Gettin’ Carried Away

Sunday, July 26, 2009 marked a pretty momentous occasion for travel bloggers everywhere. Over 100 people met at the Chicago Cultural Center for the Travel Blog Exchange (TBEX) to share ideas, ask questions and meet the real people behind the websites and Twitter avatars.

TBEX was created by Kim Mance and Debbie Dubrow as a forum where travel bloggers could showcase their work and pick the brains of other travel bloggers to find better ways to create and maintain a successful travel blog. Before the forum went live, Kim sent me an email asking if I would be the Community Manager of the site, welcoming new members and checking the site regularly for anything offensive (hello, spammers) to be removed. In the first day (maybe even the first few hours), TBEX had over 30 members!

As the forum attracted member after member (500+), the idea of a meetup seemed very possible. Knowing there were so many travel bloggers out there, Kim and Debbie got the ball rolling and found several companies to sponsor the event. Chicago seemed like an easy choice for TBEX, seeing as Kim lives there and that it’s a pretty central location. Kim and Debbie thought that piggybacking the BlogHer convention would be ideal, since tons of TBEX people would already be in town for that.

Fast forward a few months to the day of TBEX ‘09! After people signed in and posed for some free headshots–courtesy of Peter West Carey–they shuffled into the main room where super cool swag bags sat on each chair. (Thanks to Shanna Quinn for sleeping upon boxes and boxes of swag and putting the bags together.) The bloggers anxiously awaited the day’s events, which were divided into four discussion panels: creating a lively and successful travel blog, working with PR, travel journalism vs. blogging and podcasting/video.

Each member of the four panels had something unique to offer. Here are a few of my favorites:

• Nomadic Matt, aka Matt Kepnes, a successful travel blogger, briefly touched upon monetizing your blog by offering this tip: “Be niche.” Basically, he said that whether you have 100 followers or a million, if you’re the only one blogging about the topic, you’re number one. “Everybody wants to be number one.”
• Heather Poole, flight attendant and blogger said, “Don’t just write travel. LIVE travel.” I feel the same way. However, people like Heather and Matt really do live travel every day because, well, she’s a flight attendant and he’s a “professional” nomad. Unfortunately, with the jobs I have right now, I can’t live either life. Yet, I think what this statement really means is that you should participate in the experiences that you talk about in your blog. If you want to write about Paris, go there. Make your readers trust you.
• Wendy Perrin of Conde Nast Traveler says that bloggers shouldn’t just link to a story or a comment. She was once quoted (correctly), but the rest of the story made untrue inferences. Lesson learned: do some research and get the facts.

While there wasn’t enough time to talk about monetization, a topic that a lot of new bloggers (including myself) seemed very interested in learning about, I think that it will probably be a topic for TBEX 2010. Debbie hinted to that, and more, when she said that TBEX was “only the first part of a long conversation.” And I think that’s exactly what will happen. Why? I have a huge stack of business cards, I got 20+ new followers on Twitter (and I followed them back) and everyone was talking about where we could have TBEX 2010… possibly New York? That’s where BlogHer is going next year, and I’m all for TBEX following.

How lucky am I to have been in the presence of such influential bloggers and industry people? I can only hope that all of them, and many more, will come to TBEX 2010.