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BloggerBridge.com Affiliate Program – Help Us Help You

Have you ever gotten an email from a PR company that wants your help in finding bloggers? Have you ever gotten a pitch from a company that doesn’t match what you do?

We are announcing a way to turn those into cash through a new affiliate program with BloggerBridge.com. If you send us a company that signs up for a paid account we will give you 25% of their first payment. If a company signs up for an annual Premium account that will be $250, if they sign up for a Lite account or a monthly Premium account that is still $50. Not only that but the more companies we sign up the more the system will grow and the more pitches that are appropriate for you we will be able to offer. 

 

Currently all you need is a BloggerBridge.com user account. When you click on your profile page you will get a URL like:

BloggerBridge.com/users/2201 or BloggerBridge.com/users/chris2x

The last part of that URl is your user id (2201 or chris2x in this example). Any link to BloggerBridge.com (except to the blog which is run on a different site) that includes  the parameter affiilate=userid will set an affiliate cookie on a user so we can keep track of who brings us customers.

So for example: BloggerBridge.com?affiliate=2201

or even a link to your profile:

BloggerBridge.com/users/2201??affiliate=2201

To get started you can (but don’t have to) use the following widget. Cut and paste the following widget and change 2201 to your userid. See an example of this at AmateurTraveler.com.

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How Much is the Attention of Travelers Worth?

Mexico Booth at New York Times Travel Show
Mexico Booth at New York Times Travel Show

Does this booth at a recent travel show look familiar to you? I saw this picture recently and it started me thinking.

Travel shows are a common way for destinations to market themselves to travelers. What could be better than a room full of travelers wondering where they should go next? That is certainly an advantage the travel show has over mainstream media. You are dealing with a focused audience. But how much, I wonder, did this destination pay for that attention? I did some calculations.

The price for a 10 x 10 booth at the New York Times travel show in New York City is $3600 and the price for a 10 x 10 booth at the LA times travel show is $2850. The booth in the picture is roughly twice the size so let’s assume that it was twice that cost. Then we need to add in the cost of flying in people to man the booth, hotel accommodations, salaries or hourly wages, and in this case the cost of a mariachi band. That probably puts the price of this booth easily in the realm of $9,000 dollars.

Hours of Attention

So how much attention do those dollars by? Looking at our photo I count 12 people at the time of this photo who are paying attention to what’s going on in the space and don’t look like they work there. Let’s assume this captured a typical moment of a typical day at the travel show. If the show is three days long for 8 hours a day and if 12 people on average are at the booth than the total attention time for this booth is 12 × 3 x 8 hours or 288 hours of attention (HOA).

Hours of attention (HOA) may not be a unit that you use on a regular basis but I propose that it has some value. Common sense would say that a person engaged in conversation at the booth for 10 minutes is more valuable than a person engaged for one minute. Hours of attention as a metric would assume that 10 people engaged for one minute is roughly the equivalent of one person engaged 10 minutes. While not scientific, it does provide an interesting framework for comparing a variety of disparate media.

In the case of the travel booth I am estimating that the destination paid around $31 for every hour of attention.

South Africa Booth at LA Times Travel Show by Melanie Wynne
South Africa Booth at LA Times Travel Show by Melanie Wynne

So what are alternative ways of spending that money?

Let’s say you have the money to buy a full page ad in Travel + Leisure instead. Again you have a targeted audience of travelers which is good. So how long does the average reader spend on a typical full page ad?

Magazines deliver more ad impressions than TV or Web in half-hour period. (Source: McPheters & Company)

But isn’t that just another way of saying that the average reader is not spending that much time on any specific ad. I am going to estimate that a typical full page ad is going to get 15 seconds of attention, although frankly for me I think that is generous. The subscription of the magazine is 950,000 readers so that would be 3,958 hours of attention using those assumptions. According to their rate card a 4-color ad full page ad would start at $124,350 (without volume discounts). So you would be paying $31 per hour of attention. Surprisingly the same amount but for a much more shallow engagement with a much larger audience.

If you had the money for a Super Bowl ad last year you could have gotten a 30 second ad for $3.8M to reach an audience of 111 million. From the ad length, if everyone watched the ad that would be 925,000 hours of attention if everyone was glued to their set. According to Scott Tissue, during the halftime of the SuperBowl “an estimated 90 million people use their facilities” so we know that not everyone watched every second of every ad. But let’s optimistically assume half the people watched the ad. That is still 462,500 hours of attention. But, how many of those are travelers? Around 35% of Americans have a passport, that’s still 231,250 hours of attention. But if you are an overseas destination then you should know that only 28.5 million Americans traveled overseas in 2012 according to the Office of Travel and Tourism Industries. So instead of 35% that is 9.1% (some studies put that number as low as 3.5%) so that would be 42,112 hours of effective attention or $90 per hour of attention.

Indonesia Booth at LA Times Travel Show
Indonesia Booth at LA Times Travel Show by Jennifer Miner

New Media

What is the value of a blog post? Let’s say a popular blogger writes an article on your destination. If that blogger can get 1000 people to read that article depending on the length of the article time on site per page like me in the 1 to 2 minutes range (you can determine how long people spend reading a particular page of your website by looking at Google analytics on average). If we assume an average age time of a minute and a half then every 40 page views would provide one hour of attention. One thousand page views would be the equipment of 25 hours of attention. If we pay at the same rate for that article per hour of attention that we paid for the trade show that would mean this article should cost $775.

That is ignoring of course that the blog post will also get more page views in the future and will provide search engine optimization value so the blog post should have more long term value than a trade show, TV ad or magazine ad.

If you think that seems over priced wait until you hear this. I do a popular podcast which gets easily 8,000 downloads of a half hour show. So that is roughly 4,000 hours of attention. So having an episode of the Amateur Traveler about your destination at the rate again that was paid for the trade show means that the podcast would have a cost of $124,000 per episode which is coincidentally the same cost as the Travel + Leisure full page ad for the same hours of attention. I have seriously got to raise my rates.

Are these numbers estimates? Yes, but I think they are reasonable.

Is hours of attention the only thing that you should look at? No. But next time you are considering where to put your advertising or marketing money, do some calculation. How much attention are you buying for your dollars?

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Does Your Email Violate the CAN Spam Act?

spam

Everyday I receive emails that violate the CAN Spam Act ( This act was put in place to try and prevent spam or at least put into place acceptable email practices for businesses. Whenever you send an email to your customers that might be deemed “commercial” you fall into the set of emails covered by this act.

Commercial content – any email which advertises or promotes a commercial product or service, including content on a website operated for a commercial purpose;

guidelines:

  1. Don’t use false or misleading header information. Your “From,” “To,” “Reply-To,” and routing information – including the originating domain name and email address – must be accurate and identify the person or business who initiated the message.
  2. Don’t use deceptive subject lines. The subject line must accurately reflect the content of the message.
  3. Identify the message as an ad. The law gives you a lot of leeway in how to do this, but you must disclose clearly and conspicuously that your message is an advertisement.
  4. Tell recipients where you’re located. Your message must include your valid physical postal address. This can be your current street address, a post office box you’ve registered with the U.S. Postal Service, or a private mailbox you’ve registered with a commercial mail receiving agency established under Postal Service regulations.
  5. Tell recipients how to opt out of receiving future email from you. Your message must include a clear and conspicuous explanation of how the recipient can opt out of getting email from you in the future. Craft the notice in a way that’s easy for an ordinary person to recognize, read, and understand. Creative use of type size, color, and location can improve clarity. Give a return email address or another easy Internet-based way to allow people to communicate their choice to you. You may create a menu to allow a recipient to opt out of certain types of messages, but you must include the option to stop all commercial messages from you. Make sure your spam filter doesn’t block these opt-out requests.
  6. Honor opt-out requests promptly. Any opt-out mechanism you offer must be able to process opt-out requests for at least 30 days after you send your message. You must honor a recipient’s opt-out request within 10 business days. You can’t charge a fee, require the recipient to give you any personally identifying information beyond an email address, or make the recipient take any step other than sending a reply email or visiting a single page on an Internet website as a condition for honoring an opt-out request. Once people have told you they don’t want to receive more messages from you, you can’t sell or transfer their email addresses, even in the form of a mailing list. The only exception is that you may transfer the addresses to a company you’ve hired to help you comply with the CAN-SPAM Act.
  7. Monitor what others are doing on your behalf. The law makes clear that even if you hire another company to handle your email marketing, you can’t contract away your legal responsibility to comply with the law. Both the company whose product is promoted in the message and the company that actually sends the message may be held legally responsible.

The FTC guidelines for what makes a spam email are surprisingly easy to understand. The easiest way to protect yourself is to use a commercial carrier for your bulk emails in particular. aWeber is the vendor that I use. They make sure that users have opted into your list, that your address is on the end of your emails and that users can quickly and easily opt out of your emails.

Why should you worry about the CAN Spam Act? The failure to comply with this act can lead to penalties of $16000 per email.

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Social Media 101 – Video Recording

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Last Wednesday we kicked off a series of webinars with one called “Social Media 101 – What is Social Media and Why Should I Care?”. This is the video from that webinar.

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Getting Statistics for your Facebook Fan Page

httpvh://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lc0bHP8PTG4

This short video answers a question I have gotten recently. “Once I have put up a facebook page, how can I get stats so that I know how many people are coming”. You can not only tell how many people but can also get an idea of their demographics and location.

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Social Media 101 Webinar – June 16th

We are planning a FREE webinar for June 16th 11am PT / 2pm ET to start looking at Social Media and how to use it to promote your destination or your business. This first webinar would be a great starting point for those not familiar with social media and will cover:

  • What is Social Media?
  • What is a Social Network?
  • What is a Blog?
  • What is RSS?
  • What is a Podcast?
  • Why should I care about Social Media?
  • How can I use my business strategy to drive my social media strategy?
  • What should I do first?

…and of course everything will be discussed as it relates to the travel and tourism industry.

Register Here for the webinar.

For more information about future webinars, join the Tourism Marketing Consulting newsletter mailing list.

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Is Social Media a Fad?

httpvh://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lFZ0z5Fm-Ng

This video based on data from the book socialnomics puts social media into perspective.

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Malama Maui Press Trip

In late March I had a chance to travel to Maui as part of a social media team on a press trip sponsored by the Maui Convention and Visitors Bureau. The trip was titled “Malama Maui” which is Hawaiian for “to nurture Maui”. I had a chance to ask Keli’i Brown of the Maui Convention and Visitors Bureau some questions about the trip.

malamamaui-300x65

What was the goal of the trip?

As always, our goal is to allow journalists to experience Maui’s myriad offerings and to write about their experiences. The most recent press trip was unique in that we organized a social media campaign to include a team of experts to promote Maui via their respective social media networks not only during the week of the press trip but pre-and-post. This was a way for Maui to include new media as part of the press group, and it was a way for Maui to see new media in action. We also including traditional broadcast and print media for good measure!

How do you measure success for the trip, that is, using what metrics?

That’s a tricky question because one has to be more specific in regards to what you want to measure. For us (in PR), our first and foremost measurement of success is the experience. The satisfaction level of the media participants as well as our PR partners is all important as a membership organization. In the end, we want to know that Maui satisfies and we want the people who live on Maui to interact with visitors to have an enjoyable, positive, honorable experience.

Our goal is to share the culture(s), landscape, people, natural attractions, accommodations, activities, festivals, etc. Did Maui meet or exceed desired expectations or did we fall short?  We then consider the editorial placement by the participating journalists. Was the coverage handled in a way that best showcases Maui? Will that story motivate visitors to come to our island? These are things we look at as the PR team so we are better suited to work with future media and assist our on island partners.

Next, we look at the value and reach of editorial placements. These figures provide a tangible measure of success, something we can share with others as a measurement of success.  We use professional services to track ad rates and circulation figures. We compile this data and hope to have a minimum of 3 to 1 return on our financial investment.  For example if we paid $1,000 to host a journalists airfare, rental car, etc. We hope the resulting editorial will be worth more than $4,000.

Would you be willing to ballpark the cost of the event?

I really can’t share specific costs of our press trip with you, but I can tell you that in general, “hard dollars” for a press trip can run anywhere from $10,000 – $15,000, depending on the size of the group. That number would typically include airfare, rental cars, some meals and some activities. That does not include in-kind support we receive for accommodations, most meals and most activities. There is also the “time” it takes to plan such a trip.