If you want to build a successful travel blog, you’re going to need to work. A lot. Building a great blog takes thousands of hours, and you’re going to need to spend a lot of your free time locked in your room tapping away on your keyboard.
With that said, building a travel blog is extremely fun and rewarding. Every day you’ll learn new things, network with other travelers and ultimately, get a little bit closer to turning travel into a business. Sounds cool, right?
When I first started travel blogging, I couldn’t believe the number of things there were to learn, most of which I’d never even heard of. Just little things, like adding your site to Google’s index, and using tools to make your site load faster. I had thought travel blogging was just about travelling and writing (silly me). This section of the site is about all those things that separate your site from the hobby bloggers. What makes you a professional? Why are people going to take your blog seriously? You’ve got your website up and running – now let’s take it to the next level.
Steps to Grow a Successful Travel Blog
- Installation of Important Plug-ins
One of the things that makes WordPress so great is the ability to customize your site using plugins. Basically, plugins are tools developed by tech geniuses that do a lot of fancy things, and all you need to do is click “Install”. Want to add a Facebook like button? Install a plugin. Want to add a firewall? Use a plugin. Want an automatic backup of your site to be emailed to you every Sunday? Plugin. It really is that easy, which is very good news for tech idiots like you and me.
- Speed Up & Secure Your Travel Blog
Nobody enjoys browsing a slow website, and if your website is down nobody will be browsing it full stop. This post will be a short one about a simple (and free) tool you can use to make sure your website is fast and live as often as possible.
Cloudflare – Cloudflare is an amazing free tool that speeds up your load times considerably while also protecting you from bots and attacks. If you’re hosting with Bluehost, it’s already integrated into your hosting account. All you need to do is turn it on!
- Setting Up your Travel Blog on Social Media
When you’re starting out, social media is absolutely king for generating traffic. There’s no way you’ll be ranking highly in search engines and hardly anyone is going to know about your blog, so social media is definitely your best tool for getting the word out.
Your biggest social networks should be Twitter and Facebook, it’s time to let you fans and followers know about your new article. Setup a series of tweets on Buffer so they get sent out during the day and also share you work on Facebook. You want to maximize your engagement time, so by setting up an auto tweet series you know that your promoting your blog even whilst you’re having conversations with your fans.
- Build & Share with your Mailing List
A mailing list is an integral part of any blog.
With a list, you can generate traffic to your blog with the click of a button. You can ask your readers’ questions. You can promote products and services to them and offer them special deals and discounts. But most importantly, you own that list. Unlike your Facebook and Twitter followers, those emails are yours to keep, and even if Google or Facebook or Twitter go bankrupt, you’ll still have that list of subscribers that you can continue to keep in touch with.
Most businesses always go after new customers and forget about the ones they have, I always feel that you should look after the ones you have and they will bring in the new customers for you, this principal works for blogging too.
- Monitor your Audience through Google Analytics
Google Analytics is a tool that allows you to track your traffic stats and the demographics of your audience. If you’re serious about blogging, it’s an absolute must-have tool for your blogging arsenal.
- Utilize the Power of Link Building
When Google decides who gets ranked highly and who doesn’t in their searches, a big determining factor is how many links each site has pointing to it. If there are one thousand sites that are linking to you, you’ll most likely get ranked higher than sites that only have 20 sites linking to them. As some people say, links, or “backlinks” as they’re often called, are the currency of the internet.
There are also many other good reasons for building links with other sites. Every link is like an advertisement for your blog. It lets people know your blog exists. It’s an easy way for them to find you. It’s also an endorsement of your blog.
If Harvard University has a link to you on their website, people are going to assume that you’re an authority and a pretty important person. And lastly, it’s a form of networking that is very important in today’s blogging world. Getting to know other bloggers and site owners is a good long term strategy for cementing a place for yourself on the World Wide Web.
- Don’t Forget to Implement SEO Techniques
SEO, or “Search Engine Optimization”, is one of the most talked about and fast changing topics in the blogging world today. With the zillions of blogs out there, everyone is clamoring for those top 10 spots in Google search, and trying all kinds of tricks (clean and dirty) to try and get there.
So what does it mean exactly? In its simplest form, SEO is about how to optimize your site so that it ranks as highly as possible in Google Search results. This means back linking (as we talked about before), targeting the right keywords, structuring your site so it’s easy for Google crawlers to explore, tagging effectively, site speed, and staying off search engine blacklists.
- Promote Your Content
So, you’ve written the best travel articles in the history of the blogosphere and nobody seems to care. Why is it that so many mediocre posts out there are getting thousands of Facebook likes and you’re far superior post hasn’t even been tweeted once? You’re not promoting.
There are many million blog posts out there and millions more get posted each day. Don’t think you’re so special that all your readers are constantly clicking refresh on your homepage waiting for the next article to pop up. If you want them to read it, you need to tell them it’s there.
Many pro-bloggers out there insist that you need to spend more time promoting your posts than you do writing them. That means, if you spent 12 hours writing your last post, you need to spend 13 hours sending out emails, tweets, comments, FB messages, stumbling, pinning and almost-spamming your post all over the internet.
Conclusion
Remember it all starts with great content. If your content sucks it won’t even matter if you’re #1 on the front page of Reddit or Google. Nobody reads crap content and they certainly don’t share, like and tweet it. Concentrate on really creating amazing content and the promotion part will be a whole lot easier.
