Monetize Your Travel Blog With Lonely Planet
Article originally published on Voyageek
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
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
Comment
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Comment by Merrill on July 23, 2009 at 7:00am -
Hi everyone
Thanks for the kind words. Happy that you found this post interesting.
I added the second part of the blog post with the pros and cons. Don't think anyone had clicked the link to read it on my blog. I'd like to hear if anyone experience a SEO backlash because of the duplicate content issue.
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Comment by Craig Martin on July 20, 2009 at 11:59pm - We've also been part of the Beta programme, but have just been putting the occasional post on. Now that it's opened up, we're going to start adding more content from Indie Travel Podcast.
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Comment by David Lee on July 19, 2009 at 10:27am - I was accepted into the Beta program going on now...so far I am seeing some steady traffic from clicks, but I don't think they've ironed out a way for us to effectively track earnings from Google AdSense.
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Comment by Barbara Weibel on July 14, 2009 at 11:13pm - Thank you so much for this info - I just signed up and have my fingers crossed....
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Comment by Victoria Brewood on July 14, 2009 at 12:55pm - Thanks for this post! I'd been waiting for blog sherpa's arrival!!!!
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Comment by Earth.org on July 13, 2009 at 8:54am - Congrats Keith! Do yoiu like the program?
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Comment by Keith Jenkins on July 10, 2009 at 11:21am -
Thanks for the invite. I've been in the blogsherpa program for about a month now (I was somehow selected along with several others for the pilot).
Cheers,
Keith
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