You are pouring your heart and soul into your travel blog – I know you are because I did the same when I started my Travel Blog – the CBoardingGroup.com. But are you seeing the results yet? Is your traffic stuck at <50 a day on most days? If that’s you, read on as I share some important travel blog tips that will drive more traffic to your travel blog!
In this post I offer 6 Travel Blog Tips for Travel Bloggers to Drive More Blog Traffic. You will learn how to increase your travel blog’s traffic with the travel blog tips included below. These travel blog tips are based on my personal experiences as a travel blogger as well as research I’ve conducted along the way.
Note: This post is geared more for travel bloggers, but frankly it applies to most other blogs too. Also, I use WordPress for my blogging platform so some of the suggestions apply a bit more towards that platform, but can still be generically to other Blogging platforms.
PS…there are some affiliate links embedded here as well. I make a few shekels (not many) if you purchase something via these links. There’s no cost to you and it helps me keep the lights on!
The Travel Blog Tips (6 Ways for Travel Bloggers to Drive More Traffic to your Blog)
- Get on Pinterest
- Get your SEO house in order
- Get Social
- Guest Post
- Join a Facebook Group
- Get visual
Let’s dig in.
Travel Blog Tip #1: Get on Pinterest
Today, Pinterest seems to be the quickest path to acquiring short term traffic (and perhaps long term traffic as well). Pinterest, of course, is so much more than a social platform. It’s a search engine really – a visual search engine.
In terms of travel blog tips, this is one of those tips that is ABSOLUTELY critical for you. Seriously…you need to get on Pinterest. Right now…go…do it. And then come back…we will still be here. 🙂
As I noted earlier, Pinterest is a visual search engine and to be effective on Pinterest you need to understand that Pinterest users are predominantly women (something like 70-80%+). Thus, crafting your travel blog’s Pinterest marketing efforts towards the right demographics is critical.
Additionally, like Google, there are specific steps to maximize your experience (and success) on Pinterest. By following these simple Pinterest blog tips (below) you can quickly start driving traffic to your travel blog. I’ve provided links to other articles which explain how to do this.
- Convert to a business account
- Enable rich pins
- Design highly attractive pins
- Create multiple boards around your theme
- Employ Pinterest SEO techniques
- Pin consistently
There are other strategies you can employ as well to increase the effectiveness of Pinterest for your blog’s traffic. For example, the use of Tailwind and Canva are tools that can improve your Pinterest experience. Tailwind helps automate your Pinterest experience and Canva is an online graphic creation platform that helps you create beautiful pins.
Many folks suggest that you should join Group Boards and in fact, in the last year or so this has been an important part of success on Pinterest. However, as of late 2018, the effectiveness of these is being debated once again with indications from Pinterest that perhaps they will be less useful to growing traffic.
My opinion? For now, use them, but keep a close eye on them. And in particular, use group boards related to YOUR genre…vs. generic ones. For example, you can join some of my Travel Blog related group boards (follow the boards on Pinterest and send me a message on Pinterest and I will add you!).
One interesting thing about Pinterest is that you don’t need to link every Pin to your blog because Pinterest allows you to use your affiliate links in your postings. For example, I often create interesting pins (Like below) that link directly (via my Amazon affiliate links or my MagicLinks affiliate account) to Amazon. This has started to drive some incremental revenue for me and looks like it will soon be meaningful.
My sense is that Pinterest is a short term blog traffic creation strategy and that SEO is still the long term name of the game which brings us to our second blog tip: Getting your SEO house in order.
PS…don’t forget to follow me on Pinterest:
Travel Blog Tip #2: Get your SEO house in order
Search Engine Optimization, or SEO, is a long-game. Google is the preeminent search engine used by almost everyone doing traditional Internet search (when’s the last time you used anything else, right??).
Ranking on the 1st page (for your keywords) is your #1 goal with SEO. And specifically, in the top 3 search results which ultimately get almost all of the traffic. If you don’t put the time into SEO you simply will not be able to get the blog traffic you need to sustain your blog long term.
In other words, you will fail.
Which is why of all of the travel blog tips I share here, this is the single most important travel blog tip you need to know. YOU MUST GET YOUR SEO GOING and GET IT RIGHT.
For many travel bloggers, SEO is a confusing world. Backlinks, domain authority, search algorithms, a confusing Google search portal (ugh!), indexing and more can quickly bewilder many travel bloggers causing them to give up.
But you cannot give up on SEO. You MUST get it right. With that in mind there’s really two ways you can go about SEO:
- Do it yourself
- Hire someone to help you
If you choose to do it yourself don’t make the same mistakes I made early on in my travel blogging experience and not educate yourself on the current SEO practices and principles. Google periodically changes its algorithms for ranking platforms so it’s important to keep on top of recent developments in this space.
I recommend that you bury yourself in research and try to understand as much about this as you can. So, in addition, to my article on blogging mistakes I made (above), you might find these links interesting:
- How to Rank in 2018: The SEO Checklist
- Definitive Guide to SEO
- SEO Checklist
- SEO 2019: Learn search engine optimization with smart internet marketing strategies
Alternatively, for a sometimes hefty fee you can outsource your SEO to companies and people who specialize in this work. While this will likely guarantee you get it right, it will also cost you much more money on the front end. Fivvr can connect with you many freelance SEO professionals who will help you get this right.
And while Google drives most of the search activity on the Internet, there are a few other search engines it might be worth tackling as well. Specifically: Bing and DuckDuckGo. You can read how SEO for these two platforms here:
PS…you might like our blog memes section which is fully of funny memes about the blogging life!
If you are looking to save some money on your hosting costs, give the fellas over at HostGator a shout!
Travel Blog Tip #3: Get Social
Social media has become an important part of our day to day lives as a society. As a travel blogger this is definitely the case. A surprising number of people wish they could travel on a regular basis, or travel for work, or are looking for tips on how to travel smarter, etc.
These same people are often crushing on other people’s experiences on social media!
Thus, having a presence on the right social media platforms is a critical part of building your brand, finding potential followers, and connecting with your audience. All of which can drive traffic towards you blog.
The bigger is question is not should you be on social media, but which social media platforms should you be on.
The answer to this question lies in your audience – including their likely age. If you write a travel blog targeted at 60+ RV Campers, Snapchat is probably not the platform you need to invest in.
That said, it’s been my experience that the most effective travel bloggers are on at least Instagram, Facebook and Twitter. These are the platforms I’ve invested in (in addition to Pinterest, of course). In fact, feel free to follow me here:
- CBoardingGroup.com’s Facebook Page
- CBoardingGroup.com’s Twitter Page
- CBoardingGroup.com’s Instagram Page
Travel Blog Tip #4 Guest Post
Guest Posting can be an important part of driving more traffic to your travel blog. Guest posting is where you write an article for someone else’s blog. The expectation is that you will be able to include a link to YOUR blog in the post which helps with SEO as well as driving reader traffic from the other blog to your travel blog.
Guest posting can be a little tricky because you have FIND travel blogs that will allow you to guest post and then come up with a compelling story, etc. Ideally you should pick blogs that have a bigger following and higher domain authority than you do.
Here are some tips on guest posting that might be helpful for you:
And, by the way, you can guest post on my blog too. Here’s a link with all of the details: Guest Posting on CBoardingGroup.com.
Travel Blog Tip #5: Join a Facebook Group (or 3!)
Facebook Groups – Key Part of Your Strategy
Facebook groups have been tremendously helpful for my travel blog. There are numerous travel blog specific Facebook groups that exist specifically to help fellow travel bloggers drive more traffic.
For example, some Facebook groups provide ways for travel bloggers to post their recent articles to the group with the expectation that group members will click on the links, read the article, and perhaps pin it to Pinterest, or share it on social media.
Other challenges include blog comments, ad clicks, or social media follows. Members who don’t reciprocate are usually removed from the group so mutual reciprocation is expected, and usually received. And the groups are big on support, often sharing travel blog tips, providing assistance if you get stuck on something, or just general encouragement.
You will need to experiment for your specific travel blog genre, but I suspect you will find Facebook groups a key part of your travel blog strategy. Here are a few Travel Blog Facebook Groups you might want to consider:
- Travel Bloggers Club
- Pinterest Travel Bloggers Club
- Travel Bloggers
- Travel Bloggers Guide to Pinterest
Additionally, there are general writing / blogging groups like Pinterest Ninjas or Blogging for New Bloggers which can be very helpful as you learn and grow your blog.
PS…don’t forget to HAVE a Facebook Group Page as well. Like mine on Business Travel memes.
Travel Blog Tip# 6: Get Visual
As a travel blogger, a large part of your blog is likely focused on destination-based storytelling (even if you are a business travel blogger like me: Top 5 Breweries in Grand Rapids, MI).
Pictures go a LONG ways towards telling that story, spurring that wanderlust in your readers, and bringing back recurring visitors. And, as a bonus, if you SEO your images correctly, you can drive traffic to your blog via Google Image Search.
As a travel blogger this really should be the easiest of all the travel blog tips for you because you travel! And I bet you have a ton of really great pictures. Share them with us in your travel blog!
My article on Biggest Blogging Mistakes I Made when Starting my Blog provides some great suggestions on how to properly SEO your images.
Some other interesting blog tips to increase traffic I picked up along the way
In my journey as a Travel Blogger I’ve discovered a few other things that I use to drive traffic to my travel blog. Maybe they will work for you, maybe not, but I offer them up for your consideration:
- Follow more people in Wordpress Reader – I use WordPress for my blog – and I will assume you do to (most do, it seems). One trick I’ve learned is to search for blogs in my genres (travel / business travel) and both follow, like and comment on many of them. This alone has increased my WordPress followers (and of course, traffic). Another trick I use is to find people who follow back is to search for “The Journey Begins .” Then sort by date. You will find people who JUST created their blog (the first post WordPress gives you, by default, is a “The Journey Begins” post. If you follow these people, they are likely to follow you back (you might even be their first follower!). Remember when you started your blog and those first few followers followed you? You followed them back! I have found it’s an easy to way to pick up a few more followers and some extra traffic for your travel blog.
- Improve your content (grammarly, books on writing well, etc) – improving your writing skills can keep your readers coming back for more. I recommend you read the book >On Writing Well, by Zinsser. It will change your writing life. You may also want to consider Grammarly which can help auto tune your writing in real time via plugins.
- Refresh your older content – If you read my post on a Daily Blogging Checklist, you noted that I suggest you include “Blog Maintenance” as an every day item (even just for a few minutes). One of the things I consider maintenance is tuning up older content. Maybe it’s adding a new vertical graphic to pin to Pinterest. Or editing a few things to improve SEO. Or maybe adding some more affiliate links. Or finding a new affiliate link program (like MagicLinks which I just added).
- Memes – Memes can be an effective way to inject some humor into your blog and drive some incremental blog traffic. For example, I have provided numerous Travel Memes / Business Travel Memes which has helped increase traffic to my blog in a meaningful way. It seems like Images SEO quicker in Google which can be very helpful in pulling in more traffic.
- Comment on Other Blogs – this is a great technique to drive a little more traffic to your blog. Readers of the blog you are leaving a comment on may see your comment and jump over to your blog. And the webcrawlers will find those links and take them into account in your SEO score. Get started now, by commenting on this blog, below!
By the way, if you are looking for a detailed step by step guide on how to start a personal travel blog, check out LayerCulture’s post “Why I Started A Travel Blog” – it’s a lengthy and detailed discussion of the journey to starting a travel blog. Easy to understand, detailed, and informative. And it includes some suggested travel blogger tools.
Closing Arguments on the 6 Travel Blog Tips to Drive More Traffic to Your Travel Blog
There you have it. 6 Great Travel Blog Tips that will drive more traffic to your travel blog. I hope this article has been helpful to you. Employ these travel blog tips on your journey as a travel blogger and you will definitely start to see an increase in traffic.
Speaking of travel blog tips, you might be interested in checking out some of my other content related to beginning bloggers and blogging in general. During my time as a travel blogger I’ve made some serious mistakes and I wrote about it!
- Blogging for Beginners – The 9 Biggest Blogging Mistakes I Made When Starting a Blog
- A Daily Blogging Checklist – 10 Things to Do Every Day for your Blog (in 2 hours)
I’ve also scoured the web for the best travel blogs and travel bloggers and compiled them here in The Ultimate List of the Best Travel Blogs – 2018 Edition.
And don’t forget to share this article on social media. Use the pins below to add it to your Pinterest boards or use the sharing links and post it on Twitter or Facebook.
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