Practical Tips for Marketing Your Travel Blog Successfully
Everyone can start a blog but turning blogging into a profitable business takes a lot of work. If you love travelling and you're always going off adventuring from one destination to the next, you can turn your passion into a profitable job as a travel blogger.
Regardless if you're starting out or have thousands of subscribers tuning in, it's essential to promote your travel blog to connect with your audience and strengthen your online presence. In this guide, we're dishing out practical ways to promote your travel blog and achieve blogging success:
Customise the Permalink
SEO has a lot to do with successfully building a vast audience, and fixing your permalink structure at the beginning of your blogging journey is critical to a strong online presence. Unedited, permalinks can be extremely long with jumbles of numbers thrown in. If you don't customise the permalink before blogging, you will have less control over it, so do this as soon as possible.
From the backend, you're given different URL formats; choose the one that features your blog category and post name. With a customised permalink, your blog URLs would look neat and organised.
Provide Value
You have to provide valuable content to build an audience. Everyone loves a good list of travel tips like the best places to hang out during the summer, where to stay in a particular city, or budget tips. You can make food recos, activities to try in a town, post videos, or beautiful images. You can create a blog diary featuring your thoughts or insights on certain places. Essentially, write about topics that people would find helpful, things that will make travelling even more fun, practical, or rewarding.
A Beautiful Presentation
People who read travel blogs aren't just there for the content – they seek beautiful imagery too. Taking stunning pictures is one way to elevate the look of your blog but don't forget about user experience. The website design should be easy to navigate and simple. The design should look great on any screen. You can choose a website template if you're starting from scratch and don't want to spend a small fortune on a bespoke blog design.
The loading time should be quick, so blog readers won't spend more than a few seconds waiting for a page to load. Because travel blogs tend to be image-heavy, compress all images so these won't affect the loading times.
Do Something Different
Different can be fun! Different lets you touch on various topics, even subjects that aren't strictly about travelling. It's normal to run out of things to write when focusing on a specific topic, so featuring different story angles while travelling keeps readers hooked while you stay inspired.
Sensational, curious, or challenging activities like walking across Tokyo, camping in Greenland, getting tipsy in Paris, clubbing in Brazil, getting a tattoo at a random parlour in NYC, or sailing on the coast of Africa presents a different take on a well-loved tourist destination.
Promote on Social Media
Social media is the perfect place to promote your travel blog because everyone's in it, and it's the quickest way to connect with your followers. You can start by scheduling a post daily and responding to comments when you have free time. It's essential to post your social media content when most of your followers are active. You can check the insights or analytics area to determine the best time to publish a post.
The three most popular social media sites for travel bloggers are Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter. For Facebook, you can do one to two posts every day. You can also upload a video or do a live Story. Keep the captions short and straightforward because Facebook tends to cut long texts into segments.
For Instagram, you can create 2 to 3 posts at specific times of the day with 2 to 4 hashtags in the caption. Tag the location, so followers will know where you've been. Long descriptions look great on Instagram as long as it tells a story. You can also post Reels or short videos as well as Story.
On Twitter, you can do 3 to 5 updates a day with your blog link + several photos. Limit the hashtags to one to two. Spread the posts throughout the month and occasionally tag relevant companies or personalities related to the post or travelling in general.
Find Ways to Market Your Travel Blog
The internet offers plenty of ways to get a lot of press. Regardless if your blog is new and you're still building an audience, or you've gained a broad viewership, these marketing strategies will widen your reach even more:
SEO
Optimising your content with well-researched keywords remains one of the most effective ways of marketing a blog or business online. SEO is not something you set and forget; you'll have to track the performance of your keywords, implement new strategies, and continuously update your marketing campaign to ensure success.
Guest Posting
This strategy lets you market your blog to audiences that you might not otherwise reach on your own. To establish a connection, you must reach out to the authors through email, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc. Then, you'll pitch a guest post topic to the website owner and, once approved, create content that will be published on their website.
Paid Ads
Occasionally, you can give paid ads a try to widen your reach. This is especially effective if you're still building an audience. Social media sites and search engines are always offering paid ad services. Popular, well-established blogs also offer paid ad services, something you can take advantage of if the budget allows.
Networking
Making friends with the right people will lead to a large following online and offline. You can meet potential clients and business partners through travel cons, social or travel summits, blog exchanges or meets. You can also conduct online networking by staying active in online groups and social media convos. Collaborating with other travel bloggers will also benefit your blog and your friends' blogs.
Build a Personal Brand
How to stand out among seas of travel bloggers? Try building a personal brand. Branding lets you control how you present your blog and business to others. Being everything to everyone will only confuse your target audience. Focus on one or two areas of expertise and build your brand around these.
Through personal branding, you can showcase the uniqueness of your content. You'll never be mistaken for just another travel blogger. Of course, consistency is vital for effective personal branding. Be consistent with your brand logo, photography, social media profiles, and blog content to set your blog apart from others.
Blogging and travelling are two passions that you can monetise, and if done right, you will get the reward you deserve for putting together fantastic content for your readers. Think about it; you're chronicling your adventures, meeting amazing people, and making money on the side – what could be better? With these marketing tips, we hope we've inspired you to start a travel blog and inspire others!
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