Supercharging your Travel Blog notes from Social Travel Market

The other day I frantically wrote notes on the points I wanted to cover in my presentation at the ‘Supercharging your blog’ talk at the Social Travel Market. Well, I got a little carried away and found myself writing a 900 word blog post, so here it is.

The truth about publishing content

Publishing content online is not an easy way to make money – just ask any international and local newspaper who are having to get smart or risk being closed down. There are easier ways to make money; it is a job with long hours, you have to be patient, passionate and dedicated, which is why I get annoyed when I read other bloggers saying that it is easy to make money online, believe me, it is not.

Learn new skills and automating processes

If you want to generate revenue from your blog then you will need to learn new skills, or pay someone to help you – it isn’t just about writing good quality content, you will have to source advertisers and sponsors, learn about how the search engines work and get to grips with social media – just to name a few of the skills you will have to learn.

When I started planning My Life in Leeds, it was important that I found ways to automate tasks to save myself time and money. These WordPress plugins have been fantastic at automating many of the tasks you have to undertake.

AdRotate

A brilliant plugin to manage your advertising, it’ll email you when ads are due to expire – allow advertisers to login and look at stats and remove the ads automatically from your blog. The plugin opens up the opportunity of charging advertisers per click, per period, cost per thousand impressions etc.

More information on Adrotate.

Broken Link Checker

The last thing you want is for a reader to click on a link to find that the blog post or website you’ve linked to is broken. This plugin tells you which links are dead and allows you to edit the link or remove it without having to go into the post. From a recent update you can also check broken links on comments too.

More information on Broken Link Checker

Relevanssi

The default search feature in WordPress is often not very accurate which can be frustrating for the reader, so, this plugin 1) improves the accuracy so you received improved results and 2) informs you what keywords people are entering into your blog search box. Great at finding out what your readers are searching for.

More information on Relevanssi

SEO Smart Links

This plugin is the biggest time saver for me. Internal linking is just as important as getting links from other websites – so, let’s pretend you have just published a comprehensive post, full of information on New York, and over the years you have briefly mentioned New York in tons of posts – this plugin will automatically link to your new New York post wherever it sees those words within any published blog posts.

More information on SEO Smart Links

AJAX Report comments

Let’s pretend you’ve written a review of a hotel in New York and someone comes along and write a comment about the hotel owners which is libellous you could find yourself in trouble.

This plugin adds a link underneath every comment left allowing people to report it. You can investigate the report and deal with it appropriately. The plugin stores all of the reports, allowing you to add notes, in case there are any issues in the future.

More information on AJAX Report comments

Of course, you should make sure you read your comments in full and have a clear comments policy that people have to adhere to if they want to participate in your community.

Earning money from your blog

If you want to make money from your blog then it is essential that you write transactional content, so that’s content on hotels, restaurants etc. along with inspirational and useful information.

I also think nowadays it is all about the niche, so I wouldn’t write a blog concentrating on the whole of the UK, I’d write a blog about my home city – I live there, so there’s many opportunities to gather content while you are living your life.

Don’t forget offline marketing. To sponsor events you don’t always have to pay, tell the organiser that you will be their media partner and promote the event. Tell them about your audience both on your website and social media. Be an authority in your niche – you’ll get invited on the radio, on the TV, and this all helps to build your personal brand.

Finding the right advertisers

Go FIND advertisers. What I do is send an initial introduction email to a local business. I then telephone them a week or two later and arrange a meeting to discuss how I can help promote their business cheaper than the local magazines and newspapers. (I telephoned the magazines and newspapers to get their rate card prices so I could undercut them!).

At the moment my revenue for My Life in Leeds is a mixture of direct advertising and affiliate commission from hotels (I use LateRooms and Booking.com) plus restaurants (Toptable), transport (National Express etc.) and deal sites (Groupon, Tastecard etc.). My tip on the affiliate side is try and closely match the affiliate partner to your content and make sure that there’s an opportunity to generate revenue on every page, even on the non-transactional blog posts.

Understand your readers

Make sure you sign up for Google Webmaster Centre and Google Analytics then spend some time each week getting to know your readers – look at the transactional pages and set up goals and custom reports to track how effective they are. Do not just look at unique visitors and page views; these stats are USELESS if your pages are not converting into bookings or sales.

I could write pages of content about my experiences with dealing with advertisers and affiliate marketing.

Thanks to Steve Keenan and Mark Frary for inviting me to speak – I am sure you will agree that the Social Travel Market was a huge success. It was also good to meet and speak at the session with Dylan of Travelling Editor and Rich from Brilliant Travel Media.

Be Sociable, Share!

•