Flightster
How to Become the Next Paid Writer For the Flightster Blog
- by Srinivas Rao
- on July 20th, 2010
- 19 Comments
As the editor in Chief, I’m really excited to announce that we are going to be adding another writer to our writing team here at the Flightster Blog. First off, I want to give a well deserved shout out to all of the current writing staff for their contributions to the site so far. They’ve been instrumental in us getting out of the gate with a strong start.
In order to bring on next travel blogger, we’re going to do something a bit different. We’d really like to connect with the travel blogging community and get to know all of you out there who have travel blogs. We pay our writers between $75.00-$100.00 per post and our end goal is to build a top notch travel blog. Hopefully that will give all of you out there an incentive to participate in our hiring campaign.
- Write a Blog Post About Anything Travel Related on Your Blog: The first thing that we’d like is for you to write a blog post on your own blog about anything travel related. We figure why keep you from doing something you’re already doing
- Link to This Post/Flightster In Your Post: In your blog post, find a way to incorporate any of the current articles on Flightster or even this post as a link. This will enable us to know that you want to be considered for being chosen as the next member of the Flightster writing staff. We’ll be doing a roundup of all the entries as part of the contest and return the link love back to you.
- Tweet Your Post with the hashtag #FLIGHTSTER and follow us on twitter to to keep track of what we’re doing. We’ll also retweet your post to all of our followers
- Subscribe to the Blog: I encourage you to subscribe to the Flightster blog since we’ll be announcing all of our updates on this campaign via the blog.
- Become a Fan on Facebook: We’ll also be running many contests and cool travel giveaways via our Facebook fan page, so check out our fan page.
- Get our Attention: If you’re even more eager to get on our radar put up videos, podcasts, pictures or anything on your blog and share them on twitter with a mention of @flightsterblog. The main thing we’ll be looking at is your blog post, but if you’ve got some really creative ideas that will definitely get our attention.
The Benefits to You
- If you are selected as our next writer, you’ll be among good company with at team of excellent bloggers. Check out our writers page to learn more about them.
- Exposure: Ultimately Flightster will turn into a flight booking engine which receives thousands of visits a day, and your writing will be exposed to that audience.
In order to give as many travel bloggers as possible an opportunity to participate, we’re going to run the contest for two weeks. The deadline to enter will be Friday July 30th. The following travel Tuesday will do a roundup of all the entries and we’ll narrow it down to the 10 finalists. We’ll feature the articles of the finalists and the readers will vote on who should be the next blogger on the Flightster Staff. I’m really excited to see your submissions. If you have questions please feel free to email me at srinivasr@flightster.com
Congratulations to the Winning Flightsters
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Hey Srini,
This sounds like an awesome concept! I can really see this taking off big!
Best of luck!
Cheeers
Diggy
Great contest. I just published a post on Backpackingmatt.com with a link to this post. I’d love to join your crew of writers!
I think I’d do this.
Hey Srini,
How’s it going? I came across your blog about a month back after clicking through to it on one of your comments on another blog…Ash’s The Middle Finger project I think it was. (Looks like that marketing plan of yours was effective there as it brought me to your site!)
Anyway, thanks for posting this! Should be one of my favorite things to check off on my goals-to-accomplish list this week! Great contest Idea btw – its a win-win in a lot of ways.
This is the most interesting job process I’ve ever heard of! One that shouldn’t be ignored. Thanks for contacting me.
@Diggy: Thanks for the kudos and helping us get the word out
@Matt: Thanks for your entry. You have a great blog and I’m really glad that you are one of our participants
@Lauren: Glad to know that my efforts to plug this contest through my own blog actually are driving people over here. When I came up with the idea for this process I wanted to kill lots of birds with one stone, and make it a win win so that it wortwhile for anybody who entered to participate. We’ve got some great submissions so far.
@Nomadic Chick: I’m glad you are now part of our community and look forward to connecting with you over the next several months.
Hi
This is a canny way of getting a bit of buzz going about your blog! Of course it’s also a great opportunity for travel bloggers with a very respectable fee attached. I do hope that bloggers more concerned with alternatives to flying can still be in with a shot though!
Thanks
Jools
Very cool idea of hiring someone. I published my entry about a 5,000 year old Iceman and linked back to this page. Hope you get the chance to check it out and thanks again for the opportunity!
Very cool. That’s good money!
Very innovative idea! I’ve had a go myself on my blog http://www.talesofabritabroad.blogspot.com, linking to this page.
I think this a great way of increasing your blog’s ranking. You entice travel bloggers with a much higher fee per post than generally paid. However the return on investment you get from all this SEO link building is fantastic, more than offsetting paying the blogger who gets the job. Not only are you insisting on links on applicants blogs in order to apply for the job, but they also have tweet about your blog, subscribe to your blog and become a Facebook fan. I don’t see it as win win all around, I see it as great big win for your blog and only a win for the chosen applicant.
Plus I notice that those making comments on your blog don’t even get a link back to their blog from their names,that’s not showing much commitment to win win social media exposure.
Hi Karen,
Thanks for your comments and critiques. We’re not going to deny that we were eager to get SEO benefit out the hiring process. But subscribing the blog and tweeting the post were the only two required parts of this. WE encouraged people to subscribe and become a fan on Facebook. We also will be doing a roundup post for all the people who enter and link back to them. As far as their names not being linked, that’s noted and I’ll talk to our development team about adding that into the comments field. We’d also be open to more suggestions on how to make it more win-win as this is the first of the social media campaigns we’ve run and plan to have several others in the future.
Thanks for your reply and I see you have already added the option for the person commenting to add their link url.
I just feel very strongly about all social media engagements being win win as far as possible and to me this smacks of exploiting the mad scramble to earn money travel blogging. You hold up an enticing carrot and create all this buzz without much reciprocity.
However you could argue that what you’re doing makes good business sense. After all it’s only my point of view and at least you were willing to publish my comments.
I can see your point, Karen. But also take note, that Srinivas and the team haven’t stipulated that the link back should pass any SEO benefit. Ergo, all of the links could include the rel=”nofollow” attribute, therefore they will benefit from the traffic, but not the so-called link juice.
I think the pros outweigh the cons here. At the end of the day, no one is doing anything particularly wrong. The applicants obviously trust Flightster as a brand (or they would want to write for them), and Flightster are offering a relatively good opportunity.
It’s better than say, a travel publisher who charges an entry fee to a travel writing competition.
I’m an ardent critic of SEO manipulation, and I am struggling to see how you can tackle Flightster about this, especially when you sell paid text links to your own blog; which is a far worse, and wholly unethical online practise, in my opinion.
This is only my opinion, I’m neither an applicant for Flightster nor have I ever had any dealings with them. I just found them through a blog post on someone else’s blog.
wow, this is awesome!
will try to join and will re-post this so all my travel blogger friends will know this!
thanks!
Love this idea!!! Best wishes. I’m going to participate for sure.
Woo hoo my post is up! I was pretty inspired by a question Colin Write asked in his recent post “Travel as a Lifestyle” The question was, “Can travel as a lifestyle ever become as monotonous as staying home?” So, I took it from there and had a lot of fun writing it. It was a good night.
Anyway, I’m attempting to Tweet this from China where the Great Firewall of China makes Twitter more difficult to get onto than watching the SAW movies with your eyes open all the way through… China + Using Social Media to Add to the Conversation = NO.
Anyway, have fun reading through everyone’s entries and thanks for the opportunity Siri, “See” you online.
Today I taught myself to use iMovie and made a killer video for this.
Here’s the link
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DxIjTjZlWHM
And while it is a little self-promotional
I hope anyone that loves travel enjoys it too 