Blogger Changes and Your blog

These changes are scary. When I started a new blog on Wordpress. Their basic system is free and took me a week to learn. It is full of features.

It took me a while to work out.
Blogger is so much easier and saves automatically. I had far more readers on blogspot.

 My SEO adviser (my son Anthony of Marketappeal told me that if I duplicated posts on Wordpress they would not get noted by Google. So I didn't bother. I also thought people would be annoyed to read the same post twice in different places.

However, if blogger is likely to disappear, I have to consider moving all my posts gradually, in order to have time to do so.

I hope that with the new takeover, some new ideas will roll out. Come March. Only one month away. Time to copy and update some earlier posts onto a webpage - or Facebook.

Make Money From Blogs

Problem
How can I make money from blogs?

Answers
Three basic ways:

1 Advertising
If anything you write goes viral or you already have a huge following, you can attract advertisers. If not, try the next methods.
How to get huge numbers of readers? You have to work at it all day, have a photogenic dog or kid or be glamorous, or visit zany and unusual places - or offer really good advice on a popular subject, or be a trusted authority with a huge following. (Or be great at sales.)

2 Affiliate marketing
You have to provide links to every item you recommend in order to get a proportion of sales from people who click through on the link. This would be tedious making hundreds of links. But you can get a couple of standard links to big sites such as Amazon.

If you sign up for Amazon affiliates in English, you can also opt to join the Amazon in other languages to pick up readers if your bog is also published in other languages.

Publishing in other languages is easy. When you or the webmaster set up your blog, it just means ticking the boxes for a choice of a dozen languages. Flags or letters for other languages then appear on your webpage for your readers to select.
You just do this once when setting up your webpage. Then every post you write is on a website with the translation symbol.

But you then need to read all the emails and reminders which Amazon Affiliates sends you in all the other languages you have chosen, or run them through google translate.

3 You sign up to the services which do the affiliations for you and share the profits with them.
WooCommerce
Simple Payments

4 Sell you own product.
 I went to a talk by a young Singaporean millionaire. to find products which would sell well, he did not have to produce anything or do any test marketing. He simply went onto sites such as Amazon and Ebay to find their best sellers and sold those products through links to his website.

It depends whether your aim is to simply find a product to sell, or whether you want to do a job you love. If you lose interest in products you don't know about or care about, then make a whole blog on something you will love writing about every moment of the day, whether it is fashion, or fishing, or football. Add videos and focus on the one subject and add newsletters and forums and comments to increase your ratings.

Be on media with links to all the sites. Which ones? Just check out the sharing options on the newspapers and websites you read.

5 Sell your services. You can advise on Skype. Use WooCommerce. Wrodpress.com Simple Payments.

6 Sell a product you make. You could sell through Ebay and Etsy.

USEFUL WEBSITES
https://wordpress.com/go/content-blogging/ways-to-monetize-a-blog/?sgmt=gb&utm_source=adwords&utm_campaign=

Author
Angela Lansbury, travel writer and photographer, author and speaker.

My forthcoming website - Luxury travel for less - my experience and yours?

I have started drafting the home pages for my forthcoming website on WordPress which I hope to have running within the next fortnight. Here's a peek at the draft of one of the home pages:

What is my experience and how does it compare with yours?

Travels Overseas
My first holiday overseas was at the age of five. Quite adventurous in the 1950s. My husband started traveling later and then overtook me. He likes to go hiking and trekking, Everest, Kilimanjaro, that sort of thing, wearing out special boots and poles with spikes.

Romania Hiking
I know because I did that last year in Romania. with a group. Anybody can make a mistake once.
He prefers a smart car such as a Rolls Royce of a Jaguar. Failing that, he is happy with a yak.  And a porter carrying the tents. I once rode on a camel to Petra in Jordan. A camel lets you off by bending its front knees so its back becomes diagonal, like a water chute. If you are not expecting it, you shoot forward over its head. I was less scared shooting the rapids in the USA and in New Zealand. Frankly, I would rather sit in the club lounge of a hotel or shop for shoes, thank you very much.

Camel in Jordan
I once rode on a camel to Petra in Jordan. A camel lets you off by bending its front knees so its back becomes diagonal, like a water chute. If you are not expecting it, you shoot forward over its head. I was less scared shooting the rapids in the USA and in New Zealand. Frankly, I would rather sit in the club lounge of a hotel or shop for shoes, thank you very much.

I'll try anything once. I usually try it again, ten years later, and find my memory was right. Things have not improved.

In Romania I didn't have sufficiently waterproof shoes. As a result, I was abandoned on one side of a puddle which had turned into a pond. Left alone for three hours, I watched the puddle (which has a technical name) thinking that there must be something alive in it. Sure enough, there was.

I stayed still and it came out. Then another. A whole army of them!

 I amused myself watching and videoing them - they were either toads or frogs. A day later, with renewed interest, I read the information boards about wildlife. They were yellow-bellied frogs.

Everest
I was horrified to learn that most of those out in the wild trips to placeEverest Everst, with all the porters and permits, and special clothes, can cost more than staying in a five-star hotel.

My husband regards hiking like this as easy. He prefers something more challenging like Everest. He goes off with a yak and a personal porter carrying the tents and a birthday cake on the top of the mountain.

I would rather sit in the club lounge of a hotel, enjoying the free drinks, or shop for shoes in the hotel sale.

Up and Down
So I frequently veer from the expensive to the cheap and cheerful, from Singapore Airlines to Ryanair, from feast to famine. Since I and my husband are both freelance, our income goes up and down.

I understand the desire to try something new, whether its truffles or pink champagne, but everybody likes a bargain.

Comedy
Yes, I am still married, which surprises most people. I went on a stand-up comedy course. My opening line was: "My husband and I have separate bedrooms. Mine is in London. His is in Singapore." I am reminded of a badge (Americans call it button) which I saw in San Francisco. It said: If you're rich, I'm single.

Morocco Honeymoon
When we got married, we honeymooned in Marrakesh, in the Mamounia hotel where Winston Churchill stayed. We were given twin beds!

I became obsessed about double beds, and four-poster beds and honeymoon suites.  Everywhere hotel I went into, I asked to see the honeymoon suite. I wrote for Brides magazine.

Camping
Quite a contrast to the camping sites in the UK and Europe which I wrote about for Good Motoring and Camping and Caravanning magazines. I also wrote about Butlins for a mother and baby magazine. Whilst I was earnestly and happily chatting up a woman whose daughter had lost her front tooth, and a man in tattoos, my husband declined to join in the sing-songs.  He stayed upstairs lying on the bed reading motoring magazines.

Polite Praise
I used to have a goal of visiting a new country every year. Now my goal is to learn a new language every year. My aim is to tell you the truth, but politely, as they say, to damn with faint praise. I would never want to hurt the feeling of the majority of people working in restaurants and hotels who sometimes appear completely incompetent but are doing their best, like so many writers having achieved success in one area, start again at novices in another, earnestly trying to do something new for the first time, like me and you.

Angela Lansbury, travel writer, photographer, author and speaker. My books are on Amazon.com and lulu.com Please share links to your favourite posts.

Where to share your travel photos and stories

Problems
1 You have photos you'd love to share but one friend is on Facebook but not LinkedIn, another is on LinkedIn but not Facebook, or you'd just like more followers.
2 When you try to share something, you get asked for a password.
3 You keep hearing about other sites but have no complete list.

Answer
1 Use Sharethis
2 List all non-vital passwords somewhere secret not immediately obvious to somebody sitting in your office or kitchen but which will be found by family or colleagues if you die. For example: in a password page taped inside a cupboard door, behind picture frame, under your desk, under the phone, under the shelf of a bookshelf, behind a picture in a frame, behind a clock, under a carpet or rug, behind a minor, under a desk lamp, inside a CD, in a photo album, behind a noticeboard, at the back of a calendar, - look around your home and office, the number of places is endless but make sure it could not be thrown away or stolen or easily found by an intruder.
2 Here they are alphabetically.
Digg
Email (the most private, you can send individually but you can also send to groups, however most sites have an address limit to prevent spam, so if you belong to a club which has two hundred members and the limit is one hundred addresses, you may have to divide your club address list in half alphabetically.
Facebook
Google Plus
LinkedIn
Instagram
Pinterest
Reddit
Stumbled upon
Tumblr
Twitter
Wordpress

Story
I have been relying on one or two sites. I now need more.

Tip
Keep a brightly coloured book or a book with a brightly coloured label for your passwords.

Action
1 Decide which posts and photos you wish to keep secret such as
a) Children
b) Your current location 3 Your future travels. (Maybe OK if you are a blogger and have somebody permanently at home, such as a family member, parents, relatives, maid, au pair, butler, colleague, staff, guest, video camera linked to your phone or neighbour to alert to intruders. Or if you have no home because you are constantly travelling.
2 Make a list of sites. Link them to automatically update.
3 Embed links in your blogs.

Author
Angela Lansbury is a travel writer and photographer.Currently on Facebook, LInkedIn, Twitter. Soon to be on 'all of the above'.

Making your travel blog with a MacBook - photo problems solved

My copmuter systems are not shaking hands.

I write an amusing travel post for you and go to load up the essential picture, the photo of the food at the restaurant I'm reviewing, or the travel suitcase. A picture is worth a thousand words. But I can't load up the picture. I thought it was because I did not know how to do it. Or the internet was slow. No. I and you and others have had the same problem.

You may have had trouble loading up your photos if you have a new MacBook or have installed new software on an old machine. In the good old days, you were probably able to move photos instantly simply by clicking on the little icon above your draft post, the one with the cute picture of the blue sky, then clicking on pictures, but wherever you search, no photos appear, just a blank screen.

I had moved from Blogger to Wordpress but it didn't help. That's because the new software and your Blog post on either Blogger or Wordpress won't talk to each other. If you go onto the forums you will find that you are not the only person with this problem.

The solution seems to be to move your photos out of the new photo system (with the rainbow petals on a schematic daisy) onto your desktop. Then move them across. From the computer using customer's point of view that's a time consuming, backward step. You have paid a lot of money to install what you thought would be a new system and instead you are worse off than when you were on the old system.

From the point of view of the paying customer, it's time Apple and Blogger and Google and the big boys, and girls, got together. It's no good pretending that it's not our company, not our fault, not our problem.

If you are running a tourists industry, (and a computer is a kind of tourist industry), you want to ferry people from one country to another. It's no good creating a wonderful plane or ferry service when the foreign country won't let anybody from your country land. You advertise your wonderful modern ship. But it can't get into the ports where your customers used to go on holiday.

You land them on a remote island, with no sight of the destination, and no guidance how to get there. (And you have charged them a lot of money.) Some of them will try to get back on the overcrowded sinking little boat (the old laptop with iPhoto, which keeps sinking under the weight or volume of pictures and data.)

Others will shout out you. But nobody seems to be listening. If the makers of the grand cruise ship, admittedly a beautiful ship, although it won't take you to your destination. won't listen, or at least don't admit that they have heard or intend to do anything, what's left for the customers to do.

Get together. Post information. (As I am here.)

Hope that the go it alone experts will come to everybody's aid. Appeal to them. As I am now. Go and work for Apple, Google, Blogger, Wordpress, and solve the problem. If you are in marketing, persuaded your boss that you should contact the other company and do a deal which will benefit both of you.

What if you've tried to get a job with 'the big boys' and failed. Or you are far away from their office, or in another country. You don't have a great cv. Or you prefer to work from home. But you are smart. You think you can solve the problem.

Do us all a favour. Tell us the solution. If you like, if you care more about fame than money, or think fame will lead to fortune, add your name to it. The Fred photo fix. The Smith software solution. The Ali apple answer. The Lim longterm solution.

All those computer geeks who are spending their time doing damage to big companies instead could be doing everybody a favour and and instead of being hidden villains in danger of going to prison they could become popular heroes with the chance of being famous and respected by finding us solutions. Get our photos back up on our travel blog posts. Fast. Thank you.

Then you will have the pleasure of seeing a great picture on my blog posts every day, not just at the end of the day or week, when I've had time to do things the long way round. Yes, I'll come back later and add a photo - if I've got time.

Can you help? Can you spread the word? Can you like this post or forward it? Please do so.

Angela Lansbury B A Honours, travel writer, blogger, author, speaker.