Aug 15
“Hi Merrill,
Congratulations! Your blog Voyageek has been approved for publication on www.lonelyplanet.com.”
Woot! A month or so after I applied to Blogsherpa, my blog got accepted. I have this article on books to read for a trip to Ireland that is almost ready and it should be my first post for LP.
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”.
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.
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.
The results are out:
The 2009 Lonely Planet Best Blog is Two Guys Around the World!
The categories winners are below:
Congrats to all the bloggers and kudos to LP for organizing the competition.