A Conversation with Craig Martin

Craig makes up half of the couple who writes and does podcasts for Indie Travel Podcast (his wife Linda is the other half!). Today, Craig talks candidly about how to adjust to the changing media landscape, why they decided to start an e-guidebook series, and what they expect to see in terms of the industry over the new few years. Check out Craig and Linda’s site here!

First, tell us a little bit about Indie Travel Podcast. You’ve been running the site since 2007, which in blog years is pretty impressive. Was the site your first internet project? What have you learned about blogging since then?

My first real website was a personal travel blog running on a small homepage that I started in 2003. That site doesn’t exist anymore, but Indie Travel Podcast has been going for a while!

Back in February 2006 we started travelling full-time and decided we wanted to start sharing what we were learning. So much of what we read was designed to sell a place or an experience: this made travel seem expensive and exclusive. But we wanted to equip people with the resources and ideas to help them go and do it themselves. Since then, we’ve published about 2,000 pages on the site, 270-odd audio podcasts, and several e-books on travel and places.

Blogging is an interesting beast, but I think the primary thing is to keep talking to people: not shouting into the void, but communicating — asking questions, getting answers, refining your editorial to meet those people and get to know them better.

On your blog, you say that your audience is primarily backpackers, expats, digital nomads, and career breakers. Could you elaborate a little bit more on who is attracted to your site and why?

It’s an odd mix that’s attracted to us! We’ve met listeners in their teens who are dreaming of a gap-year; 20- and 30-somethings who are ready to throw it all in and go see the world; retirees who wonder why they didn’t start travelling years ago; and everything in between.

While we get quite a few people that take shorter holidays, most of the interaction comes from people who are looking to travel far and travel long: people that might be doing a one-year job placement or going on a sabbatical or gap year. We’ve started moving our editorial so it’s more friendly for those short-term holiday travellers, and we’re seeing a nice early response to that.

Most of our readers are interested in making blogging more than just a hobby. How do you support yourself with your blog, how has that income stream changed over the years, and what do you foresee in the future in terms of changes?

Oh my goodness: the income streams and business plan change year to year. Sometimes we have to throw out everything we’ve been working with for six months and start again!

Some major themes have been the books we publish (we wrote the early ones, now we publish and sell other people’s books); the sponsorship of podcasts — companies associating themselves with our brand that way; commission-based advertising — we’ve actually set up premier partnerships for all travel bloggers with a few key companies in addition to building out our own business; 3rd-party ad networks like Adsense fill in the gaps, although we’re looking at experimenting with a voluntary membership subscription to replace those if we can. We’re talking with our audience about it on Facebook right now.

If someone close to you wanted advice on starting a travel blog, what’s the most important piece of advice you could give them?

If you’re doing it for fun, just put in as much time as is fun. There’s a great community and lots of cool people around.

If you’re doing it for money, find out where the money is first. Don’t start anything until you’ve figured out where your income is coming from. Once you’ve done that, test it before sinking lots of time into it.

Some (paid) communities like Travel Blog Success can be a good place to start: even getting an account before you get a blog to see what people are doing and if it’s working for them. Remember, a blog is not a business: it’s a communication platform.

What gave you the inspiration for your e-guidebook series? In terms of the changing digital landscape, how do e-guidebooks differ from self-publishing and other online publishers?

The Indie Travel Guides idea came from our frustration with what was available. There were the big monoliths: Lonely Planet, Rough Guides, etc and a whole bunch of UGC sites. But the former were slow to adapt: they didn’t make their digital stuff beautiful, fun, or even easy to use. The latter… Well, we all look at reviews when booking a trip, but there’s no editorial structure.

What we were excited about doing was bringing the best of an inspiring travel magazine together with the best from a traditional guidebook. We also realised that the data size isn’t the most important thing, so in our PDF guidebook of Las Vegas, for example, you find the accommodation listed twice: once by neighbourhood and once by type. This means you can find places to eat, play, sleep within walking distance of each other… or decide you really want to eat Indian today and find that just as easily. Being able to experience the place around you is central to what we’re trying to do.

In terms of self-publishing travel guides, that’s doable — but probably only for a city or three. What we’re trying to do is give bloggers and independent authors the best of both worlds: a commission-based structure while we handle design, editing, sales and help with marketing. Of course, the more authors self-market the bigger their sales; and the more authors and affiliates we have bringing visitors to the store, the more sales everyone makes. Because we have an editorial vision for the whole series, customers will also be able to buy books for different cities, knowing they’ll have a consistent and excellent experience with their guidebooks.

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Podcaster and writer Craig Martin has been living on the road since leaving Auckland, New Zealand in February 2006. With a degree in Media Studies and English plus a penchant for Coleridge, he’s still travelling. Craig podcasts at the Indie Travel Podcast, has penned several travel books for Indie Travel Media Ltd and is President Elect of the Professional Travel Bloggers Association.

Interview conducted in May, 2013 by Kristin Mock.