This Weeks Adventure’s in Blogging

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Things are moving along and we have finally checked off a lot of the items on our to do list.

News: Our Monthly Newsletter

The big news is that we are starting a monthly newsletter while we are away.  Make sure to sign up for it at the top right hand corner of this page! All you have to do is leave your email address and first name and you will receive a monthly update from us. You can unsubscribe at any time.

We won’t be doing these “week in review” posts once we start our travels, but we really do enjoy sharing our successes and failures of running the blog.  It is in that newsletter that we will share recaps of what we have done with the website and what we have done on our travels.

Plus, we will be giving some tips, tricks and insider scoops of our travels. Along with some more in depth articles regarding our experiences.

Affiliates

We have changed our ads in our side bar and are very happy with endorsing 3 great e-books.  We have written reviews of Make Money with Your Blog and Write Right Online so far and will be writing about Overcoming 7 Major Obstacles for Travel later this week.  We wanted to clean up our adspace and endorse only those products that we truly believe in. and

One thing I learned this week, is the value of twitter for affiliates. I read an article at Problogger and learned that you can tweet your affiliate products.  It was something that we had never thought of before and I gave it a try.  10 minutes later I received an email from ejunkie that we had made a sale.  It really is excellent advice.

So although I am not planning on cluttering twitter with affiliate ads everyday, it is something that we are going to give a try to once a week or so. What are your thoughts?

We also learned this week thanks to Trisha at Travel Writers Exchange that we need to give full disclosure about products that we are affiliates for.  Problogger states this as well.  That includes Amazon and Commission Junction.  So somewhere on the site we are going to have to put some sort of site wide disclosure.  We are also going to be working at linking to affiliates more.

Wake up Call

We got a wake up call when Commission Junction sent us an email saying that they are going to suspend our account for not making any sales. It is easy for us to reinstate it, all we have to do is sign back up once they stop it or make a sale in the next 30 days.  We realized that we signed up way too quickly for commission junction.  We read that all of the “big bloggers” used them when we first started, so we signed up and blindly put a bunch of ads up in our side bar and never looked at it again.  We never promoted the items, we never clicked on the items and we never played around with their placement.  We just knew that we liked the Lonely Planet, we used Blue Host and that we thought Skype was good, so why wouldn’t everyone else click on the products and buy them right?  Wrong.

Where Else we have Shown up

We had a guest post come out about our time in Africa at WildJunket.  Thank you Nellie for having us launch your excellent new series What’s Your Wildest Adventure?”

We also contributed at tip to IsabellesTravels about our favorite item in our backpacks….The ZipLock Bag. We never go anywhere without it.

And we enjoyed writing a group post about Holiday Shopping.  A bunch of travel writers took part and you can check out their holiday list suggestions as well as ours at our post Holiday Gifts for the Adventure Traveler

Small Set Back

While we thought that we had a lot of time to get things done, my toe unfortunately has been a bit of a draw back.  A few weeks ago, I stubbed it on a pin in our carpet. I never did find the pin, but a couple of days later my toe was the size of Fred Flintstone’s throbbing tootsie’s.  After 3 rounds of antibiotics, and finally an X-ray last Friday, they found  a 1 cm long piece of metal is in my toe.  I could not see a specialist in time before leaving, so I had to go to emergency for a quick referral.  After 6 hours in the hospital (backed up due to H1N1 panic) I got an appointment for Monday.  We waited for 2 hours on Monday to see the surgeon only for him to tell me that he won’t be able to fit me in before leaving anyway.

My last ditch effort was visiting a walk in clinic that I went to 2 weeks earlier.  The doctor there just so happens to be a plastic surgeon and I already had an appointment with him this Saturday to take part of my toe nail off to relieve the pressure.   He took a look at my X-ray and told me that he could take it out the next morning. Yahoo!  He let me have it as a souvenir.

UnFortunately…

I thought that I would be able to catch up on reading my blogs and spending some final time tweeting our friends, but I have spent the past 3 days at clinics and hospitals.  It has wasted precious time that we just don’t have right now.  On the bright side, at least I have 2 weeks for my toe to heal and I will be going to India worry free.  We haven’t even left yet, and I already feel disconnected from the travel blogging community. I am only hoping that there are plenty of Wifi Connections in India.

So that is our week in a nutshell.

(Disclosure:  The links to the ebook’s above, do make us some money, but like everything here at theplanetd, we would never recommend something if we didn’t believe it it’s value.)

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