If You Blog It, They Will Come

I’ve been surfing more travel blogs recently and have detected a pattern: uber-aggressive marketing. I’m a little surprised at how aggressive some blogs are with it. Oh sure, I am 100% in favor of making money from blogs, but I will add that the emphasis should be on good writing or good photography– good content– rather than promiscuous hits and stats. I’ve been courted by various companies, asking me to market their wares on my travel blogs. Some I do, but some I won’t, because I cannot stray from the purpose of this blog, a personal travelogue. I do not desire it to become a platform for hotel and restaurant advertisements and water down the personal touch.

I am disappointed that so many blogs have great big blinking buttons and badges, sponsored posts, and banner ads, and yet have so little emphasis on content. I’ve seen a number of blogs today with the sidebars as wide as the post area, filled with flashing ads and exclamation marks. I find them very repulsive, and I would think that these blogs drive away more leads than attract them. Everyone has some bad days where writing is definitely laborious, but I don’t like reading a blog that has milquetoast content and seems to revolve around “capturing” me with their marketing schemes. I think there are other ways to generate interest and income, notably through stuff like sales leads, word-of-mouth, and hiring a direct marketing service.

Travel is becoming increasingly Internet-based. Think about yourself– when you are looking for a vacation destination, have you looked online for information? I’ll bet you have! The Internet has become a precious resource for travelers, but the new wave of uber-aggressive marketing will turn off the tourist instead of attract him. I’ve read some statistics that:

* The average person is on the Internet approximately 4-6 hours a day.
* The average person checks their email box approximately 10 times a day.
* The average person handles almost 50% of their purchases online.
* 90% of people check the Internet for travel information.

Hiring a company to handle all the marketing aspects can do that “undercover” kind of work without repelling the blog reader. I’ve considered it myself. I’m not up there with the “big dogs” yet, but I don’t think I could ever bear to replace my personalized buddy blogrolls for the flashing badges that scream “buy me.” It’s the personal touch that really matters. This is becoming lost amongst all this “first-party” marketing.

I’ll bet we’re going to see a demographic change with travel blogs- and other blogs that market products. I think we’ll see a moving away from webpage marketing and all the SEO linkage schemes, and move toward a more direct sales marketing– generating interested visitors via better RSS feeds, email, and even through tourist attractions themselves.

Right now, most blogs are the middle man between tourist products and customers. I wonder if in the future these blogs themselves will eventually become products and they will need middle men to direct sales to the blogs themselves. One good example is John Chow: he started with a personal blog that was a springboard for advertisers. Now, he himself sells his blog and blog posts as products themselves, and as a means to promote his books and other creative works. He’s used the power of SEOs to get where he is, but I have a feeling that this will go the way of the dinosaur eventually, because 1) the SEO output is becoming glutted with content, and 2) a lot of the SEO output seems arbitrary, and people will find ways to work around that. Of course, blogs aren’t the end-all; I realize that as long as there are sidebars, there will be ads in sidebars. But blogs themselves will become more valuable for their content, and people will flock to get blog content (travel reviews, for example) than just to read a homily and click on a few AdSense links.

Anyway, such is a long way off for this blog, but I’ll be ready if I’m right and it comes.