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Interesting Review of the Travel Industry

Susan — Fri, 25 Apr 2008 16:24:57 +0000

Many people seem to think that the online travel world has ‘arrived,’ and that it’s a very crowded market. However, I read an interesting article over at the UpTake blog today by one of that company’s founders Elliot Ng. His reviews of the new wave in travel sites, those that are moving away from being solely booking platforms and which are now more integrative planning tools. From what I have seen, the best of these act like a virtual guide book that you can dog ear and write in without having to carry the weight around. I’m excited about this development in the industry, however I find myself getting frustrated frequently because many people don’t know about these options or that there are better ways to plan your travel.

For example: My friend was working on booking a hotel for a getaway in July to a nice place in San Diego. I was looking over her shoulder and suggested several of the great booking and review platforms that I know of because of my work in the industry. She insisted instead on spending a large amount of time trying to do everything through Travelocity. Why? Because the travelocity gnome is her friend on MySpace.

Yes, that’s great advertising by Travelocity, but seriously? Seriously? (now I sound like Grey’s Anatomy) but Seriously? Sorry… got into a moment there. Anyone else excited that the new season starts soon?

Back to where I was. So in an effort to encourage others to check out new advances in travel planning, here are some great new startups and services: Nile Guide, TravelMuse, Tripit, Doppler, the Yahoo trip planner read about them and more in Elliot’s article.

Enjoy!

PS- no one’s gotten the age right yet… keep trying!!!

Sorry… just one more… for the new season… SERIOUSLY????!

Really, I’m done now.

New Contest- Guess my age

Susan — Wed, 09 Apr 2008 16:50:04 +0000

Ok, so this is bad. I just took this test (see results below) because I was inspired by A Traveler From The World of Work’s post about it, although I was shocked by the statistics regarding use of websites that he quotes. I guess I’m a bit of the stick in the mud, I was hoping I’d rate a little bit younger than this, I like to think of myself as ‘hip’ but I guess not. Then again, it does describe me well.

You Belong in the Baby Boomer Generation

You fit in best with people born between 1943 and 1960.

You are optimistic, rebellious, and even a little self centered.

You still believe that you will change the world.

You detest authority and rules. Deep down, you’re a non conformist.

What Generation Do You Belong In?

Ok, so here’s the question for you all to comment on - how old do you think I really am? A couple of hints: I’ve got a Master’s Degree, I’ve had multiple careers and I’m married (not a newlywed). We don’t have any children except our animals - read Aelou’s blog here. I’ll send something weird (how about homemade preserves?) to the winner. If there are multiple correct answers, I’ll draw a winner.

posted in Los Angeles, CA.

Missing Podcast…

Susan — Mon, 07 Apr 2008 16:59:43 +0000

Yes, there was supposed to be the inagural “Traveling Money” podcast this Saturday. No, you didn’t miss it.

What happened? My Podpress plugin was corrupted and I couldn’t make it work. I needed to re-download and re-install. Then I had to leave for the weekend because I was leading a Youth Camping trip to Anza Borego State Park (see posts to come). So it didn’t get done. You’ll have to hear it next weekend baring any unforeseen circumstances. Which will probably happen. But I’ve never done a podcast before so bear with me!!!

In other news- we’re taking suggestions for what you want to hear more of on this blog about travel and money. Let me know by contacting me at kangogirl at gmail dot com with your suggestions!

Affiliate Sales - where the big money is

Susan — Mon, 07 Apr 2008 15:49:43 +0000

I’m an affiliate whore. I love them. It’s the easiest way to make money online that I’ve ever found. However, it took me a bunch of reading and about $100 in books to figure out how to actually make money from affiliates. And I’m still working on learning! Here is an ‘affiliate primmer’. If you want to make good money online you’ve got to learn how to use affiliates well.
What are affiliates?
Affiliates are companies that sell products and who want you to get your readers to buy their products. They create the product and you advertise it through a unique link on your website that has a code in the link that identifies you as being you. When your readers click through this link and buy the product you get a percentage of the purchase, up to 50% usually. The best affiliate programs are ones where the product being sold is a recurring cost (such as a membership or insurance policy) that will generate income for you each and every month.
Why use an affiliate instead of link advertising?
Actually, I recommend that you use both. Affiliates done well will fit in seamlessly with your website or blog so that it will be a recommendation of a product not a sales pitch your readers are receiving. For dedicated readers this means more to them and will increase the funds that you receive from your link advertisements. Link advertisements are great for new or occasional visitors to your site.
How do I find affiliates?
I find affiliates in two ways. Most of my affiliates are products I found helpful first and then went looking for an affiliate program with. These are, however, the lower-paying of my affiliate programs. I use them because I’ll be writing the recommendations anyway why not make a few bucks? The more productive affiliates that I work with are ones I’ve found through searching ClickBank and Commission Junction for affiliates that meet the criteria I’m looking for. These I choose by two main criteria- if their product is a good one I will want to recommend in good conscience to my readers and if the commission scale will make me a significant amount.
How do I start?
If you have a blog or website sign up with Commission Junction and ClickBank and probably a few other affiliate programs out there to figure out how they work. Once you’ve had a good look around, choose 3-10 affiliate programs to promote on your site and focus on these by rotating them on a regular basis. Good luck!

Do you use affiliate programs? Which ones do you like the best? Which ones make you the most money?

Saving Money While in Debit

Susan — Fri, 04 Apr 2008 15:32:12 +0000

Once again, I remind you that anything here are my own opinions and experiences, not professional financial advice. That said, I want to say a few words about the importance of saving money even when you’re in debit. Every financial website, book, talk show, planner and smart person will tell you to pay off your debit then start saving money. Most of them are smart people who have good money sense and were never in debit themselves. Even if you’re in debit, I think that you should save some money every month.
    I recommend this because of the psychological impact that saving money has upon someone who has accrued debit in the past. As anyone who reads ReallyBigGoals knows, I’m pretty far in debit myself from past school loans and in general living above my means. It wasn’t until I started saving a little bit of money every month that I was able to learn the skills that have taught me to finally live below my means.
    Saving a little bit of money, even when you owe large sums of money, teaches you three things. First of all, it teaches you how to live on a budget that is below your income level, not at it. By putting away even $5 a month (although I always try for $100) you force yourself to downsize your budget which teaches you how to live not just within but below your means. This is the key to ceasing increasing your debit and the key to getting out of it.
    Secondly, it creates a small fund of money that provides a sense of security. If you’re always living in debit and never having any emergency money, when something happens unexpectedly (like our move across country) you can end up in more debit and more depression/frustration which can then trigger unreasonable spending. Call it ’shopping therapy’ or whatever you want, but a Santa Barbara shopping trip because you’re anxious or stressed or depressed because of your debit will only make it worse. If you have a tiny bit of savings this isn’t so strong of an impulse. To my great surprise and pleasure!
    Finally, by saving for things and rewards that you want you appreciate them more and learn to postpone your gratification until you can truly afford it. How much more fun will your trip be if you come back and haven’t racked up any credit card debit? How much easier will paying off your debit be if you know that you’re still going to get to go on a trip, even if it might take you a tad longer to save for it?
    The down side- it’s not the best way to get the most from your money. You’ll be paying a higher interest rate (in most situations) than you will be getting in interest from your savings. If your debit can easily be paid down in a few months, do that first. If, however, you’re working with a larger amount that will take years to pay down consider saving some money as well for that trip and/or rainy day so that you can continue to live while you pay off your debit. You can always dip into that savings later and pay off chunks of your debit if you want to.

Ok… now your turn to sound off. Don’t worry if you disagree with me, share your reasoning here!

How much money can you make from your blog?

Susan — Mon, 31 Mar 2008 15:49:42 +0000

There’s a lot out there about whether it’s possible to make a living blogging. I enjoyed a rant recently from Andy Hobo about the current boom in people thinking they’re going to be able to pay for their travels with the Internet. Can it be done? Yes. Is it easy? No. Here’s the downer - if you’re making your income from a blog or even a website, you’ll be WORKING while you travel. If you just want to party and play, consider saving for a while and then taking time truly off. If you don’t mind paying for your travel by taking longer so you can work while you go and not playing all day but setting aside several hours a day to work then you might try making money from blogging.
   Lots of people make lots of different amounts blogging. This blog is not monetized and it is not my goal to make money from it. I make my online money in other ways. Some people can make over $100,000 a year from their blog but you better believe that they’re good business persons and marketers who employ other people to blog for them and who write to a large audience with 3-6 posts per day. With some ingenuity and careful monetization and marketing strategies it should be within your grasp to make 1-3 thousand dollars a month from your blog. Which, if you’re living or traveling in a cheap country can go very far.
    To make money blogging you can expect the following: To post more than once per day, each and every single day. Missing a day is death to a blogger trying to make money. Death I tell you. This is because if you don’t have a new post you will probably not get new traffic which will mean you won’t get new clicks on ads and your monthly traffic amount will go down. Miss a couple of days or (like me) a month and expect to loose all but your most faithful blog readers.
    You’ll also have to beef up your Google Reader account. Or however you get your RSS feeds. I recently switched to Google Reader because I read regularly about 100 blogs on travel that I comment on with links back to my site. This is the number one way to build a community of readers and my faithful friends here are people I met because I read their blog first. This is probably my favorite part of keeping up a blog. If you don’t like it just have a blog for your own amusement and family to read.
    You’ll need to invest about 2-5 days of time (about 40 hrs to start) into learning how to write for Search Engine Optimization. Then you’ll need to do it for each and every one of your blog posts even if you don’t want to. This is where I slack of a ton at this blog. SEO writing isn’t hard and it is a pretty scientific form of writing, but it takes time and effort and a different mindset. Search Google for great tutorials, I’ve learned how to do it without ever buying an overpriced book at Amazon or Barnes and Noble.
    Finally, you’ll have to make sure your ‘voice’ comes through loud and clear. I’ve always had a strong written voice because I became a writer through writing speeches. If you’re new to writing, get some books and learn to write for an hour every day just to develop your voice before you write anything that will be published or submitted in any form. I especially liked Steven King’s book and Anne Lamont’s books on writing.
    If you think you’ve got it in you, go for it! A word of warning to you though, your family and friends won’t know how to respond when you tell them you’re a professional blogger so be prepared to explain to Grandma what a blog is. I love this type of work, and I wouldn’t trade it for anything, but it’s hard work. To get a good idea of what you can make from your blog, do a Google search for “how much do you make from your blog” and you’ll find a group of people who include their monthly earnings as part of their blog each month. Like I said, I don’t do that because I don’t run this blog for profit.
    Remember though, if you’re going to start a blog to make money you’re starting a small business. And 7 out of 10 small businesses fail. You’ve got a higher chance of success on the Internet because you’ve a larger audience potential, so it’s not like starting a restaurant, but you still need some business smarts to make it work. And a lot of hard work. Read Working Nomad’s ebook “How I did it and You Can Too” for the best step-by-step guide to paying for your travel through website development that I’ve ever read. It got me started on thinking that this could be a possibility and now I telecommute full-time. Not bad for working from a cafe outside Anaheim, CA while I enjoy the sun.

Adsense Pros and Cons

Susan — Mon, 31 Mar 2008 15:38:14 +0000

    Adsense by Google is the most popular monetization strategy for blogs because it is very easy to implement and understand. However, before you go putting dozens of ad blocks all over your page, consider the following pros and cons to working with the Google Giant.
    Pro: Ease of Use
        Like so many things Google, it’s easy to use and understand Google Adsense from a publisher standpoint. Putting in the html links is easy, finding the space is easy, it’s all easy. Add to this the fact that they will give you reports on your click through ratio (CTR) and make it easy to get paid and Adsense makes it easy to get started in blog monetization.
    Con: No control
        Because it’s easy and automated to set up, you have very little control over which ads get shown on your website. You can choose what style of ad shows up but you don’t get to choose whose ads get placed there. Not being able to control this means that you’re at the mercy of Google to determine how much you will make from your clicks when you get them. Rest assured though that Google is good at finding relevant ads, so they’ll match your content.
    Pro: Everyone Does It
        You know what you’re getting into with Adsense, everything is up front and spelled out. Google’s good about this.
    Con: Banner Blindness
        With Adsense your CTR is what will make your money. If you have 1,000 daily visitors and only 1% click through at 5 cents a click you’re not going anywhere fast. Because everyone uses Adsense, people are so used to seeing the ads that they simply ignore them.
    Pro: Help in placement
        Google will help you determine how to get better returns on your ads through better placement on your site, free of charge. Of course it’s good for them because they’ll make more money that way, but it does help with boosting your CTR.
    Con: Income dependent on clicks.
        With other types of advertisement advertisers pay for placement, not for each click they get. If your site isn’t running a high CTR on your adsense ads, or if you can’t figure out how to disguise them well, you might consider another advertising method.

Adsense success takes time and patience. Consider always keeping at least one block on your page just to see how it does. If it takes off, consider adding more. If not, move it around and see if you can improve it. One of the best placements I’ve ever worked with was a Wordpress design that put the ad block directly between posts or in the upper left corner of the top post. The best strategy for any blog monetization is always to try lots of things, track them all, and see what works best for your community.

Using Goals to Help You Save

Susan — Fri, 28 Mar 2008 16:43:16 +0000

It’s easy to be told to save your money instead of use your credit card for things and vacations you want, but when it comes down to actual practice it usually easier for most people to put it on a credit card and pay it off. Why is it so hard to save money for things, like vacations, that we know we want? Why can’t we just say no to the cup of $4.50 coffee and put that five bucks into a savings account each and every time? Is it because we’re not good at delayed gratification or are we just horrible at self control?
    I sometimes think to myself, as I stand in line at the coffee shop, “I have an espresso machine, I can make this at home for next to free” but I never turn around and leave. The desire to save that money just isn’t large enough. It was during my interview with Theresa a couple of weeks ago that I realized that I’m not applying the same goal-setting practices to saving for a trip that I apply to the rest of my life. In my other life I write the blog ReallyBigGoals.com about how to achieve truly huge goals in your every-day life. I felt so silly for not even thinking about applying the very same practice that I promote there to my travel savings goals.
    Here is the way my thinking about saving for and planning a trip goes:
    “Self, hello?, I want to get out of the country/town/hemisphere”
    “That’s nice self, but we don’t have any money”
    “But I’m sick of being here.”
    “Well, let’s save some money up and then we’ll think about planning a trip.”
    “Ok, I’ll save some money for a vacation and when I have $2,000 I’ll plan a trip.”
    I asked Theresa if it was easy for her and her hubby to save the massive amount of money that they are going to need to travel the world for a year or so and also to re-integrate and find jobs when they get back. She said that it got easier to save the more planning they did because they quickly realized that the $25 that they would normally spend on take-out when they were to lazy to cook suddenly equated to two nights in a South East Asia hotel.
    To set any goal, whether it is a Really Big Goal or a simple New Year’s Resolution, you need to define your goal in a quantifiable way and then break it down into bite-sized pieces. Even if you’re not planning on taking a year long wander around the world, denying yourself cable becomes much easier when you realize that a year of cable will buy your family a week in a nice San Francisco Family Hotel. Without a clear goal, you can know that you should save the approximately $1,200 that cable will cost you a year, but it just won’t seem worth it unless you know what you’ll get in exchange.
    What is the most helpful goal-setting tool you use in saving for your vacations?

And…. I’m back.

Susan — Wed, 26 Mar 2008 22:53:49 +0000

Ok, so it’s been a bit (read: a TON) crazy in my life lately. My apologies to all my readers for the way that Startgo.com fell off the map this month. Thank you if you’ve hung in there with me. Several changing focuses at work have created less time for me to focus on this blog and it’s new direction over the past weeks.

In personal things, I’ve had several computer upsets. After the death of our computer in February, I’d been using our roommate’s computer for work and online stuff. Needless to say, since I sped about 8-10 hours on the computer doing my job a day they quickly felt like they no longer had their own computer. It became necessary to find a computer of our own. And by find, I do mean find. While the hubby is looking for a job we’re existing on my freelance & independent contracting jobs. This leaves us at about 2K a month, which doesn’t leave any room for a new computer.

Luckily, a daughter of a friend of my mom’s surfaced with a computer she was trying to get rid of. We were wary because the last three ‘getting rid of’ computers we’ve been given/loaned haven’t been the best. However, things are finally seeming to be looking up for us. Our new computer is a rescue from a closing Internet gaming/cafe and seems to be quite powerful. Plus, it’s got a glowing blue case that makes me feel like something out of Star Trek, which is always good.

So I’m back. Thank you for hanging around or not unsubscribing your RSS feed. We’re set with a month’s worth of articles now (plus a few back articles including the rest of the Create Your Own Website Challenge, so make sure to read them!) and at the beginning of May I’m going to post the whole series on website creation as a free ebook.

Our new focus is, as you may or may not remember, is the finances of travel. We’re launching our new podcast “Traveling Money” this month which is interviews and suggestions from fellow travelers who have great advice and suggestions on how to make your travel dollars. Our first episode, due to air on iTunes on April 5th, introduces us to Theresa Backinton who shares with us how she and her husband Jeff have been able to save enough money to travel the world for a year after his PhD defense this fall.

Finally, you’ll notice that we’ve got a new page! I’m working on compiling a list of financial resources for travelers, don’t hesitate to check them out and suggest something if you know a resource I don’t.

Sincerely,

Susan Reed

Making Your Money Work For You

Susan — Fri, 21 Mar 2008 15:28:17 +0000

    I love the ING Direct commercials. The little dollar bills that are laying around on the couch eating junk food that are whipped into shape and start jazzerscizing when they get with ING is just such a perfect illustration of my frustration with most savings accounts. Thank goodness I say for the advent of the Internet!!! Now, to compete with ING’s Internet-based checking almost all banks have high-yield Internet savings accounts that will give you 4-5% interest. That’s a far cry from the passbook saving account I had with a credit union for years that gave me .01% and told me I was lucky.
    If you’re working hard to save money for your vacation, you should make sure that your money is working just as hard for you. If you’ve got more than $1 saved for your trip you need to find yourself a high-yield savings account, and don’t settle for less than 4.5%. You can get at least that from simply transferring your money into your PayPal account, which pays Money Market dividends. I always suggest checking with your local bank first though because the online banking is all in one place then if they will give you a competitive rate.
    This isn’t professional financial advice, rather simple common sense. You should make sure your account doesn’t charge any fees and that you will be able to access your money quickly if you’re going with a savings account. If you’ve got more than $1000 in savings you should look into Money Markets and Certificates of Deposits (CD accounts) that can give you higher interest rates, although they have restrictions on when you can withdraw your funds. Many these days will let you add more money at any time so you can get the same rate, so long as you wait till it matures to withdraw it. Remember, the interest rate you get from these should be significantly better than the interest you get from your savings account, at least a percentage point. Also, if you’ve got even more money don’t ever overlook the possibility of negotiating a higher rate.
    Check out Bankrate.com for sample rates from banks in your area. Also, check out Credit Unions around you as they frequently can offer higher interest rates since they are nonprofit organizations.

** Check out Los Angeles Family Hotels from around the web**