Voyageek

For the geeks on the go

“In Travel We Trust”: A Social Site For Travel Video

Aug 15

Posted by Merrill in Posts | No Comments

I’m very happy to announce the launch of In Travel We Trust a social site for sharing travel videos. If you are familiar with Diig or Reddit, you should have a very good understanding of the way In Travel We Trust works.

Users can share videos posted on any sites (Youtube, Vimeo, Dailymotion etc.) and leave a description. Anyone can comment, vote the video up.

In Travel We Trust will hopefully be a place where people can find great travel content and discover the best videos from the kind of people like Craig, Benny or Kim. From the video producers point of view, I hope that it will be a great way for them to get attention to their videos amd widen their reach.

As the site is very new, the traffic to the site is still smaell, but if you submit a video you are almost assured that it will reach the homepage !

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Voyalinks – 10th August 2009

Aug 10

Posted by Merrill in Voyalinks | No Comments

Travel Blog Exchange Recap

Top 10 Travel Books acording to The Guardian

Popular places on Twitter

Beautiful 360 view of Budapest

Dopplr and Xing can now be linked

What are your WORST travel experiences ?

“When can we stop looking at this big hole in the ground“

Travel Book Review: French Milk

Jul 28

Posted by Merrill in Posts | 1 Comment

French-Milk-Cover

My wife doesn’t really like travel writing, doesn’t really care about comics and is not a big fan of books by Americans or English writers about France. So when I brought home French Milk, a book that fits those three criteria, I didn’t expect her to start reading it, and halfway, to turn to me and say:

- Eventually we’re going to move back to Paris right ?

Even though she only stayed in Paris for a month, Lucy Knisley captured something about the place that made my wife nostalgic of the two years she spent there and was able to remind me  that no matter where I live, I am and always will be a Parisian !

After I read the comic book, I discovered that the author had a blog and that she was just coming back from another trip to Paris. She published the first pages on that new Paris Journal, so go and have a look for yourself.

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Get Free Advertising on Voyageek

Jul 25

Posted by Merrill in Posts | 9 Comments

I am testing a plugin called WP125. It helps display and manage 125×125 ads on your Wordpress blog.

As I don’t have any advertisers on Voyageek and as I am not looking for any at the moment, I thought it would be cool to send some love out to my readers and display ads for their sites…for free.

All you have to do is leave a comment with a link to your 125×125 image and your blog url. I will publish the ads for the whole month of August. There will be 4 ad slots, and if I have more than 4 bloggers interested I can add more ads to the system and they will rotate randomly.

I will only accept ads for quality travel blogs, so if you have a spammy blog with Adsense everywhere, don’t bother submitting your content.

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Travel Tweetup in Dublin

Jul 22

Posted by Merrill in Posts | No Comments

twitter-road-signAnyone up for a Travel Tweetup in Dublin in August ?

When: Friday 21st August

Where: We need a place that has Wi-Fi and a good Guinness. If you have any suggestions, the comments section is yours.

Who: Please RSVP in the comments. So far, the Travel Twitterers are:

Twit This

UPDATE: Finally it make more sense to not have a separate event but to go to BTW meetup September 3rd. organised by Jason.

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Gridskipper and Blogads are lying to advertisers

Jul 22

Posted by Merrill in Posts | No Comments

Where you are a blog advertising network or a travel blog looking for advertisers, lying to your prospective advertisers is not recommended.

I should have written “is not usually recommended”, because it seems that this common practice called honesty doesn’t apply to Blogads and Gridskipper.

Here is the way Gridskipper is depicted to advertisers on Blogads : “Gridskipper is the most trafficked travel blog on the internet”

gridskippper-on-blogads

Of course, a simple search on Compete comparing the traffic of Gridskipper and some well-known travel blogs show that this claim is a total lie.

It’s actually very easy to find travel blogs with more traffic than Gridskipper. Or maybe Gridskipper and Blogads have never heard of Gadling, Jaunted or Hotelchatter ?

In times when advertisers are cutting their budgets, this kind of behavior is hurting everyone.

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Is your Twitter obsession costing you traffic ?

Jul 21

Posted by Merrill in Posts | 6 Comments

Don’t get me wrong, I love Twitter. I would not have written about it as early as January 2008 and compiled a list of the Top Travel Twitterers if I didn’t.

Yet when I looked at the traffic of Overheard While Traveling, the last site I launched, the traffic sent my way sent by Twitter was dwarfed by the number of visitors the site got from Stumbleupon.

Overheard While Traveling. First Month Traffic by referers

Overheard While Traveling. First Month Traffic by referers

So shall I spend more time on Stumbleupon and less on Twitter ?

A good starting point for the Travel Bloggers interested in finding out more about Stumbleupon is the Travelexchange Stumble Upon group.

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Monetize Your Travel Blog With Lonely Planet

Jul 7

Posted by Merrill in Posts | 4 Comments

Have you ever dreamed of writing for Lonely Planet ? Well, your dream is about to come true. Lonely Planet has launched a new program giving a chance to bloggers to be published on Lonelyplanet.com and earn money from it.

The program called Blog Sherpa (or Blogs we like) allows Lonely Planet to use your articles, but the Google Adsense Ad showing next to your articles will have YOUR Adsense ID. Which means that you will get 100 percent of the money coming from any clicks on the ads served next to you content. (See an example of article here)

How to submit your blog

When you login to Lonely Planet site, click on your username on the top right. You will then see a new link called “My travel blog”.

my-travel-blog

Click it on you will be taken to page where you can click “New Travel Blog”, then enter your blog url, a description of your blog, your Adsense ID (you need to get one at google.com/adsense if you don’t have one yet) and of course you have to select the Blog Sherpa program.

blog-we-like

I’ve submitted Voyageek and will report on the revenue that the program is bringing, but my blog is probably not the best candidate for it, because I don’t write long posts about destinations. If you have great content about a country or a city, you are likely to be selected and make the most of Blog Sherpa.

All in all here is my summary of the pros and cons of entering the program:

The Pros

-This is an extra income with no added effort. You already wrote the content for your own blog.

- You get a backlink to your blog from a site with great trustrank.

- Your writing will be showed to travelers that might not have heard about you otherwise and you might get new readers.

-You associate with Lonely Planet, a trusted travel brand.

The Cons

-Your blog content is no longer unique. You created duplicated content on another site. Your article on Lonely Planet will compete with the same article on your blog for the same keywords. And guess which site Google will consider the most relevant content ? Not yours. Even if you created the content, Lonely Planet site is likely to be seen by Google as more relevant because of all the inbound links they have.

- And that’s it

UPDATE: I crossposted the articel on Travelblogexchange and there are lots of comments, make sure you read them. Also I should have explain that you have to tag the posts you want to appear on LP with “blogsherpa” and the destination covered. See here for more details.

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Voyalinks – 6th July 2009

Jul 6

Posted by Merrill in Voyalinks | No Comments

-Lonely Planet launched BlogSherpa

- A Global overview of emotions

- 4 Travel Writing Contests You Should Enter Right Now

- 24 travellers to inspire you

- Bare essentials of safety from Air New Zealand

The Future of Hotel reviews

Jun 29

Posted by Merrill in Posts | No Comments

BnB Galway

Instead of recommandations from strangers on TripAdvisor or from professional writers who didn’t sleep in the hotels they write about, get recommandations from your friends. When one of my friends writes something about a place, it has a lot more impact on me because I know the person who wrote it and trust that person.

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