The Week in Review
Well, we did it. We put together our audition video for World Nomad’s Vantastic Adventure. We have yet to make it to Australia and when we received a tweet about it, we just had to give it a try. Australia has always been high on our list of destinations, but at this point in our lives, we always choose to go to places that we can travel for a long period of time on a very small budget.
Who knows, maybe we will finally get to travel in style in the Vantastic Adventure Van.
Check out our video and leave a comment. I don’t know if it helps, but any positive feed back we can get can’t hurt us in the eyes of the judges. If you are feeling really generous, hit the stars in the left hand corner and give us an awesome rating. No, I have no shame, I am not afraid to beg when a free trip is on the line:)
I am providing the link we did not want to embed it into our site, because we need to direct traffic to youtube to get our numbers up.
Here is it Dave and Deb: Desperate for Down Under
We want to thank Trish at Travel Writers Exchange for mentioning us in her article about Why Travel Writers Really Need a Niche It is a fantastic article and we feel very honored to be among the blogs mentioned of being on the right track. Her website the travelwritersexchange has given us a lot of useful and informative advice and we are glad that we found it. It is a great resource for any travel writer or blogger.
Check out TheTravelExperta tomorrow for our guest post about Tikal in Guatemala. I love Marina’s website focusing on Central America. She has great tips, photos and information on everything related to travel in Costa Rica, Guatemala,
We also have an interview coming out on Thursday at andyhayes.com Andy’s site is very informative. It is full of very useful information, great blogs and interviews and we are thrilled to be a guest on his site that we respect so much.
I am amazed with the people that have interviewed us so far. Their questions are very insightful and all so completely different. We learn a lot about ourselves and the business of blogging and traveling in the process.
If you haven’t read our other interviews check them out here at The9to5Alternative and JetSetCitizen
Now onto the business of blogging…
We have found that we were getting great traffic from reddit. However, one of the moderators banned us from travel and we have no idea why. We have sent messages to all of the moderators for reddit and they have all sent back messages stating that it was the moderator S2S2S2S2. they don’t know why he/she banned us, but they cannot reverse the descision and S2S2S2S2 has not had the descency to get back to us with the reasons why. We can still submit everywhere else, but since travel is our niche it would be nice to be able to submit there. One piece of advice we got from another moderator was to open another account, so I guess that is what we will have to do.
Now that we have a larger Twitter following we are noticing more visitors from Twitter each day.
Since becoming a part of the Lonely Planet Blog Sherpa Program we have definitely seen a lot of new traffic. I will certainly keep submitting destination pieces to them.
We don’t see any traffic from digg and our technorati ranking is very lacking.
StumbleUpon is confusing. Some days we see nothing and other days we suddenly get a surge of viewership. So we will keep stumbling away. We will digg, delicious, tweet and reddit too, one day we just may make it to the front page.
We have been working using our google analytics as a tool and we are starting to understand things better. I am also needing to analyze the time of day to tweet things. I do tend to miss the boat a lot. It seems that I am always a little too late or too early from when traffic seems to be very high. But it is all a work in progress.
We are just thankful that we are setting everything up before we go on the road, I couldn’t imagine learning all of this from an internet café or on a WiFi in a guesthouse.
And that is what has been happening with our blog.
12 Responses to The Week in Review
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We miss the boat on timing tweets, too. It seems that we’re always busy on the days when Twitter is most hopping (in terms of #travel related stuff). Is there a place where you guys publish all of your online profiles, ie for Digg, Reddit, etc—so that we can friend you up, and Digg, Stumble and vote up your submissions? Love yer blog!
You know what has actually been sending a bit of traffic my way? Yahoo buzz. Not much as Reddit – that is my best too, but it’s working for me
Hi Dave and Deb – just DM’d you on Twitter about your video link above not working – hopefully it will get fixed soon so I can go and give you an awesome rating!
I don’t think you’re missing the boat at all – I think you’re way ahead of the game to be so aware of all of the social networking opportunities and taking advantage of them, and Twitter is just hard to predict anyway – sort of like the wind, you never know when it’s going to shift.
Thanks for the shout-out too!
Loved the video! It had me laughing out loud.
It’s great to read about blog promotion strategies, too, and I’m taking note as I build my own site. I hadn’t heard of BlogSherpa.
Trish you are a savior, thank you for the message about the broken link.
Liz, yes I love sharing information on what we are doing and what is working. I find that the travel community is amazing and supportive and I think that if we all do well together than we all win! So I just try to post every once in a while what works for me and what doesn’t.
Shannon, Thanks for the Yahoo buzz information. I am going to give it a try.
And Daniel, I am so happy to hear I am not the only one that feels they miss the boat on busy twitter time!
hey!
so i have a couple of questions. first of, who is this person!!! Sometimes people are so spiteful.
I have never used reddit, is it easy to work with.
how do you sign up with the sherpa program?
i have soooooooo much to catch up on. I can’t keep track of all the stuff to do:)
Ack. Two more social networking sites I need to learn about – I hadn’t even heard of reddit and yahoo buzz. Seriously, will you guys please do a primer on all the social networking sites you use? There are too many and you two seem to be masters.
Oh and one more thing – how are you finding this sherpa program to affect the quality of your google ranking? I heard that the duplication of the post results in a diluted google ranking for your own site. Have you noticed any problems with that?
That video is awesome and the theme song says it all! I’ll do my best to send it around and help you better your chance to win!
I love your weekly review. I love that you are so honest about what you are doing and how you do it. It’s so refreshing to see you share your knowledge as you go along.
You are one busy couple.
I have a lot more to learn from your experience. And I hope to see you go on your dream Vantastic tour!
Akila, We haven’t noticed any change in our google ranking, but we have noticed a huge surge in readers from blogsherpa. So we are happy about that. We have to start article marketing to bring up our pagerank (that is what we have researched to be the best way to get a higher rank) We have slowly been working on quality links from sites that we respect, so we are hoping that it is just a matter of time.
Good luck with everything and any more questions, let me know. I enjoy posting what steps we have been taking, it is very therapeutic:)
Hey,
just went on Yahoo buzz and submitted, it’s so easy:)