The Core

She mentions "Skin Care"

These folks can drive sales.

The trend NOW is for them to have an agency and ask for BIG BUCKS

We get pitches from "influencers" all the time. In nearly every case it is very evident a good percentage of their followers are fake. We have never seen any results to justify any sort of investment in the influencer space. I know other merchants who swear by it but it doesn't work for us.

On the flip side though I have been able to score quite a bit of free meat, free cookware, and a free grill on my meat site. And I have been able to back that up with sales to the merchants that work with me. My follower numbers are pretty pathetic but I am still able to drive a couple grand in sales to the primary merchant I work with. If a merchant can find a very niche influencer I can see it working but just throwing money at anyone with large follower numbers is a waste.

Sidenote - so many of these people have blogs with a Similarweb global ranking over 5,000,000. I look at the blog and they have nice themes, they post regular, long articles, they have excellent images.

These blogs would have been something to knock your socks off in 2003. I can't even imagine the hours that go into this. I'm talking 1500-2000 word posts with many images 2-4 times per week, plus a presence on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and Pinterest (granted, heavily repurposed obviously).

Commonly you'll do a site: search and get 10,000 pages because they think more tags is better and treat a blog like it's Instagram. So I search for

site:example.com -inurl:tag -inurl:category -inurl:author

to get just the articles (or as near to it as I can) and still get 2,000 results.

It boggles my mind that you could put that much effort into a blog for multiple years and still be over 5,000,000 on the Similarweb global rank. It boggles my mind that you could put that effort in and be over 1,000,000

But everybody wants to be a travel writer and most of them don't even understand how to ask the basic questions
 - what does my audience want to read?
 - how would I reach them?

But there's this massive circle jerk going on where travel companies want links and,

 - For the hotel, it's a cheap link to say "we won't give you a room, but here are some free breakfast vouchers." In the down season when rooms are empty, it's a fairly cheap link to give a free room (again, our marginal cost for turning over a room is $35).
 - For the PR firm, it's always a win if they deliver an "influencer"
 - For the blogger, in most cases, they were already planning to be a paying customer. But now, at a minimum, their room gets a manager check, the front desk gets a notice with their photo and brief bio, and they likely get some welcome amenity that costs $12 but sells for $29.

So everyone wins except, of course, the readers who are reading their "reviews."

Because one thing is certain: if the hotel looks at their blog and sees that of the last 10 reviews, three were anything other than gushing, that person ain't gettin' the breakfast voucher and welcome amenity.

But over and over, I feel sadness when I evaluate these people. I see in these blogs thousands of hours of free labor in the service of industrial tourism, with little to no payoff and no engagement from the non-audience.

I can't help but think that these people would be so much happier if they just saved their time and money. The above-mentioned blogger from last week was trying to build an audience and was running a contest where to enter you simply had to follow her on Facebook or Instagram and like the contest announcement post. She's offering a $1000 Paypal payment.

I looked through and as best I can tell, she only had about 20 entrants. She has no audience, so there's nobody there to even see the post and enter her contest. It did not go viral.

It actually starts to depress me. I can't imagine working that hard for that little gain.

It's indicative of how I see Americans these days: they have a "golden ring" philosophy. Meaning, the will ride the merry-go-round forever because every time it comes around, they believe they are going to win the golden ring. And even though they missed the last 2000 times (2000 blog posts that did NOT go viral), they are sure that this next one? It's the golden ring.

As our dear president would say... "So sad."

>> running a contest ... $1000 Paypal payment ... about 20 entrants.

I've seen many self-proclaimed gurus recommend contests as a way to gain attention and thus gain followers. Too bad they don't teach some math as part of the effort.

Some well-targeted PPC could have achieved a lot more ... but first one must learn how to target!

Comps are a great way of getting a decent follower count fast. To look legit.

1. Buy fake followers
2. Run comp at same time with follow required
3. As bots fall off add new followers, genuine ones.

She needs to learn:

It doesn't do much good to work hard if you're not also working smart!

Is it possible they're selling links to monetize?

Most of these sites have terrible DA and many things suggest to me that 99% of those people, if asked about their DA, would struggle to name the public official in their district who brings cases on behalf of the state.

They are mostly trading links for goods, albeit without any direct contract/negotiation. It's just understood that if they get a few freebies, they will write a review and that review will serve as a link. And they are smart enough to know this. So they publish an unending series of positive, glowing reviews with links to the businesses reviewed (using that term loosely).

I think the best way to think of 99% of travel bloggers is that they are your free, volunteer PR team, but sadly, are not very good at it and any discerning reader sees right through the BS. Which is part of why they have so few readers. They are literally afraid to publish any bad reviews.

I do need to say, that my comments do NOT concern traditional media. We have had genuine travel journalists from top-shelf newspapers who are under strict rules to not accept anything for free. In some cases, they only tell you they were there once the review is written. A review in the NYT or LA Times is a real thing.

I think there are two things going on with the influencer/tourist destination circle jerk:

1. The "buyers" mostly judge blogs by looking at it and saying "wow, that looks nice" and then ask the blogger how many monthly visits, take the blogger's word for it and stop there. So ignorance on the part of the buyer. When I ask them whether they look at tools like Similarweb, SpyFu, SEMRush, AHREFs, Majestic etc, most of them have never heard of any of these tools. Most don't even do a site: search to see how many pages are sharing those pageviews every month.

2. Everyone wants to be a travel blogger. Some days it seems that there are as many travel blogs as there are travelers. And 90% of them are just doing it to pick up freebies or even just minor discounts. It's hard to see how their articles would be of interest to anyone. The very, very best of them read like in-flight magazine articles with titles like "Five Perfect Days in X." No Tim Cahill's here. So though there are some homerun travel blogs or Instagrammers who can move the needle, they are few and far between. For the most part, the amount of traffic you need to stand out as on of the better low-end bloggers is paltry. Sites with 10 writers and 10,000 posts will brag that they have 10,000 visitors a month.

Next time one of the egregious examples comes up, I'll share it on the inside so you can run your own tools and you'll see what I mean. I previously told of the woman who got angry at me because I wouldn't provide all the photos she wanted. Didn't I want her readers to have all the information they need? But the reason that I didn't supply said photos was because I had asked her to see her blog and she confessed that she did not have a domain name yet so it wasn't live. I had another self-described "blogger" pitch me on a free stay, and it turned out she hadn't launched her blog yet.

Some of these people are clueless beyond belief. In some cases (certainly the picture woman), I have reason to believe there is mild to not-so-mild mental illness at work.

So no, I don't think link selling is a significant factor here.

As I say, it strikes me that it is overwhelmingly a Golden Ring mentality. And, at the risk of offending, the travel bloggers overwhelmingly, and not surprisingly skew toward young and childless and stay-at-home moms, at least in my experience.

Some of them make it and do get the Golden Ring, of course. Most of them seem to fall into two often overlapping categories
1. Early to the platform. One person I know who basically makes a living off his Instagram "adventure" presence attributes his success to being on the platform early. He's a good photographer with a 4-year photography degree and years of professional experience, but he doesn't think he has what it would take to make if he started today.

2. They are not only good (see #1), but offer something truly a cut above others on the platform.

Combine #1 and #2 and you get people like Chris Burkard - 3.2 million IG followers for a very non-edgy Mormon who takes pictures outdoors, but damn good pictures - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chris_Burkard

But then, Chris Burkard isn't asking for a place to stay in return for 5 posts to IG and a blog post.