To talk about my travel blog tips and my recent blog makeover, I have to start the story where it all began. I started blogging in 2009 with a simple objective: to share my expat experiences in Brussels with my friends and family across the pond. Adventures of a Puerto Rican Girl in Brussels began as a diary of my weekend travels, love failures, and food discoveries. Part travel blog, part food blog, part random ramblings, my posts were a melange of topics. I began with zero expectations, a Blogger account, and crappy photos taken either with my blackberry or point and shoot. However, the blog had a loyal following among friends and the Brussels expat community. It surprised me when it even managed to be featured in InterNations and Professional Women International during that era.
In 2012 I returned to the US where I started Adventures of the Repatriate as a continuation of the former blog. Without trying the blog narrowed into a food and travel blog. My good friend Carlis from SpicyCandyDC and I became neighbors and she began to give me blog advice in terms of photography and developing a brand. I began to take the blog more seriously and started to become more consistent with my posts. The journey to The Dining Traveler has been a long one but I have learned so much. Here are my travel blog tips I wish I would’ve known years ago that can save you time and money.
1. Define Your Objective: What is your objective with your blog? Is it a hobby or your intent is to make it a career? If it’s the latter, do your research on how to get your blog up and running. If I had to do it all over again, I would’ve done a semi-annual audit to see where the blog stood and where I want to take it.
2. Evaluate Your Design: I still keep Adventures of a Puerto Rican Girl in Brussels online to remind myself of what crappy design looks like. Content can be great but if you don’t have it in an easy to read format, it will turn readers off. Look at other successful blogs for inspiration. Get a theme that works with your style. I worked with several people narrowing my design and although it looked good, I was not in love with the page.
I was too lazy for too long about leaving Blogger (even though all the experts tell you to stay away from it!). I found a theme which made the page look like it was not on Blogger via BThemez. I pretty much installed the theme by myself and the service owner, Deepkak was super helpful in walking me through the tweaks. Although I was happy with the design, I moved to a grid theme on WordPress since it allows visitors to see a selection of my most recent posts much easier than before.
3. Learn SEO: I’ll admit, I barely knew what SEO (Search Engine Optimization) was last year. I am even surprised how people actually found my blog, especially with so many travel blogs out there. Given that I have a full time job and still have to manage content, I hired Deepak from BThemez to do a full evaluation of the site. The downfall of hosting with Blogger is that there are limitations on what you can do with the html of the page. After consulting with me and learning my objectives, he recommended that if I wanted to continue to grow, I needed to become self-hosted. I have read this on other blogs as well but I felt it was quite the undertaking given the time involved. At his recommendation and my research, I decided to go with Bluehost for hosting and WordPress to facilitate the site. He installed the Yoast plugin which made it extremely easy to make sure my posts are SEO friendly. He offers custom services on blog migration, design, and SEO. You can contact him here. His fees range with the level of customization (I paid $250) but what I enjoyed the most was how personal the service was. We’ve spent hours on Google Chat troubleshooting and discussing design.
4. Social Media: During my first years of blogging I used the “fire and forget” method of posting. I put out a post, shared it on my personal Facebook and Twitter once and called it a day. On this date last year, I had 575 followers on Twitter and 300 on Instagram. Today, I have 3,700 and 2,070 followers respectively. I did not even own a Facebook page for the the blog (mostly because I am not a fan of Facebook), now I have close to 1,300 followers. How did I get my numbers increase so rapidly? Engagement. Unless you’re a celebrity, you have to engage with your audience. Twitter chats are a perfect way to grow your audience and learn about trends and travel blog tips. On Instagram, I search my favorite hashtags to find like-minded individuals who I start conversations with by commenting on their photos (tip: don’t EVER comment with “Follow For Follow?” or “Please Follow Me” it’s tacky, take the time to ask people questions or give them a sincere compliment on their post). I’ve met great online an offline friends via social media. Your best friends may support you and your blog but if they are not blogging, they will never understand the “struggle”. Good read: MOZ Beginner’s Guide to Social Media.
5. Build a Community: Thanks to social media, I have been able to build an amazing community of people online and offline. Attend conferences such as TBEX (Travel Blogger Conference), travel shows, and local networking events. I met Metanoya Webb at TBEX who now contributes a monthly travel fashion blog post to the blog. I met Mariella from Splendor in Spanglish over Instagram and we’ve collaborated with blog posts and other projects. As the Food and Travel Ambassador for CapFabb, I am engaging with a community of local bloggers. In any professional field, there is competition. However, there are more opportunities to grow working together than being a lone wolf. Cross-promoting blogs and social media posts takes your brand to a whole new audience. Recently, I started a series of meetups called #DCTravelBlogger (read the amazing recap by Evan of Get in my Mouf) to continue to build a community. Nothing beats face to face interaction.
It basically took me five years to get my act together, leave Blogger, and commit full time to The Dining Traveler. It took me five years because I did not work on the most important item of this post. Item #1: the objective. Living in Europe, I missed out on plenty of opportunities of content because I did not have a clear objective on what I wanted from my blog. As technology evolves and new platforms come up, the learning is continuous. In order to make the transition from hobby to professional, an investment of time and money has to be made. What travel blog tips can you share?
Great post and very useful information. Another tip I would add is ‘define your audience’. When you write is extremely important to know who is your target, not only demographics, but their psychographics as well. The more you know and the more specific you get while building their profile, the better you can create content that appeals to them.
That’s a great point Maribel! That’s one of the things I’ve been trying to do with Google Analytics. Sometimes it’s difficult to balance honest content and trying to cater to the masses.
This is exactly what I needed – great tips. I can no longer deny my need to learn more about SEO to make the most of my blog. Still putting it together but not at all pleased with the overall flow and aesthetic. Great stuff!
Glad you enjoyed the tips.It’s always a work in progress and most importantly, it takes time and patience! Thanks for stopping by!
Great post, and really helpful advice. SEO is one of those things…necessary evil, right? Nobody seems to like it, but it’s so important. I think a few other things that you must have include focus and consistency – not just in how often you post, but in how you post. Some call it “finding your voice” but really it’s about branding. As you say, always a work in progress. Thanks for sharing your insights!
Totally agree. I think focus is important. They are all sorts of crazy things I would love to write about, but I feel that the growth of my blog began when it became more focus and started to treat The Dining Traveler as a brand. Thanks for sharing!
Thanks for stopping by! I agree about consistency. Another early blogging mistake. No consistency in my content. Again, everything evolves with time. BTW great blog!
Yes, sooner or later I have to move my blog to wordpress. The process sounds so complicated that I tend to just chicken out and not do it at all. But thanks for this informative post!
I know! I literally thought about it for 3 years. I even tried Squarespace with no luck. The best investment I made was hiring someone to do it! Thanks for stopping by!
Some great tips here! I am on the brink of moving to self hosted (anyday now) but just don’t have the courage (and time) to go through with it as am technologically handicapped, but I know it’s the right move for our travelling blog..thanks for sharing this very useful post 🙂
I felt the same way for a long time! Thankfully I found Deepak and he was great at doing the migration for me! Thanks for stopping by!
Thanks! Yes, self-hosted is always challenging but I am so grateful for Deepak and all the work he put into my blog. I debated whether to do it myself but instead choose to focus on my content and let the tech part be done by pros!
As you know, I just started. I missed 10 years of content (travels before getting married), now my focus is on our travels together (I have backdated all our past travels in the last 6 years! so freaking hard to put content of past travels). Its really hard having a blog, people don’t really know the handwork that comes to it. This is such a helpful post, I continue to learn how to do this right… it really is a learning process. I hope I will get there someday.
Thanks for stopping by & for the compliments. Yes, having a good quality blog takes time and a lot of work! There are things that just time and practice can teach so keep it up. You already have some gorgeous imagery and great content on your blog, so the sky is the limit!
Oh and I love how your blog looks – clean and minamlistic. I am also trying to achieve that look the best way but also show content.
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