New Years has always been a time for us to make resolutions and to write down our goals and dreams. After all, it was a New Years Resolution 4 years ago that changed our lives. We followed through on a midnight toast to change our lives and live our dreams. We’ve been working towards that goal each year ever since and are loving our new lot in life where we are in charge of our own destiny.

So what are our goals for 2012?

Reconnect with One Another

Sneaking a Smooch in Namibia

Working together and being a couple can be one of the most straining things on any relationship. We have found that we have become business partners first, husband and wife second. In 2012 we are changing that. The one thing that has kept us together and strong over the past 20 years is our honesty with each other. It’s one thing to love one another, it is another to make a relationship work. We don’t run away from troubles, we recognize a problem and work it out.

This business partnership has taken its toll on the both of us. We haven’t given each other the attention we deserve. We work late and constantly discuss our business instead of enjoying each others company. We’ve been relying on the fact that we have a good relationship and that it will always be there. Well, guess what? No matter how strong something is, it won’t be there if you don’t give it the attention it deserves. We’ve recognized the problem early and are fixing it before it begins.

Inspire

When we were looking to change our lives, I can’t tell you how many books and articles I read to inspire myself to take the plunge to change my life. I felt empty and frustrated working at a job that I didn’t love. If only I knew what I wanted out of life, I could make it work. The problem was, I didn’t know what I wanted out of life, I just knew that something was missing…but I never gave up looking. Life isn’t over until it’s over and it is never too late to try something new or live your dreams.

I am so happy that we never looked at ourselves as being too old or too established to start over. We took a chance and we are so happy that we did! We want to make sure that we are inspiring others to live their lives to the fullest as well. It doesn’t have to be through travel, it just has to be about being true to yourself and living the life you’ve always dreamt of. We never thought we’d be able to find fulfillment and yet here we are, two average Joes doing exactly that.

Honesty

Our Blog is an Extension of our Personalities

We were talking with our friend Ken Kaminesky yesterday about how we all don’t like to share the negatives about our lives. It can be difficult putting your thoughts and feelings out there on the Internet. We all make mistakes and write and say things that we wish we could take back but we are also all only human. I have always enjoyed reading blogs because of their raw honesty.

We’ve had some good fortune these past months and have probably over shared our good fortune with our readers about how great things are going for our business. But I think that we have also done a good job sharing our fears and insecurities as well. We are in the midst of a wild roller coaster ride as we build a new life. We all have insecurities and we are fooling ourselves if we think that someone has it completely together and doesn’t have a care in the world. It’s human nature and it’s what makes the good things in life that much more special. If things were always roses, we’d have nothing to celebrate when things go well.

We’ve always worn our hearts on our sleeves when it comes to this blog, it is an extension of ourselves. As we grow we cannot change just to please others. We will continue to stay true to ourselves and to you and share the good the bad and the unexpected in our travels and lives.

Balance

We are so much better at balancing life when we travel

We have been working really hard these past few months on trying to get our website exactly where we want it to be for when we hit the road again in a few weeks. It’s been tough spending our time at home while being stuck behind a computer the majority of the time. We have felt that we needed to work as hard as we could so that we could enjoy our travels in 2012 and while it has worked out ok, we are ready to break the habit of being glued to our laptops for hours on end each day.

When we travel, we are good at balancing having fun and working. When we are home, we find ourselves panicking about the time we get back on the road and feel that we have to take advantage of fast internet, having a telephone and being able to meet face to face with people. We’ve ended up forgetting to live while building our dream. We are happy to start traveling again starting with Antarctica at the end of this month.

Get Back in Shape

Blogging has taken its toll on our bodies. We are the adventure couple yet we spend the majority of our time when not traveling behind a computer. We are looking to find balance in our activity and work. Before, we had never worked at a desk job. We never knew what it was like to find ourselves sitting in an office for 8 hours a day. We have also found that while we are in one place and taking advantage of  our time to work as much as possible, we aren’t getting ourselves out of the house enough or taking care of our health. We are embarassed of the way we are looking and upset with how we have let ourselves go.

So, as I finish off this post, we are about to leave for a yoga class to stretch our aching muscles, ease our active minds and tone our soft bodies. Oh yeah, the advantage of living in a small town for the winter, Yoga is $55 for the month!

Do you have any plans for 2012? We’d love to hear them.

If our recent trip to Seattle is any indication, the future of travel blogging is looking bright.

At the Expedia Head Office

Just before the holidays, we were invited to meet the Expedia executives at their head office in Seattle to talk about the future of travel and to listen to their big ideas for the future. Expedia Blogger Day is the brainchild of Expedia PR gal Sarah Keeling. Joining her and the rest of the Expedia heavyweights for a delicious mexican feast at Barrio restaurant downtown Seattle, we enjoyed conversations with Expedia VP and General Manager Joe Megibow, VP of Brand Marketing Paul Leonard, Director of Marketing Jeremy Xavier and many more.

One thing we noticed during lunch was that the people who work for Expedia are excited about travel and they are excited about the company they work for. We were impressed to see that they truly wanted to talk to us about what we are all about and what our ideas are about the online business of travel.

Social Media Sharing at Lunch

Expedia is ready to work with Bloggers and they want to discuss ideas and options with us. They want to connect with their clients in a more personal way and what better way to do that than to work with people like us who are in direct contact with our readers.

Expedia Headquarters

After lunch, we moved onto the Expedia Headquarters where we talked with Expedia President, Scott Durschlag.

Instantly, I knew I liked this guy.

Having the same beliefs that we do about travel, he commented that “Travel is Transformational.” I couldn’t agree more. When someone experiences a different culture, event or witnesses something spectacular, it can change a life. It can give you a different outlook on how you view the world and it can inspire you to create a more fulfilling existence.

Expedia president, Scott Durchslag

Durschlag clearly believes this as well. He understands that the most precious thing in life is time and as he puts it, time on vacation is even more important. So Expedia is working to make the entire vacation experience painless and easy.

They are working to make Expedia.ca a one stop shop for people planning their precious vacations and their goal is to give their clients the best local experience when working with Expedia.

So Where do travel Blogggers fit in? 

The skies the limit.

More and more companies want to humanize their brand and connect with their customers on a more personal level. Travel Bloggers give an alternative to an advertisement or banner ad. We can explain and share our experiences first hand with our readers.

A person like President Scott Durschlag isn’t just a rich suit in a high office tower. Through us you get to know the man behind the corporation.  He’s a guy that backpacked around the world and once tried to climb Mount Everest on the cheap. We talked to him about his time in Tibet when he hired a couple of Sherpas on the spot to help him climb the world’s highest mountain. Did he make it? No way, but he has an awesome story to tell and gained my respect and admiration for giving it a good shot. And I loved that he travelled on a budget. He’s a guy that journeyed overland through Africa and has a zest for life and a love for travel. Like all of the Expedia executives we met, he’s a regular guy who’s easy to talk to. And that’s the type of stuff we like to share – The story and the inspiration.

“Travel is Transformational”

People who work at Expedia have a passion for travel and that is exactly the type of company we want to work with. As a matter a fact, Expedia not only encourages their employees to take holidays, they are rewarded when they travel by receiving reimbursements for their leisure travel each year. As Scott Durchslag said, a vacation encourages productivity. It’s important.

We were very impressed with their openness and excitement about working with travel bloggers in the future.  As VP Joe Megabow said, “working with bloggers is a proven business plan.” Other industries have already done it with great success. It’s little risk for Expedia to work with us because the plan is already laid out. Sports, Tech, Entertainment, Fashion….these industries have already embraced the influence of the blogger and we think 2012 will be the year of the travel blogger.

We were honoured to be invited alongside some other really cool travel bloggers and we all got to know each other during a Seattle Seahawks game from a private suite in the NFL’s loudest stadium.

Getting to know Johhny Jett, Kim of Galavanting & Chris J Faust of C Around the World at the Seahawks

It was a whirlwind two days in Seattle, but we had an amazing time and are excited to see what Expedia has in store.

Our trip to Seattle was courtesy of Expedia.com and we wanted to give a shout out to the beautiful boutique hotel that we stayed at, Hotel 1000 right in the heart of downtown.

To see more on Expedia and travel blogging, check out our fellow attendees of Expedia Blogger Day 2011. Here’s to an exciting

Airfare Watchdog, Bloomberg Business Week, Chris Around the World, Galavating
GeekWire.com, Johnny Jet, Otts World, Social Media Labs, Stuck at the Airport,
The Traveling Philosopher, Travel Junkie Julia, Travelllll.com, What a Trip

Thanks to Expedia Canada for sponsoring our trip to Seattle to meet our American friends.

Keith Jenkins of Velvet Escape is a respected speaker and presenter in the travel world sharing his knowledge of business and the tourism industry with everyone from travel bloggers to PR professionals and tourism boards. We are thrilled to have him share his advice on how to prepare and present a presentation in your area of expertise. So take it away Keith!

How to Do a Presentation for The Travel Industry

If someone had told me two years ago that I would one day be speaking at conferences, I would have laughed it off with a “Yeah, right!”. Oh, wait a minute, someone did tell me a few years ago that I should look into public speaking – the argument was that my ‘investment banker to blogger entrepreneur’ background would be an inspiring story to tell.

That suggestion was met with a pursed-lipped “Hmmmm” and a shake of my head. The thing that held me back was that I’ve never felt comfortable standing in front of a crowd. I have plenty of experience chairing a meeting or presenting a product to a client but standing in front of a hundred people (or more) and talking was a daunting idea.

Keith Being Interviewed Live on Catalonian TV

As time passed and my blog grew, it gradually dawned on me that the experiences I’d gained from creating the Velvet Escape brand, building the blog and marketing it via social media would be useful to others. Moreover, I realised that speaking in public is a great way to market my brand and reach out to a new audience. It’s something I had to do if I wanted to take my brand further. I decided to test the waters by organising blogging seminars in Amsterdam and it was quite a revelation to discover that I quite enjoy speaking in public.

At my first seminar, I used little cards which contained my notes. I held these in my hands as I spoke but I threw them out before the second seminar – they were too distracting and made me feel uneasy. I figured I didn’t need the cards anyway because I knew the subject matter inside-out. This was my first lesson: you know the story, tell it naturally. Discard anything that prevents you from telling the story in a natural manner. So, I stood in front of the room and simply talked, using only my slides on the wall as a guide. The seminars were an excellent way to learn about my own speaking capabilities and test various techniques. Since then, I’ve spoken at seminars and conferences such as Travel Bloggers Unite, GoMedia Canada and most recently, at the World Travel Market in London.

Public speaking is an excellent way to showcase your expertise and generate exposure for your blog outside your usual circles. It’s also an opportunity to create an alternative source of income. There are many subjects that travel bloggers can speak about and there are various types of audiences that can be targeted. Experienced travel bloggers can target other bloggers and talk about blogging techniques, writing, photography, social media or SEO. If you have an inspiring story to tell, with thought-provoking anecdotes, you could approach schools or companies looking for motivational speakers.

For those who are thinking of speaking in public for the first time, I‘ve listed below some tips based on my own experience. One thing that always helps me is not to treat the presentation as a ‘presentation’ but merely as a ‘story-telling’ session – you’re there to tell a story you know very well. Putting myself in this frame of mind relaxes me and gives me an extra confidence boost – this is a mental technique I used very often at interviews during my banking days.

Preparation

• Choose a topic you’re perfectly comfortable with and which reflects your expertise
• I still use Powerpoint for my slides but there are other, more sophisticated programs in which to create a presentation
• Keep the text on your slides concise
• Use images that are relevant
• ‘Rehearse’ the story in your mind as your create the slides. Make notes.

Presenting

• Dress appropriately – you are representing your brand!
• Decide beforehand if you want to hold on to your notes. Some speakers feel more comfortable holding something in their hand, be it their notes, the microphone or a cup of tea (the last has the added advantage of being warm, i.e. relaxing, and it helps to create a casual atmosphere). Most importantly, do what makes you feel comfortable
• Choose a good spot to stand where you’re in full view of your audience. It’s advisable to move around but don’t overdo it – it may make your audience dizzy!
• Look out for friendly faces in different sections of the audience. Spread your attention evenly across the room by moving your gaze from one friendly face to another
• Effective body language is paramount to the success of your presentation. Stand tall, move confidently and look your audience straight in the eye. Remember, you’re the expert! Keep your hand gestures to a minimum – use your hands sparingly to drive home a point. Don’t forget to smile!
• Speak up but vary the tone of your voice to avoid monotony. As with hand gestures, use a different tone to drive home a point
• As you speak, make occasional references to your slides on the wall
• Interact with your audience by soliciting a response through a joke (if this works, great. If it doesn’t, you’ll be the only one laughing so be careful with jokes), a reference to someone in the audience or by asking a question.

 Feedback

After your presentation, try to get some feedback from the audience about the subject matter and how they think the presentation went. Ask if they have any take-aways from the presentation. Use this feedback to improve your presentation and the style in which it’s delivered.

Happy speaking! 

Keith Jenkins is available to speak at conferences or conduct seminars on utilising social media for branding, networking and marketing purposes; travel blogging (branding, monetising, working with travel bloggers); his experiences in promoting destinations via social media and blogging. Speaking engagements in 2011 include:
Blue Badges tour guides, London, Travel Bloggers Unite, Manchester, Social Media, Girona, Travel Bloggers Unite, Innsbruck, Go Media Canada, Edmonton, World Travel Market, London

Follow Keith on Twitter and Facebook 

The Santa Clause Parades are taking place, the cold winter wind is blowing and Father Winter is right around the corner, but we can put off the chill for a few more hours as we transport you to places lik Norway, Cambodia and Ethiopia.

So, Where’s your coffee? 

Enjoy these travel articles for this Saturday morning.

The Life of Anjci brings us a wonderful pictorial with commentary about her trip of a lifetime to Norway: The Land of the Midnight Sun. We have yet to make it to Scandinavia but it has moved a notch or 10 higher on our list after following her journey. Make sure to stick around through the entire post, the photos from Lofoten get even better and the scenery from the ship is astounding! We gotta get ourselves to Norway! 

2 Turkeys and a Rope realize their dream of traveling to the Northern Reaches of Ethiopia. Surviving a trek with an armed guard who they aptly nicknamed shithead and surviving the stone throwing that we know all too well that comes from passing by Ethiopian’s adorable children, they stubbornly walked sans mule. Was it worth it? Oh yeah, in Monkeying Around in the Simian’s they arrive to be treated to Ethiopian Coffee (the best we’ve ever had too!) with the highlight of witnesses a herd of Ibex and the Gelada Baboon. Watch out for those baboons though, Dave was  chased by some vicious ones when we rode our bikes through Africa!

Alex in Wonderland brings back fond memories as she talks about her bicycle through Cambodia’s Angkor Wat. One can never tire of seeing photos of this extraordinary temple. Looks like she and the girls had a great day and we really enjoyed scrolling through her photo story of her time there. In Angkor Wat by Bicycle, she offers some great tips regarding how to rent a bike and what routes to take. Enjoy!

Travel With Kat has some great articles over at Travels with Kat and it is worth perusing her website for longer than just a quick stop by. However it was this snapshot that caught my eye this week of Gambian Women Looking So Colourful. What perfect way to transport yourself away from the Canadian winter than to look at this shot of women going home from the market. If only we all could look so relaxed and put together during our shopping excursions.

We’ve only just discovered The Wolfmaan a fellow Canadian character that hikes barefoot through Ontario’s gorgeous wilderness. This video explores the Limehouse Conservation Area in Limehouse, Ontario Canada. We’ve walked through quite a few conservation areas in Ontario, but we’ve never known what we were witnessing. You see a lot of old buildings and broken down bridges, flora and fauna and awesome rock formations that we didn’t know anything about. Wolfmaan explains all that we see and makes me want to go for a hike right now!

I just love the NVR Guys and have been reading their inspirational travel website for a couple of years. Well, guess what? It’s been 5 years since they left their old lives behind to change to the No Vacation Required lifestyle. To celebrate, The 5 Years of Their NVR Lifestyle they talk about what started it all, what they’ve been up to and what you can read about in the future. If you’re not following NVR Guys, you should be. They’re completely inspiring, positive and great story tellers.

Speaking of a No Vacation Required Lifestyle, Wanderlust and Lipstick is holding a travel writing contest for female writers! We met Beth in Mexico last spring and find her to be another inspirational, positive and creative person. She runs tours, shares tips and writes about exotic destinations such as Papua New Guinea and Bhutan! So, if you’ve always dreamt of being a travel writer and wanted to travel to exotic destinations head over to the Wander Women Writer Contest for more details.

]]> http://theplanetd.com/travel-writinground-up/feed/ 1 http://theplanetd.com/how-to-use-stumbleupon/ http://theplanetd.com/how-to-use-stumbleupon/#comments Mon, 31 Oct 2011 09:00:13 +0000 debndave http://theplanetd.com/?p=22245 Monday’s are new!

It’s our day to talk and share what we have learned over the past couple of years of the travel. Last week we shared what we did to secure Sponsorship for the Mongol Rally. Today, we are talking about StumbleUpon. For some it is the most confusing form of social media, but it doesn’t have to be. We don’t know everything by any means and we encourage you all to leave comments with your own ideas or additions to the post. If you feel something is wrong or you do it differently, we’d love to hear about it. We’re always looking for new ways to make things work.

Now, On to StumbleUpon

We’ve had a lot of requests to write a post about how to use StumbleUpon. This can be one of the most exciting tools in driving traffic to your site. Many people will argue that StumbleUpon traffic allows for too much of a bounce rate, but we have found that once the numbers started growing, the visitors evened out and the bounce rate settled down. People now stay on the website longer. Not only has our StumbleUpon traffic gone up, our numbers consistently climbed and stayed there.

So here is a step by step guide on what we do each week when going through our stumbles on StumbleUpon. If you haven’t got an account with StumbleUpon, you can sign up for one here.

Choose your interests: We don’t only stumble travel interests, we have various interests on StumbleUpon and it is an excellent way to make connections outside of your niche. We regularly receive funny videos, entertainment, photography and technology from our different followers on StumbleUpon.

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Find your friends and start Stumbling: You can friend us immediately we’re ThePlanetD and we accept shares! How do you accept shares? When you click on follow a link will pop up asking you if you want to accept shares in your toolbar, if you click that, you will be able to receive that stumblers shares. We’ll be explaining shares further down.

After You Have Signed Up 

First install the tool bar for your browser 

A mistake that we made when first starting with SU was not using the tool bar. The tool bar makes things a lot easier. We use the stumbleupon toolbar for chrome and once a week we go through our StumbleUpon Shares.  See that red number 172 on the left hand side beside Stumble button above? That is the number of people that have shared articles with us. We click on that red button, read the article and give it a like.

Discoveries

It is important to discover articles as well as liking them. You want to participate regularly in StumbleUpon to gain authority. Like most social networking sties, the more active you are, the better you do. If you discover a post, you will automatically have the option to write a review unlike when you are simply giving a thumbs up to a post already discovered. If you want to add a review to an article already discovered all you have to do is click on the bubble icon to the right of “friends” where it will allow us to leave a review.

Note: when going through shares, you won’t be the discoverer because posts can only be shared if they are already discovered.
I’ve since learned the above is not true, I just went through my shares and was the discoverer.

Contrary to popular belief, We stumble our own posts. We just make sure to stumble other people’s posts more than our own. What StumbleUpon doesn’t want to see are spammy stumbles. If you only stumbled your own website, well that would be different. But if you stumble your own site as you are stumbling other sites you are fine.

There is debate over this method but we have received tens of thousands of stumbles on several different articles and we have listened in on StumbleUpon webinars where they have even said that it is fine to stumble your own stuff.

We discovered our own post Petra By Night (photo above) that received 88,000 Stumbles. The more you discover, the more authority you have on StumbleUpon.

Optimizing your time with the Toolbar

The great thing about the tool bar is that we can also kill two birds with one stone. We have also added on the hootsuite hootlet  for Chrome. It’s the little owl icon above. While we are going through our stumbles, we can schedule tweets to come out throughout the day or even week.

It’s all right at our fingertips! Once you’ve given a thumbs up and scheduled the tweet and shared it with your other social networks, just click on the red button again for the next stumble share. We can schedule a day of tweets, facebooking and finishing our stumbling in about an hour each day.

Once we get to the end of our shares we start stumbling through random sites. That is when we can discover a lot of new articles and expand our reach.

Sharing

If we particularly like a certain post, we can share it with our followers for them to stumble as well.

Sharing is an important function of StumbleUpon. This is a way to ask your friends to give your article a thumbs up. Make sure not to over share, you don’t want to annoy your stumble friends with a share every single day. Also, it is a good idea to share other people’s posts as well. When you see something that you think someone will like, let them know about it.

When you click on the share button, your list of contacts will drop down. Click on each person individually and then write a little message to tell them what the article is about. Then hit share now. It will then go out to everyone and be in queue for them to thumb up when they go through their shares.

Have Patience

StumbleUpon Takes Time. It took time before we started seeing numbers. But once we sat down to really work on sharing sites, we suddenly saw a spike in traffic. We have had posts reach up to 100,000 stumbles. Now that we are in the system our posts seem to catch on with little effort on our part since we laid the groundwork early. Unlike Twitter, you don’t have to be on StumbleUpon day in day out to have a post go viral.

That doesn’t mean that we don’t use StumbleUpon regularly, we visit the site regularly. However, it is a social network that doesn’t require the constant feeding that Twitter does to remain influential. When we travel, we go for days without visiting StumbleUpon, but once we come back to catch up on our shares and stumbles, we are back on track and can pick up right where we left off.

How do you use StumbleUpon? Do you find it effective? Let us know your opinions so everyone can gain from the collective knowledge.

 Remember if you do use StumbleUpon give us a follow we love to share great content.

What we wonder is, what is with all the hating going on between travel bloggers?

Has everyone forgotten why they got into this business? Is it not for the love of  travel?

Serenity-Love-Travel

When we started in this community nearly 3 years ago, we were overwhelmed with the outpour of love and support by our fellow bloggers. Now when we watch the threads on forums and on certain websites, we are amazed with the bitterness and anger coming out of people’s mouths. We all run our business differently and that’s ok. We really don’t care what other people do with behind the scenes of their travel blogs. If they want to clog it with gambling and casino advertising that’s their choice. If they want to keep it straight and narrow and not run one ad, that’s good for them too.

It is up to the individual on how much money they need or want.

But now we see people fighting and ratting each other out to Google, there is name calling and arguments. This is over travel blogging! What have we become? Why is everyone so concerned with focusing on what everyone else is doing?

What is wrong with everyone?

Travel is supposed to be exciting and fun. When we go to a travel website we want to be inspired. We want to learn something about another part of the world that we didn’t know about.  Travel is about getting away from the stresses of everyday life and living a fantasy for a few days. Travel is beautiful and wonderful. It opens people’s eyes to ignorance and prejudice. 

Travel, Escape, Inspire

We love travel blogging and we hope to be able to do it for the rest of our lives. We have our ups and downs with starting a new business and we live through a roller coaster of extreme highs and lows each day. The one thing we have always been able to count on is sharing and discussing ideas with our fellow travel bloggers.

When a website comes out with hateful and hurtful commentary, it saddens us. We hope that people don’t turn on one another and that people won’t be afraid to discuss with each other anymore. We are all pioneers in the travel blogging world. We’re the leaders and together we should be able grow and support one another. We shouldn’t be turning into the police and turning our fellow bloggers in to Big Brother.

Peace, Harmony, Travel

We would love to be able to run an ad free site and we are working towards that goal by working in television and developing partnerships and sponsorships. We are seeing the light at the end of the tunnel but unfortunately we aren’t independently wealthy. For now have to feed ourselves and be able to put fuel in our car for all the meetings we’ve been going to these days to make the transition from a blogger that is merely getting by to travel blogger that is making a great living. We hope that people don’t resent us for selling ad space to travel companies that we research beforehand but we have to do what we have to do. We can’t worry about what other people are thinking or doing, we would drive ourselves insane if we did.

What we can do is look to our fellow travel bloggers for inspiration and advice.

We are so proud of the people that we know it travel blogging. We have watched our peers grow and achieve success and they inspire us to do better ourselves.

People Inspiring in Travel Blogging

Keith of Velvet Escape and Janice of SoloTraveler have started GBN and created successful personas of being leaders in the public speaking field.

Sherry Ott of Ottsworld has started Meet Plan Go with Michaela Potter and I hope that they get a multimillion dollar venture capital investment for their amazing idea. (maybe they’ll hire us if they do!) We’ve seen companies achieve great success in this sense like our pals at Tripping. We are so proud to know them and to be a small blip on their radar.

GoPackpaking is someone that we have always looked to for his business savvy. He has been sustaining his travels since 2007 and now he is not only sustaining himself, he is making a great living and is another leader in the industry.

Nora of the Professional Hobo starred in a TV series last year. When she told us about that at a Toronto Travel Massive, we were so excited for her. It is something we’ve wanted to do and to see a fellow blogger achieve our dream, gave us hope that we can do it too!

Ken Kaminesky landed the cover of National Geographic with his amazing photography. That’s National Geographic people! I need not say more?

Everything-Everywhere , Legal Nomads, Wild Junket, EarthXplorer, Uncornered Market and Nomadic Matt are all a part of G Adventures Wanderers in Residence. They are traveling the world representing this well known travel company as they write about their tours.

Wandering Trader and YTravel Blog are writing tips for Problogger. Problogger! They are starting to become such authorities in their field that they are giving advice to the entire blog world out there!

Andy Hayes owns an entire network of travel businesses. We have learned so much from him and admire what he has accomplished.

We’ve started working on CTV NewsChannel doing a weekly segment talking travel, we are announcing a partnership next week that we are excited about and we are so proud to be sponsored by American Express Canada.

There are so many other people out there that are supportive, inspiring and helpful and we don’t want to say that it is everyone is being hurtful. We have just noticed that it is easier to jump on the bandwagon of negativity rather than positivity and we feel the need to remind ourselves and everyone else to be optimistic. Great things are happening in this community and we can all grow and achieve success together. We don’t need to turn on one another to claw our way to the top. There’s room enough for everyone.

I haven’t mentioned everyone here, but each week we are going to feature our favourite blogs on Saturdays, so stay tuned for more! 

So what I am saying is we should all be proud of our fellow travel bloggers. If they are making $5000 a month selling ads, good for them if they are remaining pure to traditional blogging and not selling any sort of advertising or partnership, good for them too! Let’s leave the backstabbing and low blows to the political blogs. There’s enough hate out there to go around for everyone.

It’s our job as travel bloggers to spread the love of the world and make it a better place.

At least that is how we see it.

We crossed the finish line of the Mongol Rally along side our team mate Sherry Ott and returned home to focus and centre ourselves after a whirlwind two years of travel around the world.

The first order of business was a major overhaul of our website. Cosmetically, we have only made subtle changes but navigationally, user experience and organization, we have changed dramatically.

Hire a Professional

With a giant contribution from Warren Talbot of Married with Luggage who did wonders with coding issues for our website, transferring and helping with design, we have come up with a user friendly experience that will make your reading more enjoyable.

Header

We are in the process of redesigning our logo and image so that has remained the same so far. However, the big change is you can subscribe to all our social media sites in one easy location at the top of the page. It is here that you can subscribe to our RSS feed as well and have our daily updates come into either your email or your favourite reader. This is a much better location than our previous social media buttons that were lost in the side bar.

Speed

Finally people can get back on ThePlanetD without an agonizing wait or error message. Warren has cleaned up all the hacks, problems with poor coding and deleted all of the plugins and problem areas that were giving us a hard time.

We have now left Blue Host and have moved to Media Temple where our site is on a Dedicated Virtual Server. We won’t see that nasty throttling anymore and we have added security. You’ll be able to click on pages without having to wait for it to load.

Top Navigation Tool Bar

Adventures: We had been wanting to redesign our site for some time now. Not the look of it, but the navigation. We have gone through all of our categories and pages and have finally organized them into easy to use sections. Our Adventures Page puts the best of ThePlanetD in one place!

We are most proud of our Adventures Page.  - We will be building on it as we break down trips into more adventures, but for now we have 13 Adventures that you can read about and follow along from start to finish.

Destinations: When you’ve been to 55 countries, it is difficult to break the blog down into post about each place that you’ve visited. We have made a destinations page where people can click on the icon to read about the destination of their choice. We have broken down our destinations into categories that are easy to navigate.

Travel Videos: We take a lot of videos on our travels and want to share them with you. We have developed a travel video page where you can browse our latest videos and then follow your way to our youtube channel to see more. Also at the bottom of the blog in the footer, we have a featured video section where we will change it up weekly to share some of our favourite travel memories.

Featured Video in Footer of Website

Travel Photos: We will eventually be inserting a gallery into our Travel Photos section. We are looking into how to integrate Picture the Planet’s portfolio into our photo page. For now we have our favourite photo stories and snap shots for you to browse.

Home Page

About Us: We want people to know who we are. They can relate to us better if they can see our faces so we added an about us page in the top right hand corner of the site. It has a quick introduction and then you can click through to read more about Dave and Deb. That is if you want to!

Subscribe Now: We are rebooting our newsletter again. We let it slide during the Mongol Rally but we are redesigning it as we speak and you can sign up for our monthly updates right underneath our about us page.

Subscribe RSS: We will be inserting a “RSS” button just below the newsletter sign up. This way you get a second chance to subscribe to our daily updates via RSS. This is where you can have our feed go either to your home page, favourite reader or even directly into your email.

Categories:

There are many more ways for you to find posts on our home page now. We have categories broken down into:

Featured Content - We’ve replaces our oversized, cumbersome slider with a sleeker more streamlined image that you can browse our most interesting content.

Photo Stories - There is no doubt that Dave’s photography is the highlight of this blog and we feature his photo stories in the first section of the home page for everyone to take a look.

Advice - Before we started traveling so much, we wrote a lot about the advice of travel blogging. We have kept it up a little bit while on the road, but we are planning on writing a weekly feature involving tips to make your blogging career a more successful career.

Latest Posts - You have two ways to find our most recent posts, in the right sidebar where latest posts, popular posts and recent comments can be found or on the home page in the section directly below photostories and Advice.

Sub-Categories - We have a lot of categories and information to share so we now have 4 more sub-categories that we will be rotating regularly to feature different content. Right now you can find articles relating to General Travel Advice, Popular posts, Top 10 Lists, Responsible Travel

Footer

We used to have nothing in our footer. We are working on filling it up with more information as once people get to the bottom of a post, they may want to have a closer look at everything ThePlanetD has to offer.

We offer several different ways to partner with companies and we give potential partners two ways to find out how. At the top they can click on our media/advertise page and at the bottom they are reminded once again with our media package.

Besides linking to our Media Page and Appearances and to give information on how to partner with us, we have given the reader one more chance to connect with us via our Social Media Sites and RSS.  We have never fully given this aspect of our blog the proper focus that it deserves, now our readers have several ways of following and subscribing to us!

We’ve been home from Mongolia for just over a week and that is the question we have constantly been asked. It’s a legitimate question, we are travel bloggers after all and we need to stay on the road to do our job.

It’s been a very busy couple of years since we left for India in November 2009.

Dave and Deb in India

It was our first time running a travel blog as a business while traveling and we have worked hard to build ThePlanetD into what it is today. Travel is what has helped us gain an audience and stand out in the travel world. People have started to take notice of our adventures and by taking on a new challenge every couple of months we have remained fresh to our online audience.

“It’s funny that traveling full time can sometimes be the worst thing for a travel blog.“

It is also that travel that has caught up with us and caused us to fall behind on the ever important business of travel. Traveling full time is fun and exciting, but it doesn’t allow for a lot of time to do the work that needs to be done. And that is why other than some short getaways here and there we are staying put until the New Year.

The Plan

We have so many things that we have wanted to do with our website that we haven’t had the time to work on. Now that we are home for a bit, we are working on updating the site to run optimally with the help of Warren Talbot of Married with Luggage. Our current website is built from a template that we found when we knew nothing about blogging. We customized and changed it with plugins and shoddy code and ended up doing a lot of damage behind the scenes. It ran slow, it left doors open for hackers to come in and put in follow links to pharmacy sites and it didn’t have the sleek design needed to keep people on the blog once they finished reading the article that they found either through search engines or social media sites. That is all about to change thanks to having the time to design what we want with the knowledge we have today.

Videos

We have 1 year of solid video that we haven’t had the chance to edit. We aren’t quick editors like Kick The Grind but we want to be. We want to take our time to learn Final Cut Pro inside and out and to share our hours of video footage with the world. When we get back on the road, we hope to be efficient enough with our video editing to put a slick piece together in a couple of hours. But we need time to be able to sit in front of the computer to learn all that first. We take a lot of video on our travels and we enjoy being in front of the camera.

For More Videos check out ThePlanetD on YouTube

TV Careers

Deb's 5 Minutes of Fame on YTV

Dave's 5 Minutes of Fame on YTV

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As many of you may have known, we went into travel blogging with TV careers in mind. Dave and I both worked in the film business for years before we started blogging and when we decided that we wanted to turn our passion for travel into a career, our initial thought was to pitch a TV show. We brainstormed ideas, hired a publicist and got to work on transforming ourselves into Canada’s Adventure Couple. Bad timing, wrong decisions and lack of knowledge contributed to us not getting our own TV show, but now after nearly 3 years since deciding to go for our dream, it is starting to come true.

Next week we start working with CTV News Express to discuss travel during their weekly show on Fridays 9:00 am to 12:00 pm EST. We are thrilled to be a part of this cutting edge idea. We joked that we’re like the Perez Hilton of Travel Blogging. (on a smaller scale of course) While he goes on CNN and Larry King to talk entertainment, we get to go on our Canadian National News Station to talk travel!

It’s an exciting time.

Networking

Networking with Fellow Travel Bloggers

We have watched our fellow bloggers unite and bond during conferences and events. We have seen them travel together on press trips, partner with companies and form alliances. We have admired the work that they have done and what they have accomplished together.  Travel Bloggers Unite has opened up an amazing opportunity for Bloggers to discuss ideas and learn from one another. The Toronto Travel Massive has shot into the stratosphere as travel professionals gather monthly in Toronto to meet local PR agencies and travel companies.  We want to be a bigger part of that community. Toronto has some of the best travel Bloggers in the world and to meet with them and share ideas is something that we look forward to having the time to do.

While being on the road full time, it has been difficult for us to get involved with our peers. We mean well and want to comment on their blogs, read their latest news and support their latest projects but when we have unreliable Internet at best and a busy schedule of travel, we fall behind and fall off of people’s radar.

Events

This week alone is filled with events from The Future of Tourism hosted by GAP Adventures to tweet ups with fellow bloggers and the Monthly Massive hosted this month by Hostelling International Toronto. We have had lunch with PR professionals, met with TV stations, talked with companies regarding partnerships and we have only been home one week.

How could we have done any of this from the road?

It’s funny that traveling full time can sometimes be the worst thing for a travel blog.

While we don’t plan on staying in one place for long, we do need to stay in one place to take our careers to the next level. It will be short adventures for the next couple of months, but never fear, we will still be traveling.

We already have the next big one in the works. We have already been asking ourselves, Are We Crazy? Can we Do it? Should we do it? We’ll let you know once we decide.

In the meantime watch for us out there next week. We have an interview with the Toronto Star coming out on October 6th, Our Debut on CTV on October 7th and it’s ThePlanetD week with roomorama all week long. We may have just returned home, but a new adventure is already beginning.

We were feeling pretty bummed as we watched our readership plummet each day that we drove from England to Mongolia. “This is a great adventure, we’re traveling to countries that are exciting and untouched, why doesn’t anyone want to read about our experience?”

The Mongol Rally Should be a Happy Experience

We kept on driving though. All while feeling depressed and second guessing our decision to take part in this epic drive 1/3 of the way around the world. Maybe we took on too much. Maybe nobody cares about car rallies. Maybe we should have stayed home to fix up all the errors and mistakes on our blog. We are using an out of date theme and our plugins are overwhelming our site. Maybe we should just give up and go back to our old jobs – OK, we shoved that last thought out of our heads as quickly as we said it!

All we knew was that we were taking part in what seemed like an epic adventure and we hadn’t seen numbers this low in well over a year.

What’s the Deal with that?

It was somewhere after Romania that we noticed things going wrong with the blog.

We started getting messages from people that our site wasn’t loading and that they were getting error messages. It was in the Ukraine when we received a message from Candice of SMAC (the company that was looking after formatting our posts once we reached the more remote portion of the journey) telling us that she couldn’t format a post because she kept getting a database error each time she tried to enter the site.

This Came up a lot whenever anyone tried to see ThePlanetD

We had some long chats with Bluehost, our provider who couldn’t give us any help as to why we were constantly getting throttled (Bandwidth throttling is a reactive measure employed in communication networks to regulate network traffic and minimize bandwidth congestion) forcing our website to grind to a halt. They simply told us that it looks like we have outgrown shared hosting and that we would have to switch to a VPS (Virtual Private Server) that could handle the higher traffic that we’d been receiving in the past few months. We’d be paying a larger monthly fee to have our website hosted on a VPS, but it would be worth it.

Sure, we can do that, anything to get the site up and running again.

One problem though, we were driving 500 km each day to the next destination and didn’t have a moment to spend on getting our beloved blog (and only form of income) back on track.

We were also very bummed that here we were on one of the greatest adventures of our travels and nobody could get on to see what we were up to.

Our Great Adventure That Nobody Saw

Needless to say, we were not in a good mood and we were not a lot of fun to be around.

Our team mate Sherry told us about a friend of hers Warren Talbot of Married with Luggage who is a whiz with coding. She said that he fixed her website right up and optimized it to run smoothly and maybe he could help. He could even change our website over to a VPS while we were on the road to Mongolia.

We sent him an email.

In the meantime, bluehost had opened a ticket on our site and got back to us with some information. Apparently we had countless data base errors on our site and that was the main reason for the throttling. We also had a recurring hack on our website where someone had inserted code and we now had countless links coming from our website leading to a Viagara site.  A few months ago, The Aussie Nomad fixed some java script for us and while he was at it let us know that we had a Viagara hack in our website and had over 2000 links going to a Viagara website. He was amazed that Google hadn’t penalized us and wondered how long it had been in our site. He got rid of them for us and really helped us out a lot when it came to fixing up the many errors on our website.  Unfortunately, the Viagara hack had apparently come back.

Viagara Hack is Causing a lot of Headaches at ThePlanetD

New Plan of Action

We sent the email from Bluehost on to Warren and he told us that it would be useless for us to switch to a VPS with all these errors as they were in essence the cause of the problem and even if we did switch without changing the errors, we would still have the same problem on the VPS.

We put our site in his hands and let him fix the problems.

It All worked for a short time…

After a few days the website was running smoothly and we were happy again. By the time we reached Kazakhstan, our stats and readership was starting to come back and we began to think that the worst was behind us. It all loaded quickly, the throttling stopped and people were starting to leave comments on our blog again.

Hacks

The celebrations were short lived though. We started receiving messages from people that our site was running slow, it wasn’t loading and they were getting database errors. The throttling started up again as well.

The kicker came when we were in Ulaanbaatar and received a message from Google telling us that they had deindexed our site because it had been compromised. When you searched theplanetd, this message came up “This site may be compromised.” This was not looking good.

It was right then that the power went out…

We had our onesimcard on hand that allowed us to send tweets through SMS, so in a panic, we sent Warren a tweet on Twitter asking him to check out the problem. We couldn’t receive tweets back as our SMS through the SIM card was only good for sending tweets, but at least we got it out there. We could do nothing but wait.

Warren is amazing. We woke up the next morning to his message that he was on it and had already figured out the problem. The email was titled “Good news…Bad News”. I clicked open aprehensively wondering what had gone wrong now. Well the good news was that he had found the source of our slowdowns and the virus attempt.

The BAD news…..

“You have contracted the “Pharma hack” which is a SQL injection style hack that adds a bunch of links into the footer of your site. The authors of this hack are creative and it shows up and hides itself randomly so it is easy to think all is well again. This is why your website sometimes has issues and sometimes does not. The bad news is there are dozens of affected files across all of your website.”

He had to identify each file and work to correct and replace all of them one at a time. It is a lengthy process and takes days to complete.

Needless to say, we are bowing at his feet and are so grateful to Sherry for putting us on to him and to Warren for working so hard.

So as we sit here in UlaanBaatar staring at our hacked website we can see a break in the clouds. Hopefully all will return to normal and the storm will pass. Thanks to everyone who has endured the painful loading speeds and database errors. We appreciate your patience. Hopefull the Dark Days are over for The Planet D.

THE GOAL of The 7 Links Project

To unite bloggers in a joint endeavor to share lessons learned and create a bank of long but not forgotten blog posts that deserve to see the light of day again.

THE RULES

1)     Blogger is nominated to take part
2)     Blogger publishes his/her 7 links on his/her blog – 1 link for each category.
3) Blogger Nominates 5 More Bloggers

Our 7 Links

1. Most Beautiful Post – Walking Amman

I wouldn’t say that Amman is a beautiful city as far as the skyline or some of its architecture. But we had a wonderful time seeing it with our guides Ali and Mahmoud. Once we finished the post, we felt that we captured the essences of the city. We felt that captured the beautiful moments of our time there.

2. Most Popular Post -Petra by Night

Not far behind Walking Amman for most beautiful post was Petra By Day and Petra by Night. (I see a pattern here in Jordan being beautiful.) However, Petra by Night is our most popular post so may be others found it to be the most beautiful. This post is still going out of control and has not only received over 60,000 Stumbles but nearly 70,000 views. Every day I am amazed when I see it going strong our stats page.

3. Most Controversial -India is Filthy

This is an easy one, India is Filthy. The title alone is enough to cause an uproar. We wrote it while we were in India. We had already been there over 2 months at the time and the utter filth was driving us to our breaking point. We found it all so senseless for a country that is developing rapidly and has the resources to do something about it. I hope that India cleans up it’s act because it could be beautiful everywhere.

4. Most Helpful Post -Figuring out India Rail

We did a 3 part series on booking trains in India. It can be very confusing trying to take a train there and it took us 3 months, but we finally learned how to book online with a Canadian Credit Card, how to book last minute and how to pay off the train captain if you only have a general class seat, but want to upgrade to 2nd class. It can be done.

5. A Post Whose Success Surprised Me – Honesty, Fear, Triumph – Dear Reader

I don’t even have a picture for this one, normally our popular posts are photo heavy.

I had another post scheduled for the day this post came out, but I woke up in a funk. I had to get a few things off of my chest and I wrote this post quickly, published it and then left the house to go and see a movie. I didn’t think anyone would read it and I was sure that those who did would give me a lot of flack. As it turned out, I came home that night to an onslaught of comments and support that brought tears to my eyes.

6. A post we feel didn’t get the attention it deserved – Sea Kayaking John Gray’s Sea Canoe

This was a beautiful 2 days in Thailand and a unique way to explore the Hongs and Islands of Southern Thailand. We loved sharing the experience and the photographs that we captured were amazing. We wish that more people would check out this post to be inspired to try something different when visiting Thailand.

7. The post that you are most proud of – Tuk Tuk Driver Makes a Difference.

We were honoured to be invited by our friend Ajith in Sri Lanka to visit a school in the Jungle where he was donating shoes to the students. We have introduced so many travelers to Ajith and we are happy to be able to have them give him messages for us. We want him to know that we are still thinking of him and it feels good to be able to send work his way when people visit Sri Lanka. He is a poor tuk tuk driver with a big heart that gives so much and we are happy to be able to share his story.

So, now it is our turn to nominate 5 More Bloggers to keep the momentum going.

Wandering Trader
A Little Adrift
Hole in the Donut
Travels With Two
YTravelBlog

Have you been nominated? Check out the list of Nominated Bloggers to avoid nominating someone twice.

Logo Created by HopandJaunt.com

As the countdown continues to the Mongol Rally, we are thinking more and more about the months ahead.   It is going to be an Epic Trip.

On Tuesday I talked about the preparations that we have to do before making our way to the starting line in London.   We have a lot of work leading up to the Rally from planning and mapping out the route to finding funds and rounding up gear. Luckily we don’t have the training involved that was needed for our cycling adventure through Africa, we’d be in big trouble. We have our hands full for the next few months with the business end of things and scouring the Internet for information and funding. That is the easy part, but what about the problems will have to face during the Mongol Rally.

Sherry shared a great post about Surviving the Mongol Rally during an excellent interview with Abandon the Cube. It puts everything into perspective about what we have to face on the road from car crashes, sleeping in caged holding pens at border crossings, surviving extreme weather and so much more.

So I thought that I would break down what concerns we have about taking part in the Mongol Rally. It will all change once we get there, you can never truly prepare for something as challenging as driving 10,000 miles through uncharted territory, but you can anticipate a few of the problems that may arise.

1. Traveling Together

Our Twitter Trip-Two Weeks of Bonding with Great People

Anyone that has ever travelled with a group knows how difficult it is.  Put together 4 people that really don’t know each other all that well, send them on their merry way in a tiny car to spend the next 4 to 6 weeks navigating across two continents and you’ve got an adventure.  Yeah, that’s a good idea! There is no doubt we will get on each others nerves, but by the end of it all we will develop a bond more like family than strangers. When people come together in extreme situations they have no choice but to be themselves and by the end of it all we are going to love each other or ready to be tear one another apart. Just like one big happy family.

2. Breakdowns and Mechanical Failures

The four of us have admitted to one another that we don’t know much about cars. We are going to have to learn some mechanic skills and we better know how to at least fix the basic car problems that will happen along the way.  Many cars don’t make it to the end of the Mongol Rally, from mechanical failures to car accidents and collisions anything can happen out there.  Knowing how to change a flat tire is the least of our concerns, does anyone know how to fix a gasket? Does anyone even know what that is? I’ll be carrying around my Zen and the art of Automobile Maintenance and keeping it very close.  There is such a book isn’t there?

3. Corruption

There are some things that you just can’t talk your way out of.  We heard about stories of police fabricating fake breathalizers and faking the results so that people would have to pay up or go to jail.  We have heard about having to pay up to go through check points, heck we’ve heard that you have to pay just about everywhere.  We have been to a lot of places in our travels, but honestly we haven’t ever been directly impacted by corruption.  I am not sure how I am going to react when that first crooked cop comes by and demands money to keep us out of jail. Any suggestions?

4. Staying Connected

We are The Social Media Syndicate after all and our number one priority is to share our experience in real time with all our readers.  We are going to be in the middle of nowhere for much of the trip and Internet connections let alone cell phone networks are going to be few and far between.  We are going to have to secure satellite sponsorship. at least that’s the plan. Anyone know someone?  We are going to have to be very organized in our blogging,tweeting and everything else in between.  There may be days on end where we aren’t near civilization.  We want to make sure that we can keep everyone updated, so cell phones, satellite phones and Internet will be heavily relied upon.  In between that we will have to have a very strict blogging schedule to be sure to keep you reminded that we are still out there somewhere.

4. Electronics

Don't want to Ruin our Expensive Electronics

We are going to be facing some tough elements.  There will be desert sand that get’s into every nook and cranny of electronics.  As photographers, Videographers and bloggers we are going to be taking our camera equipment and computers with us.  We could damage thousands of dollars of our precious livelihoods by having sand blow getting into them.  We’ve seen first hand how deserts can kill computers and cameras. We will also be in wet and humid weather. That’s not good for anything except our skin.  Things can simply stop working. We are going to have to weather proof our gear in some very secure cases. They will have to be well padded too. Our cars are going to bump around a lot, we don’t want to shake our computers until the logic boards or hard drives go!

5. Impossible Roads

Will we see roads like this?

a) Road Conditions - We’ve seen the Long Way Round, we know that these roads are not the easiest and smoothest roads on the planet.  We’re going to be driving through some of the biggest pot holes, washed out and basically non-existant roads on earth.  How will our car let alone our bodies hold up?  It is driving over this rough terrain that accidents happen, so we have to be solid and confident in our driving skills.

b) Traffic - My very first fear is driving out of London.  The traffic, the confusion and the left hand driving is not going to be fun.  Our team is team North America, we’re right handed drivers and we’re going to have to deal with modern traffic and congestion at high speeds on the other side of the road right from the very start.  It’s not going to be easy.

So there you have it. Our concerns about the Mongol Rally. I am sure we will be adding to this list regularly.

As travel bloggers it is important to stay connected while traveling.

It is our livelihood after all and if we were to disappear for weeks on end, people would stop visiting our site.

That is why when we left for China, we had a few concerns about being able to interact with our readers.

A good portion of Blogging is social networking and when sites like Twitter and Facebook are blocked in a country that has strict censorship, we could be in trouble.

Luckily we followed a fellow Bloggers trials and tribulations during her time in China.  Barbara Weibel of Hole in the Donut was very helpful discussing the censorship problems she was dealing with.  She smoothed the road for us making our trip hassle free.

What was the number one thing we learned from Barbara?

You can get around Internet Censorship.

We contacted WiTopia about using their service a Virtual Private Network (VPN)  in China and we couldn’t be happier with our results.

By signing up with WiTopia, we were able to log on to the Internet using an IP address outside of the country.  We found that the Toronto Network was the fastest.  We tried Hong Kong, Los Angeles, New York and Vancouver, but Toronto seemed worked the smoothest for us.

At first we felt that we should choose addresses close to China. That is why we started out with Hong Kong or South Korea. It seemed like a logical choice to make our IP address close to where we actually were physically.  We soon learned that it doesn’t matter where you log on to, just log on to a place outside of China.

This allowed us to go on to websites that China blocks and chat freely with our readers regularly.

Internet is slow in China and the VPN does make things even slower, but by traveling with our iPhone, we were able to stay connected easily.  We bought a SIM card with a data plan in Yangshuo and were able to use the VPN on our cell phone.  The 3G network was far faster than any Internet connection that we had in our hotels and we spent many a bus ride Tweeting and updating our facebook status freely.

It is a fact that these sites are blocked.

Whenever we tried to log onto Facebook, Twitter, Stumbleupon or even Wikipedia we were denied access.  Even Internet Movie Data Base is blocked in China.

Luckily, all we had to do was activate the VPN and we could browse freely. We even uploaded videos to our YouTube Account.

Find out about other ways to get around Internet Censorship at Foxnomad’s  ”How to Get Around Local Internet Censorship When Traveling Abroad.

We thought that our social media stats and readers would drop dramatically in China, but they held strong.

It was a challenge connecting to the Internet regularly, dealing with extremely slow connections and wifi and having to constantly use the VPN, but as a Travel Blogger, we managed to do our work and stay connected during our entire month in the country.

Would we recommend Witopia’s VPN to anyone travelling to China? Definitely.

Even regular travelers like to stay connected on facebook.  Many people told us that they would love to be able to update and check their facebook accounts.  We are an online modern world and everyone is addicted to staying connected and sharing their experiences with their friends and families instantly.

We loved being able to keep our presence alive by sending out twitpics and quick photos from our iphone.  Without our VPN, this would never have happened.

Starting at $39.00 per year, you can buy a VPN account from WiTopia. Go to their website and follow the instructions. It is extremely easy to use.  Just open your Internet browser, turn on the VPN, chose an address and start browsing.

So, if you happen to go to China or any other country that has strong censorship rules, make sure to buy a VPN, you never know what site will be blocked yet. It may be your own!

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What does that tell us? Klout’s Got Clout!

But what about the great travel blogs out there that aren’t so active in social media? Are they being punished by all these lists because they aren’t actively participating in TNI nights on Twitter or regularly liking fan pages on facebook?

We have been lucky as we have been showing up near the top of these lists, so that feels great. Who doesn’t love some recognition?

But what if we weren’t so active in the social media aspect of the online travel world?  There are better blogs out there that aren’t making it on to these lists or aren’t as high on the list that are more deserving than us.  We have had the time lately to tweet and stumble, facebook and comment.  We were at home for a couple of months and were able to juggle social media with putting out a blog post 5 to 6 days a week.

We like putting out blog posts regularly and we don’t want to cut down on this.

But we are starting to feel like a couple of chickens running around with our heads cut off.

There comes a time when somethings gotta give.

Our good friends JD of EarthXPlorer and Rick Griffin of Rick Griffin and Midlife Road Trip focus almost entirely on the social media aspect of the online travel world.  It has paid off for them and they are at the top of their fields. EarthXplorer is by far the most respected and influential online travel personality out there.  He has focused on building a positive message through travel and we admire and respect him for what he has accomplished.  We are also very proud to be able to call him our friend.

Rick Griffin is in the same boat. He has been splitting focus a little more lately between tweeting from Midlife Road Trip and Rick Griffin, but he is still at the tops of the social media field.  We are honoured to be able to drive to Mongolia with him next year and we look to him all the time for advice and inspiration.

So Where Exactly are We?

We are a strong travel blog, but there are far more blogs out there with a wider reach and larger audience. We are strong in the social media side of travel as well, but there are far more people out there that have way more twitter followers, way more facebook fans and do a much better job commenting every day on people’s blogs.

We are definitely not complaining, we are very happy with where we stand at the moment.

But the question becomes, what do we do next?

We are traveling right now. The next year is going to be almost entirely on the road in remote countries and destinations.  There is no way that we will be able to actively participate in the social media market of online travel and keep up a quality blog at the same time.

We know that it is important to show up on influencer lists and top travel lists.  The more people see your name, the more people will read your words and look at your photography.  We write this blog because we enjoy sharing our experiences and thoughts with people.  While we would keep writing and photographing even if nobody was reading, it is certainly more fulfilling when people take notice.

The Internet changes every day and the rules change every day. It is important to stay on top of what the trends are.  If the Internet dictates that social media is important, we will have to try to do it.  But at the same time, we don’t want to spend our days travelling sitting at our computers.

However, this is our new chosen profession, so who are we to complain? We should be spending a certain number of days at the computer. We have the luxury of travelling 7 months of the year. What is a couple days a week at the office?

Conclusion

So for now, we haven’t answered any of our own questions.  However 800 words later, I have come to the conclusion that we better be able to figure out a way to tweet and facebook from China, Kazakstan and Mongolia if we want to progress further in our careers as travel bloggers.  We are going to have to learn how to find a balance of both and make it work while enjoying our life and travels.

Last year we figured out how to blog from the road, now we need to figure out how to sustain and stay connected in Social Media on the road.

New Friends

Today we want to share with you, the new friends that we made this summer. We had many a tweet up, presentation, travel tribe and media trip to meet new and like minded friends that have inspired us and touched our hearts.

We met amazing people on our Princess Cruise, at TBEX and the Travel Tribe that we now can truly call our friends. The next few days, we are going to introduce you all to our new friends that met this year. They are some of the coolest and fun people on the planet and everyone should check out their blogs to see more.

Meet the Toronto Travel Tribe.

We were lucky enough to spend some time on many occasions with these people at the Toronto Travel Tribe meet ups. We laughed, we learned, we brainstormed and we had a great time. Just when we feel that we are starting to get to know all of you so well we are leaving.

I feel that one of you are going to have to bring a computer to the next meeting so that we can take part via skype!

Here’s to some of the fearless people that we had a chance to get to know personally this summer. You have all inspired us and we can now call you all our friend.

1. Evelyn Hannon of JourneyWoman – one of the first travel websites we discovered when we looked into travel blogging was JourneyWoman. I remember our first tweet together and how honoured we were to get a retweet from her. She started JourneyWoman before solo travel was common, especially solo women travel. Before the Internet was used commonplace, she printed off newsletter and stuffed envelopes and inspired women around the world to get out there and live their life. At 70 Evelyn is going strong as the leading women’s travel website on the Internet. She has 75,000 newsletter subscribers, she has been featured in Time Magazine, on USA today and Canada AM just to name a few. Listening to her speak is captivating. With her engaging presence, she tells amazing stories of her fears, accomplishments and stuggles while travelling.

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2. Lauren and Todd of Globetrooper - The best thing we could have done was check a facebook message one night in July. A couple of days later we were in Montreal for a spur of the moment weekend with Todd and Lauren. They had 3 free suites for the weekend and invited us along. We made great friends with them and even managed to meet up a couple more times after the fact. They have one of the coolest and fastest growing websites on the internet and are filled with extraordinary ideas. Every time we have a conversation with them we are not only pumped up to do something big, we are also amazed at how well we all get along. We are expecting big things from Todd and Lauren. With write ups in Mashable, Killer Start ups, and MakeUseOf.com they made a huge splash into the world of travel. In a few short months, they are pulling in numbers that the rest of us can only dream about and that goes for the top togs of travel blogging too!

3. Janice of SoloTraveler – Our fearless leader of the Toronto Meet Plan Go event, Janice is a fantastic woman that has a compelling story. From family traveller to SoloTraveler, she is an inspiration to everyone that says “maybe tomorrow we will take that trip of a lifetime.” Even though there were a number of reasons as to why they shouldn’t go, Janice and her family left for a trip of a lifetime for a 10 month trip around Europe. It was a wonderful time together and if they didn’t seize the day and take that step of doing something extraordinary, it never would have happened. After returning home, Janice’s husband passed away due to a rare disease. Janice is living her life without regrets, she has carried on as solo traveler and is an inspiration to us all to live your dreams now because you never know if there will be a tomorrow. We value our friendship with Janice and the way her smile lights up a room when she enters. She has a vibrancy and youthfulness about her that only a woman living her dream can have.

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4. Katy of Intrepid Travels - I am so happy I sat down with the two Katy’s from Intrepid Travels to chat about well, I am not sure what…the wine had gone to my head by then:-) Intrepid Travels is a cutting edge travel company that takes tourists off the beaten path to exotic destinations around the world. We are so excited to be going to China with Intrepid, but that is not the reason that we are happy to have met Katy. We are happy that we met a woman that is interested in promoting travel in Toronto. Intrepid has slide shows and media presentations each wednesday at their store on Bloor Street, They have tours around the Toronto area and they are open to any idea that get’s people excited about travel. She has come out to Travel Tribe meetings and even hosted one at their store. If Katy weren’t at the tribes, there would definitely be a void in the room. She is a woman with a great presence and there is a reason that the entire crowd wants to talk to her. Fun, successful and a generous woman, we are happy to not only call Katy a colleague, but also our friend.

5. Alicia of Life Behind the Lens - I have never met a lady with so much on the go! It took a few Travel Tribes before we had the chance to actually talk to Alicia and wow, I wish we made the time earlier. There are always so many people to meet and so little time, but if you find yourself out at a Toronto Travel Tribe, seek this woman out. Filled with great energy and ambition, we see Alicia doing something amazing in the future. She has so many projects on the go, I don’t know where she finds the time. Between working in Television promoting the World’s Best Travel Job, running the Toronto Travel Tribe and helping out Intrepid’s Scavenger Hunt, she is a mover and a shaker. But not only that, she is a great lady! She is funny, smart and supportive and giving. It was great fun having a Caesar with Alicia and it is a bummer that we only just got to know her and now we are leaving.

6. Marcello of WanderingTrader – Marcello came out to a couple of Travel tribes, but we also spent time with him in Montreal with Lauren and Todd. He is now is South America, but it was great to get to know him for a short time in Canada. He is a guy that has business and success on his mind. Day trading by day, fearless traveler by night, Marcello certainly takes life by the horns and lives by what he says. If Marcello says he is going to be in Africa next Spring, he is going to be in Africa next spring. This is something we have loved about meeting people similar to us. You know how most people are dreamers and say that one day they will go somewhere? Well each of these people just do it. We haven’t met other people like that in the past. Our friends say they would like to go to Africa or they would like to try something new, but life keeps holding them back. This group of travelers has an idea, they figure out how it can be done and they do it.

7. Mariellen of Breathe Dream Go – Co-Founder of the Toronto Travel Tribe, we all wouldn’t be here if it weren’t for Mariellen. She brought us all together for the first meet up in Toronto early in the summer. A calm and centered person, you can see her years of meditation and yoga have kept her grounded. A lover of India, Mariellen sees the best things in life. Her optimism motivates me to be a better person. She has nothing but good things to say about everyone and everything with a genuine heart. She shares her fears and dreams openly and listens intently when someone speaks. Happy to let others have the spotlight, she has the confidence to know that she can simply be. Her youthful smile and quiet grace always attract an audience, even when she isn’t trying. We will probably see Mariellen in India in January and the amazing thing about having friends that travel the world is that it is never good-by, it is see you on the flip side.

There were other amazing people and now that I am writing this, I feel that there should be a second Meet Your Travel Tribe.

There is the always smiling Natalie Taylor, Jeannie of NomadicChick that we just didn’t get enough time with but loved her bubbly personality, the lovely and talented photographer Erin Hogue, Melanie Fine who has the best laugh and is a kindred spirit, if we had more time together, I know we would be inseparable, Diane of Girls Getaway who we really must get to know better because she is fabulous, Gregg Tilston who we just met at the last tribe, but is such an interesting guy filled with great stories and excellent Internet knowledge, and the super people at Gap Adventures that are so much fun to be around.

It has been one of the busiest summers of our lives which is hard to believe because if you were to look at things from the outside, it would like seem we are just playing around on our computers.

As JD of EarthXplorer once said, If you are busy doing something you love, is that work?”

We have been back from our travels for a mere four months which we thought was going to be a large chunk of time to fulfill our goals before hitting the road again.

Well, four months flew by with press trips, multi media presentations, media lunches, new business ventures and a plethora of blog changes.

We leave for our Fiji adventure in two weeks with long term travel plans after that to China, India and the beginning of the Mongol Rally in July.

We have no idea when we will be home again.

This weekend we sequestered ourselves indoors to start our final blogging push before leaving the country. Once on the road, we know that we can’t fix the little things, so it is important to have a head start on technical issues and blog posts.  So here is a break down of what went wrong.

Blogging

Bluehost informed us that we have exceeded our file count limit and they have given us two weeks to get it down or else they will close our account.  This was just a little stressful to say the least.  We don’t have time to change to a dedicated host, but we know that our site has outgrown Bluehost.  So what can we do?

We searched our files and found over 100,000 useless files in a temporary folder and an old gallery.  Yay, we got our files down by over 100,000!

However….

An Entire Gallery of Photos Were Wiped Out!

After browsing through the site, we found that the gallery contained our photos from India, Nepal and Sri Lanka, all our articles from that time were missing pictures!  We had to go through each post one at a time and reinsert our photos.  We now host our photos on SmugMug which we highly recommend, but we only started that in July.  So, we put all the photos back into the posts, but that wasted a day of our time.

While we reinserted the photos, we took that time to properly tag our photos with key words.  We learned this from Gary Arnt of Everything-Everywhere and have been trying to re-tag our photos throughout the summer.  It was a giant job that we didn’t totally finish but now that India, Nepal and Sri Lanka are tagged, we have done the majority of the photos on our site.  We had been going through old posts all summer long re-tagging and with this final push, we feel that we actually made a dent in our SEO goals of the summer.

• You can read about how to tag your photos at Blogging Business Week 1
• You can read about our other changes that we have done to increase RSS and SEO at Blog Changes

Ventures

Mongol Rally

Next July we are taking part in the Mongol Rally with Sherry Ott and Rick Griffin.  While it seems like July 2011 is far away, we need to have our sponosorship packages and Mongol Rally website built before we leave in 2 weeks.

After fixing our photos and Bluehost problems, we spent the rest of the weekend working on the proposal (which Sherry and I are writing together) and Dave started building a new website for the three of us to contribute to.  Rick is working on planning the social media campaign and we are all meeting regularly to work out the details.

It is exciting to be learning and working with Rick and Sherry, but it is also time consuming and overwhelming.  The four of us are very busy people with other ventures on the go, but we have a common goal of doing the Mongol Rally together.   There is a time issue with us leaving and sponsors planning a year in advance.

We have two weeks to put it all together.  It can be done, but we will probably remain sequestered.

We didn’t get our backlog of blog posts written, we didn’t have time for any social media and we didn’t finish our work on the photography site picture the planet. But there is always next weekend!

Photography Tour

Globetrooper was gracious enough to post our India Photography tour onto their awesome trip planning site as we are trying to drum up interest for our WireIndia venture.  In January we will be leading two back to back photography tours through Rajasthan, India.   Wire India is India’s newest niche boutique travel company and we are thrilled to be working with them.

Press releases have gone out, our photography tour page is built on their site and we have brainstormed ideas on how to promote the trip.

It is another exciting partnership that we are thrilled about, but it is another time sensitive issue.  January is only a little over two months away and we need bookings.  We leave for Fiji and China in two weeks and won’t be able to put much time in to promotion after we leave. So we are working hard right now.

We have spent time shopping for new camera equipment and bought a snazzy new Canon 5DMkII, with a new 70-200 2.8 IS Lens. With our older 16-35 and the 50 mm 1.4 we will be walking around with our best camera kit yet! I will be taking over the Panasonic GH 1 Camera and will be using that for photos and video.  So the reason I write about this?…Shopping has taken up a lot of our time!

Tourism Fiji

We keep mentioning Fiji and that is because Tourism Fiji has invited us to take part in their FijiMe campaign in November. We are so excited to be going to Fiji and we had a Twinterview with them yesterday regarding the trip.  We learned that we will be staying in Fiji’s adventure capital at the PearlFiji Resort taking part in some sweet activities such as parasailing, trekking and jet skiing.  We don’t know our complete itinerary yet, they will be tweeting it throughout the next two weeks, but we enjoy the anticipation.

MeetUps

We are sad to be leaving Toronto and missing out on the future Toronto Travel Tribes. But we did manage to make it to a final tribe meeting where we discussed video editing.

Alicia of Behind the Lens put on a fabulous presentation and we all learned a lot.

We will be editing our Princess Cruises Videos (Finally) this week and I think I am going to take the leap and do my editing on Final Cut Pro. Wish Me luck!

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So with only two weeks until we leave we are packed and ready to go. We barely unpacked from India, Nepal, Sri Lanka so that was the easy parts.  We dont’ need any shots, we don’t need any prescriptions filled and we don’t need to deal with any travel insurance. Lucky for us, the travel is the easy part….Blogging is the work!

Let’s face it, most of us aren’t writing a blog for ourselves.  We would appreciate an audience.  But how does one get an audience, especially when they are first starting out?

You have to network. If people don’t know you are out there, they will never find you.

There are many technical things that can help a person to place higher in the search engines. If you show up on the first page of Google, you will definitely find an audience of people looking for advice and information. But that doesn’t happen overnight.

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cartoon courtesy of HardikPargi.com

So what do you focus on first?

You write great content.   If you don’t write something of interest, people won’t come back. People want information, but they also want to be entertained. They want to know that when they come over to your blog, they will find something different.

Let’s assume that you already know the basics of blogging. If you don’t, head over to NomadicMatts website and buy his Book How to Make money with Your Travel blog. He has some great tips on how to start your travel blog.

So let’s get on with the post.

I was overwhelmed when we first started trying to get our blog recognized.  I had been looking at all these “top travel blog sites” and “lists of the best travel blogs” and said..”I want on that.  How do I get on those?”

I scoured the Internet looking for advice and found a lot of information at places like:

• The Travel Writers Exchange
• Travel Blog Advice
• Travel Online Partners

They have great information and The Travel Writers Exchange even has a forum that you can discuss issues and post questions.

We are by no means the top of the travel blogging community, but we have slowly started to figure out how to find an audience. We have reached that magic number of over 30,000 views per month. We are nowhere near where we want to be yet, but for a year and a half of work we are happy with our growth.

What we’ve done over the past 18 Months.

1. Write about what you know -  We were lucky when we started our travel blog. We had been traveling for almost a decade and had already been to over 30 countries. We had a repertoire of stories that were just waiting to be told. In a sense, we could compete with the “big boys” of travel blogging because we had already done Burma, Laos, Borneo and the rest of South East Asia. We had been through Central America and Africa. People thought that we were already established bloggers. That doesn’t mean we were anything special, we just focused on what we knew; World Travel.  But, if you haven’t been around the world don’t worry, focus on your expertise.  Maybe  you know all about sports of the world, or languages or you are an expert on one destination.  If you write about what you know, people will come back. You will become the authority on that subject.

2. Find a Niche -  There are a million travel blogs out there. Backpackers, solo travelers, travel couples, you have to find something that makes you unique. What are you passionate about? When you write, are you funny? Are you a straight and to the point type of person, do you like controversy and will rant about anything?  We are an adventure travel couple from Canada. A lot of the world doesn’t know the little things about Canada, they think we are the same as the United States. We like to write about that. We also like to write with our hearts on our sleeve and discuss our insecurities, our accomplishments and our struggles. We like to take on extreme adventures are thrilled to be taking part in the Mongol Rally next year to kick start the adventure side of our blog again. With China, India and a 10,000 mile car rally coming up in the next year, we are back on track as being Canada’s Adventure Couple.

Network

3a. Leave insightful Comments – When we first started blogging, we would go to other people’s blogs and see the insightful comments and discussions going on between established Bloggers and we were blown away.  Just by going through comment threads, we could pick out who was an authority in the travel market.  The more we saw them around the Internet, the more we wanted to read about them. The ones that are big online, are the people that network well.  They leave comments that add to the post not just a silly “great post” comment that does nothing for a person.

3b. Join forums –  Places like the Travel Blog Exchange, The Travel Writers Exchange and BootsnAll are a great way to get your name out there. Introduce yourself and join the discussion.  There are so many places that you can network with other Bloggers. There are even Travel Blog forums on facebook. Find the one that you are comfortable with and start chatting.

4. Write Guest posts - People are always looking for great content. If you approach a larger blog with something that you think would be suitable for their readers, people will most likely say yes. We accept guest posts. When someone emails us an article we read it. If we like it, we post it with their bio and a link back to their website. It not only introduces them to a new audience but brings new readers our way too. So don’t be afraid to approach blogs if you have a great idea, they may just say yes.

5. Write for websites – Take it one step further and write for websites like Matador, GoNomad or write a travel tip for JourneyWoman and put an article up on BootsnAll, This will give you a boost in traffic, build your name and your body of published work. Some larger sites even pay a small amount for your articles.  Go for it, start searching for other online travel magazines and send in your submission today.

6. Build a Social Media Presense – Twitter, Stumbleupon and facebook are your friends.  People may snub social media, but the referrals you will get from these sites are astounding. People will follow your facebook fanpage because they like you.  If you engage with your followers on twitter, you will find that people retweet your posts regularly and drive traffic your way.  There are many different Social Media sites to choose from. Some people may love Buzz or Digg. Whatever it may be, choose a couple and focus on them.  The most important thing is to be generous. If you spend all your time promoting yourself, nobody will click on your stuff.  The more you give, the more you get.

7. Offer an RSS Feed – We had our blog going forever without offering an RSS option (really simple syndication) to our readers. Boy I wish I knew then what I knew now.  Give people the option to subscribe to your posts via email. They may not think of coming back for a visit when they are busy but if they subscribe to you and have regular updates in their inbox, they will be reminded to come over and take a look.

8. Persevere - Blogging takes a long time. You have to build an audience and sometimes it takes longer than others.  There are some websites that explode over night but for the most part, consistency is the key.  Keep posting, keep writing, keep leaving comments, work on building your friendships and contacts on your social media sites, work on becoming a better writer or photographer and stay true to yourself and your vision. Eventually it will pay off.

I suck at writing a headline.

It is the last thing I think of whenever I write a post and it shows.  I try to think of something witty and fun and I draw a blank.  However it is the most important part of any article. Be it for a magazine, newspaper or blog post, we have to grab our readers attention with a catchy headline that will draw them in and make them want to read more.

We have obviously been lucky.

Our headlines are terrible. People may read our posts, but I know it is not based on the titles of the piece.

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So What makes a good headline or title for a blog post?

Too Vague

When I first started blogging, I didn’t have any clue about SEO (search engine optimization) If I were writing about our preparation for our cycling tour of Africa, I would end up writing something like “Crunch Time.” What does that mean?  It doesn’t give the reader any idea what the story is about. And search engines would have no idea how to index the article.

Key Word Stuffing

As time went on, we learned about the importance of SEO and then went to the extreme the other way.  My titles were terrible as I tried to fit every key word possible. eg: Strange Funny and Odd Names of Towns in Canada.  That is a title that is obviously trying to look good in keyword searches and it sucks.  If I could have fit the word city and village in there, I would have, but the title was already way to long.

Balance.

In recent posts I have tried to put what I am writing about in the title and try to make it a little interesting to grab the readers attention. We think one of our latest posts has a fairly strong title “Why We Love McDonalds in France” Not many people love McDonalds, so it grabs the readers attention. Why would anyone admit to loving McDonalds, and it is very clear about what and where we are writing about: France and McDonalds.

But we still need a lot of work.

So What Makes a good Title?

I have been doing some research.

It is my new mission to try to grab the readers attention while staying relevant to the content.

Keep it simple – people want to know what they are reading about. If you are writing about Yangon, Burma put that in the title.

Stay on topic – There is nothing worse than having a title spark my interest and then when I go to the piece it isn’t about the topic at all. You may think it is clever and funny, but it still has to be about the subject you are writing about.

Ask a Question – Bring the reader in by asking a question.  Has something funny happened to you on the road? Put it into your title with a question encouraging readers to leave their thoughts.  People will read it and say “I totally know how you feel!” and want to read more to see what happened.

WordPlay - This is where I struggle and it can be difficult coming up with a clever pun. I have seen some amazing headlines that use double meanings that are amusing and yet completely explain what the article is about.  I haven’t found any great wordplay headlines lately, If you know of any let us know!

This brings me to….

SEO Vs A Good Title – People worry about SEO when using wordplay or puns. People aren’t searching for clever headlines on the Internet, they are searching for information. But that doesn’t mean we should try to be clever once in a while.  Plus, we have just recently figured out  that you can have a fun headline and then in the “Title Tag” add the key words to fill out what the article is about. We wrote an article called “Increasing Traffic with Easy Tweaks” But in the Title Tag we wrote “increase traffic to your blog”  We made the title tag more search engine friendly, but still kept the actual title clear and concise as to what the article was about.

Numbers - Everyone loves a top 10 list.  I see them and click on the title. I know what I am getting and  I know how long I will be reading.  What are the top 10 things to do in Montreal?  What are the three best travel secrets of all time? Numbers catch a browsers attention.   I just read a great headline from Traveling Canucks called 10 Alternative Adventures in Australia. I want to read that and will once I finish this article.

Stay Positive – People are looking for help and advice when they search for things on the Internet.  I thought I was being clever when I wrote “10 Things we Hate About Travel” I remember thinking, oh people will want to read this and see what we could possibly hate.  While our regular readers read it and commented and initially it received a lot of traffic, it doesn’t receive much traffic because who looks up the key words Hate with Travel.  We don’t really hate much about travel, we talked more about what is difficult when travelling, what is upsetting when traveling and what irks us when traveling. I think that a more effective headline would have been “The Difficulties of Long Term Travel” or “10 Things we Struggle with when Travelling.” Hate is such a negative word. why do we want to be associated with that?

SEO Tips – We have also figured out recently that you should put the key words near the beginning of the Title. Put the idea of the article in the first two words of the article.  If you are writing about a photography tour in India make sure those are the keywords you put at the front.  Don’t put the useless words first nobody is going to care about Dave and Deb’s Cool Photography Tour in India, they will be searching Photo-Tours-India.  A good one I read in my RSS feed today was Swimming with Sharks in St. Maarten at GoNomad, Anything for a Story. It gets to the point quickly, but adds humour at the end.  People won’t be looking up Anything for the Story online, they will be searching for swimming with sharks.  but Anything for the Story adds another element to the piece.

Do you have any tips for writing a great headline?  We would love to hear your advice. How do you come up with clever puns, clear and concise words or eye catching headlines?

It has been one of the busiest summers on record. Who would have thought that travel blogging could be so time consuming. Especially when we were not travelling that much!

The summer has been filled with making changes to ThePlanetD.

We have kept monthly updates as to how things are going since first submitting our blog to The Travel Writers Exchange’s Under the Microscope and since it is the beginning of the month again, it is time to highlight some of the changes that we have made.

We don’t want to go over our previous changes as we have made many, but if you would like to see what we have done to almost triple our readers since June and move up from 150,000 in Alexa Rankings to 68,000 you may want to check out our previous posts.

It is amazing what some little changes can do to make people start to pay attention to your website.

• Blog Changes and Website Business
• Business of Travel Blogging, Week 1

Now, what have we done during the month of September?

1. New logo and header – We had an outdated photo at the top of our blog showing our faces at the end of our 12,000 km cycling race through Africa. We were pretty skinny after cycling 12,000 km in 4 months time and don’t look like that photo anymore.  When we first made the website, we thought it was a great picture because you could see both of us clearly in the photo, but have since learned that we don’t look anything like it. When we met fellow bloggers and readers, they informed us that they almost didn’t recognize us!  Now we have redesigned the header to look more professional. Dave designed a new logo for both ThePlanetD and the Photography Site Picture the Planet with an arrow pointing people to click on the link.

What we still need to do: We have a few tweaks to do on the header still, We need to widen it a little so that it doesn’t look so squished and we are going to change the globe for Picture the Planet to blue to match the mountain vista photograph.  Blue and Orange are complimentary colours and we like it much better than our old blue and black colour scheme.

2. RSS Subscribers – We have been trying to increase our RSS subscriber list all summer. For those of you that don’t know, RSS stand for Really Simple Syndication. Simply put, it is a simple way for readers to receive updates in their email or on their google reader.  It is great for blogs because it shows that people actually want to come back regularly to see what  you are up to?  We haven’t done a great job at promoting our RSS until this summer.  The past few months we have slowly and steadily increased our subscribers.

What did we do?

1. We just recently added a new plugin called WP Greetbox to let our readers know that they can subscribe to us at various social media sites like twitter, facebook or in their email inbox by RSS. We only installed this greeting last week, so we are not completely sure if this will help or not, but we have noticed that many other blogs have this greeting so we thought that we would give it a try.

2. We have a great plugin at the end of our posts called subscribe remind. But I think that we were under utilizing it.  It is a reminder at the end of each post letting people know that they can subscribe, but we found that our font was too small and people were probably missing it.  We just recently made the font larger so that people will notice it.

Did it work?

Besides these recent changes above, we made our subscribe button larger in our sidebar and we have noticed a large increase in subscribers in the past few months.

Search Engine Optimization

Tagging

As we told you in our previous post Travel Blogging Business Week 1, we have been working like mad on retagging photographs in old posts and making our older posts more Search Engine friendly.  We didn’t tag our photos before and considering we are a very photo heavy blog this was a big mistake.  We have now changed photos that were tagged with things like “img_2967″ to “holi_festival_india.”

It seems simple, but we didn’t do it!

Key Words

We have noticed a considerable increase in views of our older posts since working on our SEO (search engine optimization).  We haven’t gone overboard with adding key words because we don’t want to change the posts to seem strictly written for keywords, but we did notice that we were very light on key words in all our earlier posts.

For example: In the past we would write something like “Africa was incredible.”  We now changed the sentence to “cycling through Africa was incredible.”  The post was about cycling Africa, but we hardly mentioned the words cycle, bicycle or cycling.  We learned that we have to add a few of these words if we want to be found in the search engines when someone is looking for “cycling Africa”

Now, when we search cycling Africa, we show up on the first page of Google.

Meta Tags

First of all, what are meta tags? Well, Google describes them as a great way for webmasters to provide search engines information about their site. They are usually placed in your header.php file anywhere above your <head> section. For a more detailed description click here.

Boy did we have all the wrong meta tags for our blog.  We started to do a search of certain keywords for our site last week and realized that we should be placing higher.  After checking out our meta tags that we set up at the very beginning of our blogging career, we learned that we chose some terrible ones to describe our blog.

We had tags like, “tourism, follow us, tips and advice” etc.  These were pretty useless for our blog.

We focus on Adventure Travel Around the World for Couples.

We have now changed them to adventure, travel, around the world, couples, blog and travel photography.

How do you find meta tags?

If you go to your website’s homepage and click view on your browsers toolbar you will see “view source.” Click on that and you will see your meta tags for your website.   Check out some of the top sites in your niche and see what they have as their tags.  It is a great learning

So there you have it.  Only one month until we are back on the road and we will not be able to do as many updates to our blog.  We are hoping to have everything set up before leaving for Fiji and China.

There is still a lot to do, but with a lot of hard work, we have made progress and we hope to make some more in the next few weeks.

Stay tuned for one more update before we leave.

]]> http://theplanetd.com/increase-traffic-to-your-blog/feed/ 37 http://theplanetd.com/why-your-website-sucks-review/ http://theplanetd.com/why-your-website-sucks-review/#comments Wed, 29 Sep 2010 09:00:28 +0000 debndave http://theplanetd.com/?p=12760 The newest Travel Partners ebook is out and we absolutely love it.

First of all the title, can it be anymore fun that this?

Why Your Website Sucks!

Let’s face it, there are a lot of sucky websites out there that just need a little nudge in the right direction to make them suck less. Why Your Website Sucks covers easy tweaks and advice on how to write for your audience, research your market and appeal to your target.

Written by:

Andrew Hayes, Founder of Travel Online Partners. He’s That Travel Guy, a marketing expert in the Tourism Industry

Kelly Erikson, Founder of Vision Points and an expert in growing businesses with good design and strategy.

Why your Website Sucks is targeted to people that sell a product or service online, but the information is also valuable to anyone wanting to improve their website.

By the end of the ebook, you will have the tools that you need to make your website more appealing, user friendly and increase readership.  You don’t need to hire expensive consultants or spend a lot of money to drive traffic your way, you will be able to find all the readers you need by redesigning and rethinking your site.

You will learn to…

Why Your Website Sucks packs a lot of information into its pages in a very easy to read format. Plus it also hits its points with an element of humour. It is a serious subject discussed in a lighthearted manner.

The Anti Suck Action Plan (ASAP)

We liked the summary at the end of each chapter  - “The Anti Suck Action Plan” There is a lot of content to digest and having “ASAP” at the end of each chapter gives you your task for the day.

You are even provided a workbook to help you work through the points of your anti suck plan.  Anyone can read a summary, but by having a worksheet to jot down your thoughts and ideas, you will be able to put Andy and Kelly’s plan into action.

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To get your copy of Why Your Website Sucks, Visit Travel Online Partners Today

We shared our favourites but we learned so much more from other peoples suggestions.  People knew of some awesome applications that we can’t wait to explore.  We discovered several new applications recommended by Tripideas, CanvasofLight, ExpatAmerican and HoleInTheDonut in the comments section of our last post.  Thanks for your suggestions. We are definitely going to check out Panoramio, Animoto, Hugin, 360cities, MpegStreamClip and MarsEdit.

So now that we have covered our favourite desktop applications in the post Top Applications for Travel Bloggers, we would like to share our top online applications that we like to use.

So here goes our list of the Best Online Applications for Bloggers

Dropbox

Dropbox is an excellent tool for all your online file sharing.   Instead of emailing large files to a person, open up a drop box account.  It is easy to set up. All you have to do is create a folder, enter the email address of the people that you want to share files with and then simply click on “share folder.” They now have access to whatever you put into that folder.  You can drag and drop in large files and all they have to do is reply to their shared file invite and download what they need.  Dropbox has many more uses too, you can check out all it has to offer at their site.

Tweetdeck

This is the best application for tweeting for us. We can track multiple columns to see what is going on in Travel, Friends, groups and mentions.  We set up different columns depending on the day or what we are taking part in. If you are following #traveltuesday, set up a column to watch the tweets. We can thank many people at once and give a shout out to many tweeters easily.  We can create groups and follow each group or hashtag individually. We can’t tweet without TweetDeck.

MailChimp

For our email campaigns and newsletters we use the free MailChimp application. For where we are right now it works great.  Not only can we send out our monthly newsletters to our subscribers, we can track how many were sent, opened and clicked. We can continue to use MailChimp until we reach 1000 subscribers. After that we can either start to pay a monthly fee or move to another platform. For now, we find it quick and easy to design a slick email newsletter campaign with links and graphics.

Chrome

We are converted. Having heard great things about  the Google Chrome browser, we left Firefox and made Chrome our new browser. It is the fastest browser online and it is easy to use. What I like is that I can search and navigate from the same box. It leaves Firefox and Safari in the dust with its lighting fast loading and ease of use.

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LiveStream

Allows you to create your own channel where people can watch you stream your event live. you can also put up your own channel and post videos like you do on youtube. We are new to livestream, but we are looking into ways to utilize it in the future. We have had a lot of live events lately and we are looking to use it during our slide show at Intrepid Travels on November 6th. It also allows you to stream on your channel, on your website and even on mobile devices. It is free which is even more of a bonus!

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MusicMevio – For free non copyright music we use MusicMevio of Music Alley. Sign up as a producer and gain access to thousands of songs from different genres. All you have to do is put the disclaimer “Some of the music provided from Mevio’s Music Alley. Check it out at ‘music.mevio.com” We have found some great tracks for our travel videos and we can feel good knowing that we are helping to promote new artists.

SmugMug

We have just recently started using SmugMug and it is an excellent way to show your photos.   What is great is that all your photos are hosted on smugmug keeping them off your blog, thus speeding up your site. It is easy to customize allowing you to integrate it seamlessly into your site.  It even offers you SEO benefits and the opportunity to sell your photos. All at an affordable yearly fee.

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google docs

This fantastic online tool allows you to create spreadsheets and presentations and access your documents from anywhere and any computer. What is also awesome is that you can share your documents with others. If you are working on a project with clients or partners from around the world, you can invite them to share your doc and both of you can work on the document together making changes in real time.

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igoogle or google reader

Do you have a lot of blogs that you like to read. A Google reader is the perfect way to keep track of your favourite websites. By subscribing to their RSS feed, you can choose to have their updates go to your homepage, email or reader. The google reader give you a lot of flexibility to organize, star and tag posts. It is laid out in an easy to read way to track all the blogs that you follow. We enjoy igoogle as it summarizes several blogs on one page and we can quickly scan for new titles.

skype

We now can’t live without skype. We have started taking business meetings on skype with its free internet calling. Use it like a telephone for video calls or even instant messaging.  It is an invaluable tool for travel bloggers that are never in the same country as their clients. Phone calls are expensive, but Skype is free!

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su.pr

For scheduling tweets and encouraging stumbles, su.pr is a great tool to keep your blog post alive and well when you can’t make it to your computer regularly. You can schedule posts to be tweeted up to a week in advance with su.pr
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Related posts

• 10 Essential Plugins for Travel Bloggers
• Top Applications for Travel Bloggers

Do you have some favourite online applications that you use to make the business of blogging easier. We have barely scratched the surface and we are learning of new apps every day. What do you use?