Let’s face it, I’m addicted to traveling the world and experiencing as many new places as I can. I’m addicted to transitions, to change, to compelling stories told over beer…well maybe its the beer I’m addicted to. Amazingly there is a whole group of travel bloggers who feel the same way about world travel (and hopefully about beer too). A few months back many of you probably noticed that I was accepted into Lonely Planet’s Blogsherpa Program where everything I write is syndicated on the Lonely Planet’s website. Very cool, right?
What’s even better than being syndicated on Lonely Planet? Getting to know all the other bloggers who have been accepted. Recently we have begun to exercise our collective creativity and have come together on a number of projects, including a possible anthology of our travel stories and a photo book (don’t worry you’ll hear more about these later).
This week our creative and talented group of world travelers launched a World Travel Squidoo lens (a website that features all the world travel articles that we write in one place). Any traveler, the active or the armchair type, can sit back (maybe with a beer?) and see different parts of the world through the eyes of some of the web’s top travel bloggers.
Lonely Planet has selected the cream of the travel blogger crop to take part in their blogsherpa Beta program. All of the bloggers below syndicate their content live to the Lonely Planet website so that you can view their articles by location as you research travel destinations. The LP bloggers have banded together to bring you a complete, up to date view of the world by syndicating their content live to this squidoo lens. Sit back and take a trip.
Stop by and check out the collective musings of some incredibly talented travelers who love sharing their world with others. You’re guaranteed to find something new each time you visit the Lonely Planet Blogger’s World Travel lens. Oh and a tweet, e-mail or just an old fashioned verbal recommendation to your friends would be greatly appreciated.
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being a part of the LP bloggers community has been fantastic. I had no idea about the squidoo page, have to look into that
yeah, the squidoo page is really cool. Check out the thread on the google group for info.
Todd,
Nice post and it’s great to be a Blogsherpie with you.
Jason
http://alpaca-suitcase.blogspot.com/
.-= Jason´s recent blog ..Dream Patterns, Weave Memories: Nilda Callanaupa =-.
Hi Todd,
Just stumbled along and found you. Good find!
.-= Devin´s recent blog ..Pic of the Week: Around Mindanao, Philippines =-.
Thanks Devin. I really like your site as well. Great tips on writing and travel. Please come back
Hi Christine and Keith,
Thanks for the long, detailed comments. I agree with Christine in many ways and have concerns about LP ranking higher on google for my own posts. In the short term I am not too worried about it as the benefits of being affiliated with LP are outweighing the costs. Hopefully the benefits will increase even further now that many blogsherpas are getting together under a shared voice.
My site is still relatively new to the public even though it has been going for the past three years, and at the moment being close to LP suits me. I do hope that as the program moves forward that LP delivers greater benefits to those in the program, or at least does not hurt them in their search and traffic rankings. The Adsense revenue is nothing really and should not be promoted as the main benefit. Although, to be fair, guest posting is very close to the LP way of doing things as you get the main benefits from another person’s work
Keith, thanks for the great tips. It would be nice to hear from someone who left the blogsherpa program to see if they have seen their traffic increase or decrease. I’m not sure if Christine was in it before or not. Cheers
.-= Todd Wassel´s recent blog ..World Travel through the eyes of the Lonely Planet Bloggers =-.
Hi Todd,
Great to meet you on Twitter, facebook and now through the blogsherpa program too! It’s a great honour to be a part of such an amazing group of travel bloggers.
In response to Christine’s comment, I have to say I agree with her. I’ve been in the blogsherpa program since they launched it about a year ago and I’ve seen some bloggers pull out for precisely the reasons she’s mentioned. My posts always ranked lower than their LP versions in search results and I must’ve missed out on quite a bit of traffic. I get about 20+ clickthroughs from LP each day, which is probably about 10% (Christine’s estimate) of the people who read my stuff on LP. I stuck with the program because of the status of being associated with LP (it has opened quite a few doors for me) – the AdSense revenue is a pittance. Here are two things I’ve done to limit the loss of traffic:
- Limit the number of blogsherpa posts.
- LP includes links in the blogsherpa posts they publish so I always ensure there are multiple links back to other related posts on my blog (either in the body of the post or under it).
In recent months, however, I’ve noticed that some of my posts have started to rank higher than their LP versions for different search terms. I’m not sure if this has to do with my recently raised PR or if Google is starting to figure out which of the two is the original post (and giving the original a higher rank in the search results). Whatever the reason… I’m happy with it!
As blogsherpas, we might want to consider Christine’s suggestion of urging LP to block search engines from indexing blogsherpa posts. It is, as she says, very very easy to do, yet they don’t.
Cheers,
Keith
.-= Keith´s recent blog ..World Travel by the Lonely Planet Bloggers =-.
Hi Guys,
One thing about blogsherpa… and as a collective group of bloggers, I think you should demand it from LP… they should stop letting search engines scan your content on LP.
There are 500 bloggers and over 11,000 pages submitted and google counts them as LP content. That means when someone searches for that long tail search like, “Best hostels in Quetzaltenango” it will produce Lonely planet’s page with your post of the same name ABOVE your blog. Guess which one the search engine user is going to click on? So LP gets that visitor. Maybe 10% of them click through to your site, but 100% of them go to LP first when they would have gone to yours. So in the long term, you’re missing out on traffic.
With 500 bloggers and 11,000 posts LP is getting a massive amount of free traffic and paying nothing for it.
To give you an example of how long tail traffic will help you in a year or two down the road, I have a single guest post called “How to sail around the world”. I never write about sailing. It was posted in 6/2008. To this day I get 200 visits a week for that search. 50 weeks a year, that’s 10,000 people a year or 20,000 people since it posted. From search engines. If I had used blog sherpa those people would have never visited. Some of them look at other pages on my site. Some subscribe and become long term readers. One little post written two years ago and the effect over time is greater than the original bump in traffic.
I’m not saying LP will outrank you for everything, but the fact that they have your content, will have a higher google pagerank than any of us means that google is likely to consider them the authority and rank them first. I have personally seen this happen with other bloggers.
I do use blog content sharing programs. I use blog burst which syndicates my content with magazines and newspapers. And they never index my content as their own. It’s very very easy for LP to put a little code in there to tell search engine spiders to stay out. Yet they don’t.
Sorry for the long comment. I have nothing to gain from this, just trying to help, but I know this will make some people mad. It just kills me that LP is taking advantage of people and everyone seems to be A-Okay with it.
I think if everyone put pressure on LP to change this practice they would do it.
Hi Todd: Awesome post. Like the others, I am honored to part of the LP Blogsherpa program and to be associated with so many other empassioned travelers/writers.
.-= Barbara Weibel´s recent blog ..Off-Beat Budget Vacations from Tours4Fun =-.
Hi Todd! Well said…I think I found someone who likes beer even more then I do! Have you been to Bruges, Belgium yet? The best beer I have ever had I had at a brewery there. You might want to add it to your list!
.-= Danee Gilmartin´s recent blog ..Naked Men Lead the Way in Paris =-.
Thanks. Haven’t been to Belgium yet, but I did consume my fair share of Belgium beers while I was in the Netherlands. But it is now added to the list
Just my two cents. I completely agree with Belgium as a great beer destination. Of course, I still have an occasional dream about weitzen (sp?… wheat beer) beer in Germany
.-= Devin´s recent blog ..Pic of the Week: Around Mindanao, Philippines =-.
Hey Devin,
I love all beer, accept rolling rock…very gross! I have no problem combining Belgium and Germany in one fantastic beer trip. I will have to pitch that for my next story.
Thanks for weighing into the sensitive debate
Great post, Todd
Hello Todd, very cool post and it is a pleasure to be associated with you guys in the LP Blogsherpa program. Ain’t we all addicted to Travel… and some Beer too
As I write this, I am itching for my next trip to Halong Bay and Hanoi in 3 days time….
Regards,
David
Malaysia Asia
.-= David @ Malaysia Asia´s recent blog ..Pullman Hotel and Resort Putrajaya =-.
Thanks Dave, it’s is an honor to be working with all of you as well! The last time I was in Halong Bay a typhoon struck and our boat was one of 3 boats (out of 7) that didn’t capsize and everyone died! I have to write a story about it one of these days
enjoy the beer hoi and your trip, despite last time I really want to go back.