Category : Hotels Carolina Beach NC
By : Hotels In San Diego
Posted By : San Diego Rancho Bernardo CA Hotels
What follows is one of those periodic navel-gazing exercises. If you have no interest in the rather strange world of travel blogging, stop reading now and find something more interesting instead (may I humbly offer you this post).
Reading from the many round-ups of the recent travel blogging conferences the route to getting a return on the considerable effort involved in managing a blog appears to lie in building a relationship with travel brands. Whether they sell hotel rooms, airline tickets, travel insurance or magic vests, those responsible for promoting these brands are the people who see the best reason to engage with the blogging community. There appears to be a fairly happy exchange taking place between those who own a travel blog and those who want to have their business promoted on their sites.
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It makes perfect sense of course. Companies allocate a proportion of their budget to getting the message about their products or services to as many of their potential customers as possible. As travellers themselves, who better to act as their advocates than travel bloggers? And the best part of all for the travel companies is that it’s so cost effective. Instead of paying large sums of money for PR, marketing and advertising, now a blogger can get your brand in front of a new audience for a fraction of the cost (a trip or a product sample is the normal currency of payment). As for the bloggers, they get access to travel or travel-related goods which would otherwise be, in most cases, beyond their financial means.
And it is here that I lose interest in the business of blogging. I don’t write on this site to make friends with travel brands, be their advocate or introduce them to my readers. That should probably take me off the radar for those brands (and their PR agencies) looking to ‘reach out’ to the travel blogging community. Rightly or wrongly, I started this blog as a place to publish my own musings and try and develop my writing. Over time I’ve become more determined to keep it like this and not go down a commercial route.
If someone pays me to write (thankfully this does occasionally happen), they are taking my work and publishing in their pages or on their site, not mine. It’s a simple rule but one that helps me make consistent decisions about the ‘mutually beneficial opportunities’ that are presented to me on a daily basis.
Does any of this matter? Not really I suppose. But before people make their offers of exciting collaborations or amazing blog trips, I do wish they would look beyond my site statistics and read a little bit of what’s on here. My About page makes my intentions clear, as does the contact form that presumably people use to find me. If those looking for suitable travel bloggers for their new project did a basic check they’d quickly see that I am not what they are looking for and would turn their attention to someone far more useful.
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