How to Find Travel Bloggers

Sometimes it's difficult find other travel writers who blog, but a post from Sheila's Guide to the Good Stuff is an excellent start. I wonder if I'm in there somewhere....

Many tourism organizations have asked me lately how they can find bloggers (and others active in social media) who might be interested in covering their destinations. I thought it would be helpful to write up a quick reference list.

First, thanks for asking, because blogger outreach is one of the main topics that Becky McCray and I plan to cover when we launch our Tourism Currents social media learning community for tourism professionals in September 2009. If you want to be kept informed about it, there’s an email signup when you click the Tourism Currents link.

Secondly, Becky has already started a new series on her Small Biz Survival blog called Tourism Tuesdays. For example, here is her dynamite post Never Been There, about incorporating local folks into your tourism outreach campaigns. I read Becky’s work because she always finds the nuggets that others might not think about or notice.

Want more? Go to the Twitter Search Engine and type in #tourismtuesday to see general tourism chatter (this is called a hashtag and groups together all tweets with the same hashtag marker.) If you want to see general travel tweets instead, try #travel or #traveltuesday.

Finally, here’s my quick-and-dirty list of other ways to sift around online to find bloggers and the social media-savvy amongst us:

» The Travel page on Alltop.com – it features the latest headlines from tons of hand-picked travel bloggers. Use the Search function on Alltop to find bloggers in just about any area of interest, like food or music or Cleveland.

» Travel Blog Exchange – a relatively new forum for travel bloggers, they just hosted a successful TBEX blogging conference that will no doubt become an annual event.

» Google Blog Search – this only returns search results from blogs, so it’s a nice filter rather than using the Big Google haystack to needle-hunt.

» Travel Blog List – this Invesp Consulting list of general travel blogs is sorted every which way and is a bit too unwieldy for finding the smaller gems, but it does contain lots of the major travel blogs.

» Travel Bloggers on Twitter – a blog post by Condé Nast Traveler editor Wendy Perrin, What You’re Missing if You’re Not on Twitter, includes many travel bloggers.