Let’s face it, most of us aren’t writing a blog for ourselves.  We would appreciate an audience.  But how does one get an audience, especially when they are first starting out?

You have to network. If people don’t know you are out there, they will never find you.

There are many technical things that can help a person to place higher in the search engines. If you show up on the first page of Google, you will definitely find an audience of people looking for advice and information. But that doesn’t happen overnight.

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cartoon courtesy of HardikPargi.com

So what do you focus on first?

You write great content.   If you don’t write something of interest, people won’t come back. People want information, but they also want to be entertained. They want to know that when they come over to your blog, they will find something different.

Let’s assume that you already know the basics of blogging. If you don’t, head over to NomadicMatts website and buy his Book How to Make money with Your Travel blog. He has some great tips on how to start your travel blog.

So let’s get on with the post.

I was overwhelmed when we first started trying to get our blog recognized.  I had been looking at all these “top travel blog sites” and “lists of the best travel blogs” and said..”I want on that.  How do I get on those?”

I scoured the Internet looking for advice and found a lot of information at places like:

• The Travel Writers Exchange
• Travel Blog Advice
• Travel Online Partners

They have great information and The Travel Writers Exchange even has a forum that you can discuss issues and post questions.

We are by no means the top of the travel blogging community, but we have slowly started to figure out how to find an audience. We have reached that magic number of over 30,000 views per month. We are nowhere near where we want to be yet, but for a year and a half of work we are happy with our growth.

What we’ve done over the past 18 Months.

1. Write about what you know -  We were lucky when we started our travel blog. We had been traveling for almost a decade and had already been to over 30 countries. We had a repertoire of stories that were just waiting to be told. In a sense, we could compete with the “big boys” of travel blogging because we had already done Burma, Laos, Borneo and the rest of South East Asia. We had been through Central America and Africa. People thought that we were already established bloggers. That doesn’t mean we were anything special, we just focused on what we knew; World Travel.  But, if you haven’t been around the world don’t worry, focus on your expertise.  Maybe  you know all about sports of the world, or languages or you are an expert on one destination.  If you write about what you know, people will come back. You will become the authority on that subject.

2. Find a Niche -  There are a million travel blogs out there. Backpackers, solo travelers, travel couples, you have to find something that makes you unique. What are you passionate about? When you write, are you funny? Are you a straight and to the point type of person, do you like controversy and will rant about anything?  We are an adventure travel couple from Canada. A lot of the world doesn’t know the little things about Canada, they think we are the same as the United States. We like to write about that. We also like to write with our hearts on our sleeve and discuss our insecurities, our accomplishments and our struggles. We like to take on extreme adventures are thrilled to be taking part in the Mongol Rally next year to kick start the adventure side of our blog again. With China, India and a 10,000 mile car rally coming up in the next year, we are back on track as being Canada’s Adventure Couple.

Network

3a. Leave insightful Comments – When we first started blogging, we would go to other people’s blogs and see the insightful comments and discussions going on between established Bloggers and we were blown away.  Just by going through comment threads, we could pick out who was an authority in the travel market.  The more we saw them around the Internet, the more we wanted to read about them. The ones that are big online, are the people that network well.  They leave comments that add to the post not just a silly “great post” comment that does nothing for a person.

3b. Join forums –  Places like the Travel Blog Exchange, The Travel Writers Exchange and BootsnAll are a great way to get your name out there. Introduce yourself and join the discussion.  There are so many places that you can network with other Bloggers. There are even Travel Blog forums on facebook. Find the one that you are comfortable with and start chatting.

4. Write Guest posts - People are always looking for great content. If you approach a larger blog with something that you think would be suitable for their readers, people will most likely say yes. We accept guest posts. When someone emails us an article we read it. If we like it, we post it with their bio and a link back to their website. It not only introduces them to a new audience but brings new readers our way too. So don’t be afraid to approach blogs if you have a great idea, they may just say yes.

5. Write for websites – Take it one step further and write for websites like Matador, GoNomad or write a travel tip for JourneyWoman and put an article up on BootsnAll, This will give you a boost in traffic, build your name and your body of published work. Some larger sites even pay a small amount for your articles.  Go for it, start searching for other online travel magazines and send in your submission today.

6. Build a Social Media Presense – Twitter, Stumbleupon and facebook are your friends.  People may snub social media, but the referrals you will get from these sites are astounding. People will follow your facebook fanpage because they like you.  If you engage with your followers on twitter, you will find that people retweet your posts regularly and drive traffic your way.  There are many different Social Media sites to choose from. Some people may love Buzz or Digg. Whatever it may be, choose a couple and focus on them.  The most important thing is to be generous. If you spend all your time promoting yourself, nobody will click on your stuff.  The more you give, the more you get.

7. Offer an RSS Feed – We had our blog going forever without offering an RSS option (really simple syndication) to our readers. Boy I wish I knew then what I knew now.  Give people the option to subscribe to your posts via email. They may not think of coming back for a visit when they are busy but if they subscribe to you and have regular updates in their inbox, they will be reminded to come over and take a look.

8. Persevere - Blogging takes a long time. You have to build an audience and sometimes it takes longer than others.  There are some websites that explode over night but for the most part, consistency is the key.  Keep posting, keep writing, keep leaving comments, work on building your friendships and contacts on your social media sites, work on becoming a better writer or photographer and stay true to yourself and your vision. Eventually it will pay off.

Did you know that there are many other ways to connect with and enjoy theplanetd on the Internet besides having to type in our address each day?

You can receive emails updates in your inbox or blog feeds daily on your homepage. You don’t have to worry about checking our site to see what is up, we can come to you.

We love talking with travelers outside of the Canada’s Adventure Couple website and we thought that we would take today to tell you about other places on the internet that we spend time on regularly.

Let us Look to the Right of our Blog

See those funny looking circles on the right of the page under connect with us?
Have you ever wondered what that picture of the little bear holding the book in his hands means?
Why should you subscribe to us and what does that mean?

We really do want you to connect with us at some of our favorite social media sites.  For those of you that know all about these sites, head on over to our side bar and connect with us if you already haven’t.

For the rest of you that are wondering just what all the fuss is about Twitter and Facebook. Stay tuned below for a little information.

Starting from the Top Right and Working our Way Down the Blog

Sign Up for our Monthly Newsletter - Don’t have time to read every article at the PlanetD.com? Each month we send out a newsletter to your email address with highlights of what we did each month. We never share your email address with anyone and we never send spam messages.  The only thing you get is an update on PlanetD news. We discuss our travels, our insider tips on what we have learned and links to some of the most informative sites on the Internet for travel information.

Post Updates through RSS - People are often confused as to what RSS is.  What is stands for is “Really Simple Sydication” When you sign up for post updates through RSS, you receive our new posts each day directly into your email inbox or as a part of your reader homepage.  Add us to your home page and our new posts will show up alongside your other favorite websites.
When you click on the feedburner logo, you will be directed to a page that lets you choose what reader you prefer. If you use igoogle as your home page our links will show up there, if you prefer Yahoo to hold all your favorite sites, our link will show up on that page. It is a great tool that allows you to browse your favorite blogs from your homepage to see if you want to read that article today.  Instead of having to type in the web address and visit our site we come to you.

Twitter - We have all heard about Ashton Kutcher and his twitter antics with Demi Moore, but what does twitter mean for the average person? What can we really say in 140 characters? As it turns out a lot.  Twitter has become one of the top social media sharing websites on the Internet.  Corporations are seeing the importance of Twitter and website owners are seeing the benefit of using Twitter to drive traffic to their websites.
We have made incredible connections with Twitter, not only through business opportunities like Princess Cruises Follow Me At Sea, but we have also made great true friends through Twitter.  Travel Bloggers are some of the most giving people in the world and everyone loves to help each other out by sharing each others websites and posts with their followers.

All you have to do is find something great on the Internet, shorten it’s address with tools like bit.ly, share it with your friends and put in a little blurb as to why you think it is great.  The more you share on Twitter, the more love you receive back and the more connections you will make.

Facebook - The most popular social site on the Internet is a great way to stay connected with your faraway friends. As travelers, we don’t get to see our friends and family as much as we would like, but we can stay up to date with their activities on Facebook. It can be as public or as private as you want it to be. Of course Dave and I are a couple of open books, and not only do we have our own private Facebook pages, we have a PlanetD Round The World Adventures fan page. People can leave messages, ask questions, find other travelers and even post photos on our page. We are trying to encourage more conversation with other travelers and Facebook is a great way to do so.

Join our fanpage and  you don’t even have to leave Facebook to read our latest posts. It will show up in your newsfeed and you can decide whether or not you feel like reading our post today.

StumbleUpon - If you are not in the Blogging community, chances are you have not heard of StumbleUpon. We hadn’t, but you don’t need to be a blogger to like to Stumble. StumbleUpon is an excellent social site to find like minded people that enjoy the same content that you do on the Internet. As you start to rate articles by giving them a thumbs up or a thumbs down, StumbleUpon will start to know your likes and dislikes and recommend articles that you will like. You will be able to find friends and share content with them and will be able to find some incredible and unique Internet content.

Like all social media sites, the more you give the more you get. If you rate a lot of content on StumbleUpon, more people will connect with you and your content will be stumbled into the system more often.

YouTube - The first and the best. The very first social media site we ever joined was YouTube. That is why our Youtube account name is Wegobyebye instead of ThePlanetD. We shot video, up loaded them to youtube and hoped that people would watch a few.  It turns out, people love watching videos.  The Internet is filled with short attention spans. People enjoy watching video and looking at pictures more than reading and youtube is the proof. Put up a funny, offbeat and entertaining video and it just may go viral. Careers have been made on youtube. (yes, we mean you Justin Beiber)

We have a lot of video to edit this summer and we will be posting new ones weekly starting two weeks from now. Don’t miss our shenanaggins, join the youtube party.

As much as I love the Internet, the technical side of things really freaks me out sometimes.

You put a lot of work into networking a marketing and really you have no control over anything.  We have worked hard on establishing ourselves on Twitter and to have to start all over so close to leaving for Asia would be a real bummer.  We had decided to focus on Twitter as our main form of networking. We thought that it would be the best and easiest way for us to connect with other travelers and Bloggers while we are traveling.  We did a good job too.  We have developed great friendships, Topsy lists us as “highly influential” we have gained a nice amount of followers quickly and frankly, we love Twitter.

Last week we noticed that someone posted an ad from our profile on Twitter.  It said something like…”I just signed up for a rewards program” and it had a link to website.  We quickly deleted it because first of all we didn’t post it and second we didn’t want someone clicking through to a malicious site from our name @theplanetd.  We were nervous that someone had hacked our account so we quickly changed our password and deleted any third party applications that we didn’t recognize in our connections.

Everything was fine and we felt better…

but here is where we think that troubles began.

We didn’t change our password with the 3rd party applications that we left on our Twitter account and one or more of them was obviously trying to gain access.  These third party sites are Tweetdeck, wefollow, twit this etc.  If they keep trying to access your account without the valid password too many times, Twitter will lock your account.

So here is what we did…

1. We could not sign in from the twitter home page.  But when we clicked on the “forgot password” icon we could access Twitter through the link that they sent to our email.  However, once we logged out, we were locked out again.
2. If we went to Twitter help we stayed signed in so we could access our account for some reason, so we did that.
3. We could not find anywhere on the support page where we could let Twitter know that we were having problems.  We had read that you could send them a ticket, but we could not find a way to contact them anywhere.  And we went of the support section with a magnifying glass.  There is just no way to contact them. We clicked on every link from that page and even if your click on contact us at the bottom of the Twitter feed, it just goes right back to the help page when you click on support.  If anyone knows how to get a hold of them, I would love to hear it.
4. We went into our connections settings and revoked access to all 3rd party applications for now.
5. We signed back in after waiting an hour and everything worked fine.

So we are back on Twitter.  However, we have Tweetdeck etc. disabled for now. I don’t want to sign back into them yet. I think that I will just give it a few days.

I will keep you posted if it happens again.

Other Frustrations

Does anyone else have a problem with Throttling on their site?  We have points where people throttle our account to the point that it freezes our site.  We use Bluehost and at times we have spammers hit our site hundreds of times in a minute causing the site to slow down or stop.

Once our site was down for quite a while so Dave went online with Bluehost.  They told him that certain sites were basically attacking ours and that we have to block them.  What we do is go into our Bluehost Control panel and click on CPU Throttling.  Sometimes it is through the roof.  They told us that we have to block those ip addresses that are hitting us.  Man, that is a lot of work.

Just to clarify…it is not the usual spam that Askimet catches, this doesn’t affect us at all,  it is bandwidth throttling. Which I still don’t really understand.

Do other people have this problem with different providers? Are we just having bad luck this month?

I must admit, that Bluehost’s customer care is excellent however.  Whenever we have an issue and contact them, they are right there to help us out.

Speeding up our site

I also really need to work on making our site faster.  People could say that it is the featured video in the side bar, but many people have video streaming from youtube and it doesn’t slow them down.  We have thought that maybe it is because of the featured content slider on the home page, but a lot of people have that as well and their sites are fast.

We have cleaned up errors and we have installed super cache but that hasn’t sped up the site.  We are definitely needing to solve this little mystery.  I don’t like waiting for a blog to load, so I definitely don’t want people to have to wait for our blog.

So anyway, that is our week in review this week.  Just annoying technical difficulties.

Outside of the blog things are moving along well.

• We have been moving our contents to storage and have made quite the dent in our apartment.  It looks like moving day is going to be pretty manageable.
• We are bringing in our Visa Application for India tomorrow
• Doctors visits are done.
• Optomitrist – ?
• We have bought our new camera and camcorder – That is a post for Dave to write about in the near future
• We are all packed. I know it is early, but we don’t use anything that we are bringing with us.
• All medications and first aid – ?

For some reason I am getting busier at work as time gets closer.  On one hand I enjoy making the extra money, on the other, I have a lot to do and work is really getting in my way. Dave is busy as usual, so time is just flying by.  We are both feeling a little anxious.  No excitement brewing yet. We are too busy checking off the to do list.

So that is what we have done this week.