The first thing I learned last week at TBEX, the national conference of travel bloggers, is that instead of being crass and saying you want to learn to make money from your blog, you say: "I want to learn to monetize my blog."
The second thing I learned is that in order to monetize my blog I pretty much have to change who I am. Not a lot of time at the conference was spent talking about content, but when the subject came up, it became clear that a blog should contain material that people are looking for. And in travel, that means tips and information, not observations and musings. Also, more people are looking for information on Las Vegas, Nevada, than on Las Vegas, New Mexico, and my philosophy as a travel writer - which I once wrote on a chair in a bookstore in Blytheville, Arkansas - has long been "celebrate the unsung."
This is partly why I'm no longer a newspaper travel editor, newspapers being as hungry for readers as bloggers are. But the beauty of blogs is that you're your own editor, which means that I can still write my reflections on less visited places. And, in a perversely satisfying (and non-monetizable) synchronicity, my blog will be less visited too. It's just like high school: The kids who are different are rarely popular.
