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?

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