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How to find your adoring travel blogging audience (and keep it)

Editor’s note: This is part five of my series on becoming a successful travel blogger. Here’s the first one, the second one, the third one and the fourth one. I’ll have the final installment tomorrow.

You’re missing a key ingredient to your super-successful travel blog: your audience.

Notice that I said “your” audience. Not “an” audience or “the” audience. When you become a travel blogger, you will make a deep connection with your users that goes beyond anything you had in old media. These aren’t simply readers, viewers or listeners; they are members of your extended family.
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7 comments

So you wanna be a travel blogger? You can do it — here’s how

Editor’s note: Want to be a travel blogger? Almost every day, someone asks me how it’s done. So I’ve decided to spend the next week answering that question. Comments? Please send ‘em along or leave one below.

You can launch a travel blog right now, in the time it takes to read this post.

But not so fast! Just like every house needs a blueprint, you don’t want to build without a plan.

The blogosphere is littered with great sites that started with passion and fanfare and then flamed out. Why? They had no foundation, no plan, and ultimately, no reason for being. You don’t want to become a statistic.

I can help.
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The 11 best new travel blogs of 2011

Even though I vehemently deny this is a travel blog, or that I’m a travel blogger, I just can’t look away.

During the last few months, I’ve seen too many excellent new travel blogs arrive on the scene to stay quiet. I have to speak up.

Update: Here’s a list of 12 travel bloggers worth following in 2012 and 12 travel Twitter personalities you should follow in 2012. Also, please see update at the bottom of this post on the survey results.
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Should I delete my customer service blog?

Alistair Young had a problem. He booked a room through the Comfort Inn site and paid $225, but then found the same room elsewhere online for just $174.

Comfort had a best rate guarantee, which he invoked. The hotel turned him down, citing fine print in its agreement. So he started a blog called Keeping Choice Hotels Honest. (Choice owns the Comfort Inn brand.)

He also asked me for help, and I referred him to this wiki, where he obtained the executive contacts for Comfort Inn and appealed to them.
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This is not a travel blog, it’s a …

Let me start by saying this isn’t my site, even though it bears my name. It’s yours.

Always was.

Without you, I would have moved on to the next thing a long time ago. But your interesting questions and lively comments keep this site going. They keep me going.

Thank you for an amazing 15 years as a consumer travel advocate.

I wanted to let you know about some important changes coming to your site, and I wanted you to hear it from me first.
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11 travel blogs you should bookmark in 2011

Which 11 travel blogs should you bookmark next year?

To answer that question, I consulted my feed reader to find out which travel sites I visit most frequently. It’s a methodology I used for last year’s list, too.

Update: Here’s a list of 12 travel bloggers worth following in 2012 and 12 travel Twitter personalities you should follow in 2012.

(Related: Here are the best new travel blogs of 2011. I’ve also just launched a new travel blog of my own called Away is Home that’s worth checking out.)

This list shouldn’t be confused with my definitive list of travel blogs I like, although I happen to like all of these blogs. (That list is on the left side of this page — see “Friends”.) Nor should it be mistaken for your favorites.

By the way, if you’re not signed up for my RSS feed, you can do that right here.

Here we go:
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