Blog Your Long-Term Trip - Advice from the Experts

7 Ways to Support Your Favorite Bloggers for Free

Let's pretend for a moment that you arrived at a blog, one not so different than this one perhaps, read the article you intended, and enjoyed it. What do you do next?

While your own path from there may be different, the vast majority of people who read blogs do something fairly simple: they leave.

Odds are good you do this too, but let's take a moment to go past that. Let's say you really enjoyed the article, or perhaps you have been a fan of that particular blogger and want to help them out. What can you do?

Well, we have several easy ways for you to help out a blogger you like, and they all can be done for free!

9 Things Bloggers Really Wish PR Firms Would Know and Do

We receive pitches from PR firms just about every single day on our sites, and almost every one of them falls flat in one way, shape, or form.

There is seemingly some disconnect between PR firms and bloggers such that PR agencies don't seem to understand us, and perhaps bloggers do not seem to understand them in return.

To help with this, I thought it would be fitting to publish a few things that bloggers wish PR firms would know about us, as there are some rather easy explanations for why your campaign pitch fell apart, a blogger ignored you outright, or they quoted a fee for the promotion you are looking for. To help unravel some of these mysteries, and to help educate PR firms about bloggers in general, this post was born.

This article is specifically dedicated to PR firms- agencies that are hired as a 3rd party to represent a brand, product, or destination. While some of the following points are also applicable to DMOs, CVBs, and companies who represent themselves in marketing, a few points are tailored specifically to third party PR firms exclusively.

So while all marketing teams and agencies may find the following useful or insightful, a few are purposefully written for these firms only.

*Note: I did not crowdsource any of these points. So while I may be speaking solely for myself here, the below echoes many sentiments I have seen in private Facebook groups from my fellow bloggers.

Is The MATPRA Marketplace Worth It For Travel Bloggers?

In the past, I've written reviews of travel conferences and networking events like TBEX, Travelcon, NATJA, and IMM– a few of which I've had in regular rotation for a while. As it has been my goal to broaden my networking horizons, I'm starting to attend more conferences/events beyond these as well.

One of my recent additions was MATPRA (the Mid-Atlantic Tourism Public Relations Alliance) Media Marketplace. MATPRA is a consortium of tourist boards from the mid-Atlantic, namely within Delaware, Maryland, Pennsylvania, Virginia, Washington DC, and West Virginia, that comes together for a networking opportunity (the Media Marketplace) for writers and CVBs to meet and discuss publication opportunities.

So, is this one worth it? My short answer is yes. But my long answer would be with a caveat that it depends on where you are coming from and what you want to get out of it.

*Note: Unlike other event reviews, I forgot to take photos at the Marketplace proper (I was too busy networking, whoops). Instead, photos of this one come from the FAM experiences that coincide with MATPRA Media Marketplace.

What Happened When I Removed Dates from My URL Slugs

When I started this blog in 2008, I had no idea what I was doing. In many cases I opted for whatever the default setting was in Blogger (my CMS at the time), and, as blogging best practices weren't established just yet, I had no idea why some settings were terrible.

This has come back to bite me many times throughout the years.

Having dates in my URLs was one such setting that I was unaware could pose a problem down the road.

It only took 11 years, but I finally paid my developer to remove dates from my URL slugs, and quite frankly it was something I should've done a long time ago. Today, I wanted to share the results of this change.