Firstly, a huge thank you to the sponsors Skyscanner, Bookingmarkets and Canadian Tourism Commission and the speakers Benji Lanyado from the Guardian and Alastair McKenzie of Travelllll.com who all supported the 4th Travel BlogCamp.

Before I give you my own thoughts of last night’s event I want to thank Kevin May who has moderated the event for the last three years and has been a fantastic support. I’d like to think that the BlogCamp is a good example of collaboration in travel working well, so a huge thanks to Kevin for his support.

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I am conscious as an online travel publisher the majority of my traffic comes from Google; roughly 85% in fact comes to My Life in Leeds from the search giant. This worries me because if for some reason they decided to remove me from the search results, I would struggle to run a business, in fact the truth is, I would not have a business.

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This weekend I have been following some of the discussion at the Travel Bloggers Unite conference in Manchester and it seems that bloggers are so fixated on making money but many do not stand back and look at how they can monetise their content. I would suggest that bloggers need to get into the mentality that a blog is a business, if they want to make money.

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In May 2009 I had just returned from a long weekend break in Venice, in fact I had just walked through the door when my doorbell rang. On answering I was handed a £50,000 libel claim from the high court in London, relating to a post on Travel Rants. It was a complete shock, the first thing I did was panic, I telephoned a few people, who were really supportive, but I was on my own, I felt sick, it was a horrible situation to be in.

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