Our Blog Report, What We did This Week to Make a Better Blog

Ah my favorite time of the week. Monday’s are my days to take stock of what we did this week at the Planetd Blog and what we have in store for the weeks ahead.

First of all, it was terrible having Twitter down for most of the weekend. I was very frustrated. Saturday mornings are a time that I enjoy a coffee and read other people’s blogs. I give them a tweet and a stumble, a digg or a reddit. I will admit it, I enjoy Twitter because people know that you tweeted them and it makes me feel good that they know I am reading and paying attention. StumbleUpon, reddit and digg… I don’t think that anyone knows. I know that they are still getting the benefit  (at least I think that they are) but when I tweet someones post and then see it re-tweeted, I feel good. I can’t help it, it is the way I am made up.

I gave up on twitter for the most part this weekend, but I realized that I have really come to rely on twittering a lot and have enjoyed supporting other people’s posts as much as I enjoy tweeting my own.  Twitter does work very well for us. We get a lot of views from there, so when it is down, we do notice a bit of a change.

It did give us more time to finish editing our video for Van-tastic Adventures. We did a couple of re-shoots on Saturday because we wanted to add the infamous scene of us climbing the stairs in High Park. I really do love Dave’s interpretive dance that he has going on. I crack up every time I see him do his little back bend. We don’t know if we have a shot or not at Van-tastic, but we have certainly enjoyed the process. We loved coming up with the concept, writing a little script and shooting and editing the film. Check out our Aching for Australia video here. Leave a rating, comment or join the group and give it a  love it rating! That is only if you do love it:) We really could have done a 10 minute short with all of the ideas that we had, but we had to keep it to two minutes.

One note to all, I took a chance and used copy-written music, but I don’t recommend this at all. However, I have used “Flight of the Bumble Bee” before and it didn’t get taken down on my Peru Video so I thought it was worth the risk because it really does work with this montage and I couldn’t picture anything else that I wanted.

I am going to use Trish’s advice at TravelWritersExchange from now on though and buy music at istockphoto.com It is just too much of a worry that your hard work will be taken down off of youtube.

I have to say that the week was pretty quiet. We were busier with work and life, and didn’t seem to have as much time to dedicate to the blog. It really showed in our stats too. We dropped a couple of hundred views per day which was kind of upsetting. But hey, Blogs have their ups and downs and I do feel that my posts were a little weak last week.  We do get a lot of views from search engines and I don’t think that I wrote about what people are looking for and my tagging was lacking luster.

I am far more inspired this week so things should pick up again.

I am actually very excited because tomorrow we are starting a new series on Giving Back, Travel the World and Make a Differece. We receive so much joy visiting other countries and the people always are so welcoming and friendly. However, often the places that we visit are struggling in the world economy and many times we feel compelled to help, but don’t really know how. This series is going to explore the different ways that travelers have given back to communities and to inspire other people with ideas on how they can help as well.  Keith Jenkins of VelvetEscape has written a beautiful piece and we are thrilled to have him as our first guest writer at theplanetd.  So be sure to come back tomorrow for a visit.

We also want to thank Nomadic Matt, AndyHayes and TravelWritersExchange for your advice last week regarding information on link ads. It can be a very nerve wracking experience to make sure to do everything by the rules and we are thrilled with how it all turned out.  These three websites have been an incredible source of information for us.

We hired someone from Scriptlance to fix the SEO on our blog. He did a great job, and hopefully we will see results in one month. Scriptlance is a great place to find someone to do the things on your blog that you can’t do, or that you don’t have time to do. You post the job, people bid on the time and cost and then you choose who you would like. They have a rating system, so you can see how they performed on other jobs and we have used them now a couple of times.  We hired TobRanking for our SEO and the report that he gave us outlining everything that he had done is outstanding. We never could have done all of that. We just don’t have the knowledge and now we know what we need to focus on.

If you decide to go with something like this, I highly recommend paying attention to ratings and comments.  We had someone with a low ranking fix some errors a couple of months ago and he messed everything up. We didn’t have to pay him, but things were messed up and luckily TopRankings came to the rescue and fixed everything within an hour, now we will hire them for everything.

So, we are leaving for our next travel around the world in less than four months and we are feeling pretty pleased with the direction that our website is going, but we are feeling very overwhelmed with everything else that has to be done. So now it is time to find some balance in blogging and living. My biggest fear is that I will be locked to my computer on my travels and not enjoying the moment. But we can’t let that happen now, can we?

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