There are hundreds of thousands of travel blogs out there, but the majority of them have never had more than a few hundred visitors. Why? Well, it’s primarily because the owner hasn’t marketed their blog correctly.
A lot of non-marketing bloggers falsely believe that just creating good content is enough and that eventually, people will find their blog. But those of us interested in digital marketing know that’s simply not true.
You have to work for every visitor that you get.
Why Do You Want More Traffic?
Most travel bloggers want more traffic because they are interested in earning a living from their blog so that they can continue to travel. Without enough traffic, they can’t generate any significant revenue and would need to find other employment.
With that in mind, the traffic that you need will be different depending on the methods that you’re using to monetize your blog. If you are using advertisements, then all traffic is good traffic, but for blogs selling services or promoting affiliate offers you need traffic that is ready to make a purchase.
Interacting Within the Community
The first method for generating traffic is one of the most underutilized, and that’s by interacting with the community, helping others and giving them a reason to visit your blog. There are hundreds of travel forums out there, and each has countless members interested in travel.
By replying to other members’ messages and helping less seasoned travelers, you can encourage them to visit your blog. But the type of content that you post on your blog will have a significant impact on how and where you can promote it.
If most of your posts are journals of your adventures, then they are only attractive to people looking to read about others or to see what a specific area is like. Therefore, you can just promote it to people looking to visit that area or who might want to read your stories.
However, if you wrote more general travel articles aimed at a broader audience, you might find promotion much easier. For example; you could write about buying travel insurance because not only is that relevant to all travelers but insurance affiliate offers can generate vast amounts of revenue.
Social Media
Most travel bloggers take a few minutes after they write a post to share it on their social media and let their friends know that they wrote a new article. But how do you expect that message to get outside of your friendship group?
To get traffic from strangers, you’re going to need to join groups, events, and pages on your social media networks where you can talk to others interested in travel. Don’t make the mistake of entering groups where everybody is promoting their blogs because nobody will read anything.
Instead, join proactive networks where users ask for advice. Then, when you see an opportunity to help someone you can share a relevant post from your blog with them. This gives them a great reason to visit your blog and makes it more likely that they will become lifelong readers.
Ranking for High Traffic Keywords
Finally, you can use search engine optimization (SEO) to rank for high volume keywords that people are searching for on Google, Yahoo, and Bing. These phrases are regularly used by people across the world to search for information, and by ranking high, you can bring in massive amounts of traffic to your blog.
The first step is to find out which keywords you want to target. You can do this using a keyword research tool which will show you the number of people searching a term each month and even how difficult it will be to rank for.
Once you’ve found the right keywords, you should create posts on your blog around these keywords and include the keyword within the title of the post and the content itself.
Finally, you need to get back out there and promote your article. Creating links from other websites to your pages will help them to rank higher, bringing in traffic directly through the link and also from people searching on Google and finding your blog.
