Make Money on a Travel Blog

I was recently asked by a friend who is going travelling this summer, if they should set up a blog about it to make some money, that will pay for their extended holiday:

My Advice to her is below:

I think writing about your trip is a great idea and yes you can make money from it. I would however cation you if you think it will make you loads of cash quickly.

It is not that it can't, but I do it full time and it is a full time job. It also took me over a year of doing it before I got to the point where I was earning enough so that I could quit my day job and work on it full time.

If however you just want to earn some pocket money - You could easily set up a blog and then add some Google Adsense and Affiliate advertising onto it. This is not to say that in the future you could not earn a living from it, but this summer may be too soon to really make good money from a blog.

Nerdy Nomad: http://www.nerdynomad.com/ is good for inspiration and plenty of advice as she pays for her travels with her blog

Free Blogging Platforms
Besides wordpress.com, that this blog is hosted on, Google have a good free blog host: www.bolgger.com

Build Free Websites

For SEO purposes, I am always on the lookout for "places" to add content on the web, get it ranked and then point it towards my main sites. If these "places" are free, so much the better.

There are a number of sites that offer you the chance to build and Create a free website, some of the better ones include:

• http://www.yola.com/
• http://www.webs.com/
• http://www.weebly.com/
• http://www.wix.com/

Of these, wix is my least favourite as it builds the site in "flash" which looks nice, but is pretty rubbish in regards to getting high rankings on the search engines.

GUK Publishing

It has been a while since my last post, mainly because I have been really busy and as such, plenty has happened.

The biggest news is the start of GUK Publishing, a company that I, along with two other guys have started.

It is still very much in it's infancy, so much so that the name is not 100% fixed yet and we don't yet have a website, but the whole project is very exciting. As the name suggests we will be publishing useful content on the web and we have already stared on a few projects:

• Weddings in Newbury
• Hotels in Newbury

Both websites focus on local business and aim to provide useful information to the people of Newbury or those visiting Newbury (in the case of the hotels site)

Guest Posts
All our projects will also allow guest posting, guest articles should be relevant and useful. The advantage for us is good quality unique content from a different perspective and the advantage for you is a link back to your site on the "about the author" section. So if you would like to write an article for either, please feel free to contact me.

My Love Hate Relationship wih Google

Recently Google decided that it no longer liked my Best Binoculars & Binocular Reviews website and keywords that I was previously ranking in the first 5 places for, were now down to the tenth page or worse.

I was totally gutted, because I have been doing a lot of work on this website for many months now and it was slowly starting to pay off with the traffic to it, steadily increasing and as such so has to has my income

So what I had done to incur the wrath of Google?

In my opinion nothing, because I am looking at this site as a long term project I am purposely keeping away from any shady ways to improve my search engine rankings and producing quality unique contenet that I feel is genuinely useful should you be looking for advice on binoculars.

I did wonder if I may have too many internal links on the homepage, Google's own Webmaster Guidelines recommend that you keep it to less than a hundred and mine is pretty close to that, but surely this is not the worst crime in SEO?

After racking my brains and not coming up with anything and as a last resort, I submitted a Reconsideration Request from my Google Webmaster Tools account. This was done in frustration more than anything else as I have written to 'Big Brother' in the past and never received a reply and so was not expecting much.

Five days later
Yeagh \o/ - all my rankings have now returned and I even have a very generic reply from Google that says:


----------------------------

We've processed your reconsideration request for http://www.bestbinocularsreviews.com/ July 30, 2009

We received a request from a site owner to reconsider how we index the following site: www.bestbinocularsreviews.com.

We've now reviewed your site. When we review a site, we check to see if it's in violation of our Webmaster Guidelines. If we don't find any problems, we'll reconsider our indexing of your site. If your site still doesn't appear in our search results, check our Help Center for steps you can take.
-----------------------------

I still do not know what (if anything) I did was wrong, but at least now I now once again have people visiting my website although I have a horrible feeling it may happen again.

So if someone in the reads this from the Google Search team reads this, thanks guys, but to improve it, why not tell us why it happened, this would help people who are genuinely not trying to trick you to to produce better websites for your search engine and for the billions of people who use it.

Battle of the Films

Pink Panther vs. Street Fighter vs. Wolverine vs. Star Trek

In the next few months there are a few new films due to be released:

• The Pink Panther 2 (Feb 13th)
• Friday the 13th (Feb 13th)
• Street Fighter: The Legend of Chun-Li (Feb 27th)
• X-Men Origins: Wolverine (May 1st)
• Star Trek (May 8th)

So before their release, do you think it is possible to tell which film will be the most popular?



Most Popular Film Search on Google
According to Google Insights for Search, over the past 30 days, slightly more people are searching for Street Fighter than Star Trek. If you combine the searches for Wolverine and X-men, it shows that this film is pretty popular in as far as web searches, with the Pink Panther lagging a little behind.

I am not sure if the amount of people searching for the films on the web will have any bearing on the box office, I guess only time will tell, but it is pretty interesting all the same...

Darren Rowse Video Interview

A little nerdy, but interesting interview with Darren Rowse, owner of ProBlogger and Digital-Photography-School blogs, which I have actually guest posted on before.

He has taught me loads, not only about blogging, but SEO and marketing in general and it is always good to listen to what he has to say. In this video he mostly talks about what it takes to make a successful blog. Most of it is obvious, things like always producing quality, worthwile content, but there are other gems in there aswell.

Darren according to Wikipedia:
In November 2002, while working as a part-time minister, for an on-line department store, and as a casual labourer, Rowse started LivingRoom.org.au, a blog about living in Australia, religion (mainly the emerging church movement), politics and other topics that he found interesting.

Rowse contributes to around 20 different blogs, although he is only actively blogging on two, - including topic specific blogs such as the Athens Olympics and the Michael Jackson court case - he runs with other bloggers.

His two personal blogs are Digital Photography Blog with reviews on digital cameras due to lack of views of his own photography, and ProBlogger which features tips on blogging. These two blogs get around 15,000-20,000 page views a day and over $20,000 in total ad revenue a month. Rowse attempts to contribute around 25 blog posts a month.

As of 30 January 2007, ProBlogger was listed as number seven on Technorati's most favorited blogs list and number 48 on the most linked to blog.

In 2006, Rowse was awarded the Best Web Development Weblog blog award in 2006 for ProBlogger.

Rowse is currently the vice president of training and development for b5media, the blog network he founded in September 2005 with fellow bloggers Jeremy Wright, Shai Coggins and Duncan Riley. The blog network claims to have over 200 blogs, and one of the largest new media networks in the world with one million page views a day in 2006

Translate Your Blog into 34 Languages

I stumbled upon the Global Translator yesterday - A plugin for WordPress blogs that will translate your blog posts into 34 languages with the added bonus of being completely free!

I know that it is not going to help this blog, but I think it could really help my travel orientated blogs like on The Safari Holiday Guide and Beach Holiday Guide where through analytics I have noticed not only many readers coming from non European countries, but also that they then view my pages through the Google Translator.


For more information and to download the Global Translator follow the link below:
Global Translator

What we searched for in 2008

Towards the end of the year Google, publishes it's Zeitgeist, letting us know what internet users are searching for on their search engine.

As usual there are some pretty obvious terms as well as a few interesting ones:

The most searched term for Google users in the UK was Facebook while the BBC came second and its iPlayer service was the fastest rising query. Social networks accounted for four out of the top 10 global fastest-rising queries while the US election held everyone's interest all around the globe.

Fastest Rising Search Terms (Global)

1. sarah palin
2. beijing 2008
3. facebook login
4. tuenti
5. heath ledger
6. obama
7. nasza klasa
8. wer kennt wen
9. euro 2008
10. jonas brothers

A nice feature of the Zeitgeist is that you can look into what people are searching for in different regions around the globe. Unfortunately for me they don't feature Zimbabwe, but the statistics for South Africa are still fairly interesting:

Top Newsworthy Searches from people in South Africa

1. load shedding
2. fifa 2010 world cup
3. beijing olympics
4. barack obama
5. global warming
6. euro 2008
7. xenophobia
8. adt (home and office security service)
9. zimbabwe election
10. cope (congress of the people political party)

For me it was interesting to see that the elections in Zimbabwe were obviously pretty important to the people of South Africa, it's a pity that their government did not seem to feel the same way and continued with their stance of "quiet diplomacy"


Top Sports Teams (South Africa)

1. the sharks
2. kaizer chiefs
3. the lions
4. mamelodi sundowns
5. bafana bafana
6. orlando pirates
7. stormers
8. the springboks
9. cheetahs
10. proteas

You can check out all the most popular terms from around the globe on Google's Zeitgeist

Seth Godin's Funnel

Seth Godin, Funnel? Seth who and what funnel you may ask, it will all become clear in a few minutes, so let's Start with the who:

Who is Seth Godin?
No he is not a Jean-Luc Picard stunt double or a mentor to all those with a shave head (me included), he is according to Wikipedia an American author of business books and a popular speaker with appearances at Google, TED and a number of charities. Godin popularized the topic of permission marketing.

He is also the creator of Squidoo - a community website which allows users to create pages which are called "lenses" on subjects on just about anything.

What About The Funnel?
Seth's funnel is a theory whereby instead of spending tons of money on advertising and marketing your company or product as in the traditional way, you can turn it all around and use the power of people to turn the "funnel" into a megaphone, thus getting people to shout about your business or product.

The web is an excellent place to do this and it can even be done for free especially with all the social media sites out there, the Facebook, Myspace, Squidoo and Flickr's of this world.

Seth goes on to say about his funnel: "Once you see the funnel, it's easy to understand how valuable your existing customers are, and easy to think about how you want to spend time and money in promoting and building your site. Most marketers are running a flat campaign. Embracing the funnel changes the way you treat people. And treating different people differently is what consumers demand."

You can download his ebook for free: Flipping the Funnel and in my book, even though it was published in 2006 is still highly relevant and a must read for anyone interested in marketing.

Google releases Friend Connect

It has been announced on the Official Google Blog that Google Friend Connect is now available

After expressing my interest by signing up a few months ago, I received an invitation yesterday for Friend Connect from Google.

The invite basically said: "We appreciate your interest in Google Friend Connect and would now like to invite you to try the service. You can get started by visiting our homepage and clicking the "Set up a new site" button."

So what is Friend Connect?
Friend Connect is another way of keeping in touch and connecting with people that have similar interests as yourself. It hopes to make easy for people to instantly connect with other people on websites that they already enjoy and visit.

The goal of friend connect is to foster an open social web by using common standards like OpenID and OAuth. Websites that use Friend Connect on them will become OpenSocial containers, capable of running applications created by the OpenSocial developer community. So because it is open source, we should see many different applications being developed in the future, so who knows where all this will go..

It will be interesting to see in a year or so if Friend Connect has become the next big thing.

Christmas Fancy Dress Search Terms

I do SEO work for Jokers Masquerade, the UK's largest on-line retailer of fancy dress and Halloween costumes and often use sources like Hitwise, the web's leading competitive intelligence service and Google Trends to check what are the most popular keywords people are using on the major search engines like Google and Yahoo at any given time. Hitwise has the advantage of allowing you to break this down into different or even customisable industries.

We use this data to to make sure that there is enough stock available for the most popular types of costumes that people are looking for as well as optimising the website so as to make sure that the website ranks well in the natural listings on the search engines for the most commonly searched for terms.

In late September and October there is a large increase in searches of Halloween and fancy dress related keywords like zombie, witches and ghost costumes. I have now just finished researching the fastest rising keywords within the fancy dress industry over November so far. The list of keywords below is not the most searched for terms, but rather the keywords that are have the biggest increase in how often they are being used. Many of the Christmas related search terms are pretty predictable, but there are also a few surprises:

1. santa costume
2. pirates costumes
3. showgirl fancy dress
4. santa suits
5. indian costume
6. egyptian costumes
7. christmas fancy dress outfits
8. cinderella costume
9. cow costume
10. mermaid fancy dress
11. wild west fancy dres
12. bugsy malone costumes
13. convict costume
14. santa hats

I best make sure our purchasing department have enough cow costumes in stock this year!

If only SEO was this simple: Google Custom search

Google have just announced their new SearchWiki where you can customise your search results by moving your favorite or useful websites to the top of the search results. You can even delete your least useful websites from the search results altogether.

I spend most of my working day trying to get the website that I am working on to rank as high as possible for a particular search phrase. To do this there are a gazillon things that need to be done and it takes plenty of time and effort as well as a little luck to get to the top for competitive search terms. Sigh if only it was this easy to get to the top, I could spend the rest of the day at the beach!

Obviously it is not going to be this easy because to move your search results up and down the list you need to be logged into your Google account and only you will see your personalized results.

I do think though that sometime in the future, Google will look at phrases that have been customised by large amounts of people and tweak their results to match what most people think are good websites for that term.

For more info and a short video on how to use it, check out the Official Google Blog: SearchWiki: make search your own