- Writing travel guides online.
- Using existing guide book writing skills.
- Understanding what people search for and how they use the internet.
- Use Google Maps to illustrate travel guide sites.
Lack of work for travel writers?
There are few things liable to generate less sympathy than a moaning travel writer. And I say that as a moaning travel writer; whenever I crank up the whining, I’m always reminded that I’ve got a great job.
But times are hard for guide book writers and travel journalists these days. Matthew Teller’s recent blog post shows the thin end of the wedge in the guide book industry; titles are being cancelled, sales are falling and companies are laying editors off.
For those of us who write for magazines and newspapers, things are even more grim. Freelance budgets are being slashed (often to zero), travel sections are disappearing, and finding a paying gig is increasingly difficult.
Why the internet is good for travel writers
The pessimists blame this on the growth of travel on the internet. There are few web sites that pay for travel content – and many of those that do pay such small peanuts that making a living is virtually impossible.
This doom and gloom attitude irritates me immensely. The misery merchants foretelling the end of travel journalism have got it all wrong. The internet has created a world of opportunity – and guide book authors in particular should be getting excited. The tools are there – it’s just a case of harnessing them. And this, as far as I can see, is how to do it…
ONE: Use your specialist knowledge
Guide book writers, in particular, like to regard themselves as an expert on a particular destination or subject. And if you’re an expert on anything in particular, you should be more qualified to write about it than just about anything else, correct?
Well why wait for a book publisher to ask you to write it? That detailed knowledge is precisely what will enable you to earn money writing for the internet.
There’s very little difference in writing 50,000 words for a guidebook and writing 50,000 words for a website. It’s still a guide – it’s just formatted slightly differently.
As long as you have a niche that can be exploited, you’re on to a winner. The web is all about niches – and a little one man operation can often cover that niche just as well (if not better) than the big players. It’s all about the content – both the quality and quantity of it. Start-up costs are low (buying a domain and web-hosting costs a pittance) – it’s just a case of putting the time and effort in.
It doesn’t matter what your niche is – Albania, Mumbai, The Andes, shopping holidays – as long as you can write lots and lots of good material on it. If you’re confident that you can be the best at writing on the subject, then there’s money to be made.
TWO: Don’t worry too much about web design skills
Two of the most successful online guide writers I know of are Durant Imboden of Europe For Visitors and Tom Brosnahan’s Turkey Travel Planner. Both sites are hideously ugly, but their owners are very successful, and make a comfortable full-time living from their little babies. Why? The main reason is the level of detail present and the sheer weight of content. What the site looks like is something of an irrelevance – structure and organisation are far more important than aesthetics.
And surely structure and organisation are two things guide book writers have to be good at anyway? It’s hardly learning a new skill set.
THREE: Build up a mass of content to exploit the long tail
Europe For Visitors and Turkey Travel Planner make money because they have so much information, spread across thousands of pages. No one page earns all that much, but when the earnings from each page are added together, it comes to a tidy sum.
This is the long tail. It’s the same model that the likes of Amazon.com work on. They sell hardly any copy of most of the books they have, but those few copies of each eventually ends up being hundreds of thousands of books.
Web content works the same way. Turkey Travel Planner’s page on Phrygia and Phrygians in Turkey will get barely any traffic, but when that trickle of traffic is added to the trickles from the other thousands of pages, it gets substantial.
FOUR: Understand how people use search
Google is your friend. The classic mistake is to create a site and expect that people will look for it.
It doesn’t work like this – surprisingly few people will visit your site by putting in the URL and going direct to the home page.
The more likely route is that someone will be looking for a certain bit of information – they might be searching for museums in Eskisehir – and your page will turn up in the search results. It’s hard to second guess what people will be looking for, and this is where sheer weight of content comes in again. The more you’ve covered, the more likely people are to stumble across your site whilst searching.
FIVE: Use maps to illustrate your website
A massively underrated component of guidebooks is the maps they contain. A major part of a guide book author’s job is mapping the bars, restaurants, sights, internet cafés, shops etc. Up until recently, this has been both what is majorly lacking from online travel guide websites and one of the barriers that has precluded individual writers to provide what they would in a book on their own website.
Not any more. Take a look at this piece I’ve done on Sydney’s best pubs and bars. I wrote this, mapped this and put the advertising alongside it in less than two hours.
That’s two hours of playing with Google Maps from scratch, having never previously experimented with it. Granted, there’s probably an awful lot more that can be done to make it look better and be more useful to the reader, but it does show the staggering potential of Google Maps for travel writers.
If a complete technical klutz such as myself can map out a guide like that in such a short space of time – with little to no knowledge of coding and web design – then imagine what can be done with concerted effort.
Those in the know have been saying mapping is the way forward for some time. All the best hotel booking sites (such as Kayak) use maps, and newspaper websites are beginning to cotton on. Take the Guardian’s interactive hotel map or The Times’ walks, for example.
To me, any author looking to make money from the web should be jumping on Google Maps. It’s the way to make your specialist site stand out, be incredibly useful and present things in a way that those people seeking a guide want.
Think about it, travel writers: the mapping tools are free, you’ve got as many pages as you want, you’ve got the knowledge. The opportunity is there to create the best guide you’ve ever made, and earn enough from it for that guide to be a full time business. The internet may be killing off traditional outlets for travel writing – but every single guide book author and travel journalist has been given an incredible opportunity to take charge of their own area of expertise.
Tags: online travel, Travel Writing, web writing
/
I’ve just read your blog, David, and it’s great. I am inspired and want to do it. I still don’t have a handle on the bit about how you make money – where does the ad revenue actually come from? Don’t you have to go out and sell? If anyone has any reading material/_link_s that will help with this and with SEOs, I would be grateful.
My other problem is very specific to me – my greatest specialist area is Turkey – and as you quite rightly say, Tom Brosnahan is the pioneer and shining example of all that is best in the world of specialist web travel guides and he got there first! Onto plan 2.
Post originally from British Guild of Travel Writers forum.
Hi Melissa. Short answers before I’m dragged off to look at houses…
1. I’m not entirely sure on things myself. I haven’t done it myself (yet). But I can see what is possible.
2. For advertising, there’s Google Adsense and pay-per-click affiliate programmes that you can ad to the site. No selling involved. Alternatively, you can sell ads the old fashioned way – but possibly not the best bet for the types that don’t like selling. Adsense and affiliates do most of the work for you.
3. SEO is not my specialist subject either, but as far as I can see, the basic premise is to give things dull, explanatory _title_s, fire in sub-headings along the same lines and to use words and phrases that people will actually search for. ie. “Athens cheap hotels” rather than “Remarkably good value little joint in the Greek capital”.
4. Know your feeling. My specialist area – Australia – is too vast. I’d need to hone in on one particular area. But the expense of going out and doing it from the perspective of a guide writer rather than looking for individual stories as I usually do is prohibitive. That said, I am going to do it. I’m just not giving the subject away until it’s ready
For your good self, I’d suggest taking on a different niche. But there’s nothing to say that there’s not room for two extensive Turkey guides on the internet. The key would be presenting the information in a slightly different way. After all, there are lots of different guide books about Turkey. Why not lots of different guide sites?
David’s summed up the main points perfectly. I had no wish to learn HTML and website design, when I wanted to start my own website, but luckily at just the right moment I stumbled across a company that did all that for me:
http://tinyurl.com/mdyoty
The design isn’t great but as David, say, it doesn’t matter. Tom Brosnahan earns a 6-figure income from his websites so I think he can live with the lack of website design awards on his walls.
One thing David omitted was another potential revenue earner – e-books. You can earn considerable amounts from these, by supplying info you don’t have room for on the website. I haven’t yet had time to do one myself, but I’ve got the info on how to do it. They are very easy to do, and one website owner I know (just a one-woman website) told me she’s earning $2000 a month from e-books alone.
Adding maps to my web pages was already on my ‘to do’ list, and David also omitted to mention that including photos is another good way to attract visitors. You must label them properly so they show up in Google search results, but lots of people do visit my sites through Google Image searches. They may or may not be interested in the site, and may or may not click on an ad – but you have to look at all ways of attracting visitors.
I found that starting a website was considerably easier than O had thought it would be – much easier and much more fun (because you make the rules and the deadlines) than writing a guidebook. Getting it noticed on Google is the key thing, because the most wonderful website in the world will only have a few visitors if people can’t find it on Google. It’s no good just telling a few friends about it, or sticking it in your email signature – you have to get it ranking high on Google. Again, I’m fortunate that the service I found taught me how to do that, but there are plenty of books out there that do the same. It doesn’t matter how you do it, but it’s evident from David’s second paragraph that you do it. And the sooner the better.
Thanks so much for your input Mike. You’re one of the few that’s actually doing what I’m talking about, and thus someone for most travel writers to look up to.
Writers interested in doing this should check out Mike’s site – it’s a textbook example of how these things can slowly be grown.
David,
I think most of the travel sites making it are not journalists turned online, but online writers first. Why? Because journalists write in a way that isn’t very sticky for the web. A fantastically popular blog is not writing about the secret music scene in some obscure town on the coast of Africa. Yawn… It’s writing 10 best ways to have sex in a hostel. Or it’s writing a how-to guide for the most common questions with a clever twist. Yes there are destination guides, but they better be funny. Or have some very interesting ideas for trips.
If you want to write a guidebook online, then you have to be the definitive source. You have to have more and better information than what’s available on lonelyplanet.com or anywhere else. If you just have a smattering, forget about it. Total waste of time, IMO. Destination guides don’t get you subscribers, and they don’t drive social traffic.
Also– design does matter, it’s how people decide you’re credible. Sometimes you can get around this by having a huge site, that is bare bones designed making it look like it’s been around forever and is so good that the owners don’t have to update the look. But… for a brand new site, I think it behooves the author to get a professional looking design. There are just too many crappy fly by night travel sites out there…
Ultimately, I think the reason why travel journalist aren’t getting it– ie that they can make money online, is because no one is really telling them what it would take. And it’s not as simple as throwing up a site. If you started today with a brand new site, you really would have quite a climb to make it profitable. Just writing the content alone– but let’s not forget all the nicely written, beautifully designed, smartly positioned sites out there that fail to become “big”. And that’s what we’re talking about, because under 100,000 visitors a month isn’t going to pay the bills.
I mean, even this blog isn’t getting that kind of traffic. I’m just saying, it’s not easy.
Is it doable? Absolutely, but I’d advise people starting out to educate themselves. Problogger.net, copyblogger.com, entrepreneurs-journey.com– all those how to make money online sites, well… you have to read them. If you don’t agree with something, don’t do it, but you should at least know the most widely accepted theories about what makes good writing online, what makes money and what makes people return.
There is a reason why the dream of travel writers harnessing the web to turn UGC into something useful and providing the very best travel information online hasn’t materialized.
So I don’t really disagree, I’m just adding a big fat *
[...] sure that this list-style writing is the future of the internet either. I’ve already discussed how travel guide book authors can apply their skills to making a profitable website, but I also believe we’re about to enter a major stage in the internet’s evolution. Paid-for [...]