Today’s post won’t exactly look at the traditional ways in which people earn money online - you won’t find the Google gospel off the company’s latest blog post or anything of that sort.  Instead, this is the tale of how a guy who suffered through a bad vacation made about $892 off a blog.

Monetization is monetization, eh?  And Andrew Sharman used a blog, a Twitter account, and little else besides word of mouth to get a fair amount of both cash and attention.

Richard Savill wrote, “Mr Sharman told . . . how he and his girlfriend Taryn Capewell, 26, were misled when they booked their ‘first proper holiday together’ at a Thomson store in Leicester. . . .  But when they reached Tunisia they said they found beer was 3 a pint, twice the price quoted by Thomson; the Sahara was eight hours’ drive away; there was no scuba diving and their room had had two single beds instead of the requested double.”

So Sharman, instead of (or at least in addition to) wacking himself for not doing his own research, wrote a letter to the Thomson travel agency.  After he didn’t receive a response, he blogged about everything and promoted the blog on Twitter.  Before long, he then found that his blog, and not the Thomson site, ranked high for several “Thomson Tunisia”-related searches.

So Sharman relayed that fact to Thomson, at which point the company gave him a refund covering about two-thirds of the price of his vacation.

If a fool and his money are soon parted, this at least goes to show that blogs and Twitter have the power to mostly reunite them.