line and that line is Moonraker.

Thursday
Just about finish writing about a place I went to six years ago, have virtually no memory of and took no notes about. It's a triumph of vague, flowery description, cheap jokes and meandering tangents that really have nothing to do with the place.
Pack in a blind panic and rush to the airport. Once there, realise I've left my coat, gloves and hat at home and my flight and hotel details in my coat pocket. Desperately phone a friend, begging him to hack into my e-mail account and tell me the names of the hotels and the e-ticket reference number.
Finally arrive in Bratislava at about 11pm. It's minus six degrees, with a wind-chill factor of minus 13. Feel like crying and wonder if there are any shops open that might sell big coats and furry hats. There aren't.

Friday
Wake up at 6am in the hotel that still thinks it's 1962 and the Communists are still in charge. It really is the most ugly, repulsive Soviet-era monstrosity imaginable and has service to match. But it's cheap and so am I.
Powerwalk aimlessly in the direction of the train station in order to get to Brno in the Czech Republic. Get there with seconds to spare, internalising my anger towards whoever makes Slovakian signposts.
Spend much of the day in Brno looking for the technology museum, which appears to be hidden behind a barrier of tower blocks and dual carriageways. After three hours of fruitless hunting, I give up and retire to an Internet cafe. Have been offered a freebie jaunt to a hotel at a business park in Rotherham, South Yorkshire. That's as glam as it gets...
Spend a bit more time Googling my own name. Anything to avoid having to go back outside into the Siberian blizzard for a look around the castle. This is my karmic payback for that freebie villa in the Cook Islands, isn't it?

Saturday
Arrive in Vienna, a city I've never had any previous affection for. Haven't lined up anything in advance for once, so I'm freestyling like a proper traveller. Decide to go and annoy the woman at Tourist Information by asking if there's anything "weird" I can go and see. She looks puzzled and then suggests the Haus der Musik, while handing me a mountain of leaflets.
This is part and parcel of the job. It's no good writing about Vienna's musical heritage, lovely architecture or famous dancing horses. They've all been covered in staggering depth before. My job (well, it is if I want to make any money out of it) is to find a new slant.
Mercifully, the leaflets are far more useful than the woman. How can you possibly respond to a request for weird attractions and forget to mention a Funeral Museum? There are a few more along the same absurd and bizarrely specific lines, too, so the whole day is spent hopping between wacky museums. And a more fabulous, career-affirming day I couldn't wish for.

#77 – Make the most of your own knowledge

Or selling common sense to where it isn’t common sense.

Expertise?
As a travel writer, I am something of an all-rounder rather than a specialist. I know some places quite well (and Australia very well), but I’d hardly call myself an expert on anything. This doesn’t mean that some of my editors don’t think I’m an expert, however.

Australian knowledge
I sell a lot about Australia to Australian publications, but there are also publications in the UK that will come to me as an expert on Oz. I’m not really that knowledgeable, but my knowledge of the country is vastly superior to that of most people (including the editors). I might not have the absolute inside line, but it’s good enough for the purposes.

Budget airlines in Europe
Similarly, I write a lot about Europe for Australian publications. And a lot of what I’m doing seems like common sense to me. For example, I’ve just done a piece on budget airlines in Europe and where to look for the cheapest flights. Many Europeans will already know this – but not many Australians do.

Common sense?
The same applies to pieces I’ve done on the vagaries of the British train system. Most people in Britain know to book trains online in advance or face exorbitant prices. Aussies don’t, however. What may seem common sense here isn’t common sense there. I don’t need to be an expert on the UK rail network – the basics that I do know are enough to make me SEEM like an expert through Australian eyes.

Applied logic
This is a logic that can easily be applied elsewhere. Americans probably don’t know the best ways to find cheap car hire in the UK. New Zealanders probably don’t know anything about budget airlines in Canada. South Africans probably have zero knowledge about getting good value taxi fares in Dubai. A local in each of those destinations can easily appear to be an expert by explaining what is common knowledge in their home town, but a mystery on the other side of the world.

#76 – How to find anniversaries

Or how to avoid being a history sponge.

Historical information
In my previous tip, I suggested using forthcoming anniversaries as a hook to hang destination stories on. But of course, you’ve got to find those anniversaries. And not everyone has a brain that soaks up historical information like a sponge. I’m not bad for it, but I’ll concede that I don’t know which year the Panama Canal was built in (for example) without looking it up.

Sheep-like travel publications
The first method I would use is to read other travel stories. If Paper X is running a piece on the 100th anniversary of the building of the Incredible Bongo Towers, it doesn’t necessarily mean you’ve missed the boat. Travel publications can be a bit sheep-like, and once one decides a place is a ‘hot’ destination, others will follow. In this situation, you can always pitch a similar story to Magazine Y or Website Z.

Year searches on Wikipedia
Another useful source is Wikipedia. Simply bung in a year (say 1909 or 1959 for anniversaries this year) and a list of events that happened then comes up.

Date-a-Base
The best resource I have found, however, is the Date-a-Base from Ideas4writers.co.uk. It’s pretty darned comprehensive and while it doesn’t point the story ideas out to you, it’s fairly easy to come up with some after reading through it. It costs GBP4.99, but I’ve found it an extremely worthwhile investment.

#75 – Use anniversaries as a hook

Or the joy of nice round numbers.

Travel editor difficulties
One of the difficulties of being a travel editor is creating a reason for running a story on a certain destination. In all honesty, there’s no real reason to run that quite nice story about flea markets in Paris – it’s just personal choice. And frankly, it doesn’t matter which issue it goes in – it’s hardly topical, is it?

Anniversaries and topicality
So editors love to have something topical. They like to have stories on places that are in the news, and they often end up running things related to anniversaries. Look out over this year, and you’ll see plenty of stories with tenuous links to some anniversary or other.

From Galileo to the Berlin Wall
I should know – I’ve got commissions to write about some of them. It’s 400 years since Galileo Galilei invented his telescope; it’s 200 years since Charles Darwin was born; it’s 90 years since the Nazi party was founded and it’s 20 years since the Berlin Wall came down.

Nice round numbers
In all honesty, most of these are not that significant, but humans buy into anniversaries in a big way. If it’s a nice round number of years since a major event, people will always find some excuse to celebrate it. And travel editors are interested in what people are celebrating. Thus 1,000 meandering words on the lovely English town of Shrewsbury suddenly takes on more urgency when Charles Darwin was born there 200 years ago.

Keeping track
As a writer, it’s always worth keeping track of anniversaries that are coming up. If you can get in there before everyone else starts writing about them, you’ve got a high chance of making a successful pitch.

#74 – Notebooks vs recorders

Or making record time...

Recording devices
One of this blog’s regular readers, Ms Lucy, makes an interesting point:

“Just wondering, do you ever use a recording device, besides the notepad? Someone suggested this to me recently, and I'm not sure whether I'd feel self-conscious using this...Then again, so many people walk around talking to themselves on their 'blue Tooth'...”

Conducting interviews
My answer is that I do own a recording device, but I rarely use it. When I do, it’s for conducting interviews – it means I’ve got an accurate record of what has been said, and it allows me to listen properly to the interviewee without having to concentrate on scribbling everything they say down.

Listening to recordings
Even then, I’ll rarely listen to the recording afterwards. I’ll generally only require one or two quotes, and I generally recognise what these will be at the time and write them down.

Braying into a mobile phone
But for other circumstances, I think it’s best to just stick to the notepad. Firstly there’s the self-consciousness aspect. Secondly, I’d put someone walking around a museum talking into a Dictaphone in the same category as those arseholes that bray constantly into their mobile phone throughout a train journey.

The process of writing notes
I also find that the process of writing the notes is important. For some reason, writing something down makes it sink into the memory. In a way, I’m writing notes so that I don’t have to read them.

No fast forwards and pauses
Most importantly, using a notepad instead of an electronic recording device can make for massive time savings when it comes to writing the piece up. Why? When it’s recorded, you’re constantly having to fast forward, rewind and pause because we talk faster than we write. You also have to listen through to get all the information and check that it’s the bit you want.

Quicker with the notepad
Compare that to a notepad: it’s all there in front of you, you can flick to the bit you want without having to skip around to guess the right time and everything is spelt out. Do you really want to have to spell foreign word while you’re talking into your mechanical aid? It’s far quicker with the notepad, and far more functional.