The Business of Travel Blogging. Week 1 – Change
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We have been a couple of busy little Canadian Beaver ‘s this week working on our blog. We have taken the summer to work on refining ThePlanetD and finding companies to partner with.
It is a lot of work and we are entering foreign territory. Why can’t we just travel and magically find the funds to stay on the road? Wouldn’t that be great!
Unfortunately, we need to learn the business of Blogging. We wrote a post last week with our goals and although many travelers couldn’t care less about what we are doing to the blog, there are many others that are interested in trying to fund their travels through blogging, sponsorship and advertising.
So we thought that every once in a while we would give you an update as to what we have been doing with our little old travel blog.
Technical.
Why have we been as busy as a beaver? We have been working on code and making a few changes.
The Travel Writers Exchange has a new monthly feature called Under The Microscope. We have started slowly implementing the suggestions.
- We have widened the site which we hope is a good idea. I know that not everyone has a wide monitor yet and haven’t updated their Firefox, Safari or Internet Explorer, but we feel that the site will look better wider.
- We have changed the colour on the header from orange to light grey. We had a note that it looked a little like Hallowe’en and after taking a second look, we agree.
- We have made our icon a little larger at the top with our picture a little more prominent. We softened the font to a lighter orange rather than that harsh orange that we used to have.
- We put Dave’s Photography Icon up in the header.
- We have gotten rid of our drop down menus and made each category into a page. Now when you click on let’s say… Africa, you will be sent to a neat and orderly page to navigate.
- We are still working on cleaning up our side bar. We have to change some things around, but it is coming along, we hope.
- We have lightened the background in our ads as to not take focus off the content.
- We have changed our RSS feed to give our readers the full post. We used to have only a partial feed go into your email or google reader, but that is not the best idea we have heard.
- We have taken our email address off the page and now have a contact us page. We were receiving far too much spam in our inbox and hopefully this will help us out.
- We have updated our “about page”. We haven’t touched that since leaving for India, so it was about time.
Writing
On top of all the technical stuff that we are still working on diligently, we have worked on making our blog more search engine friendly.
I have been busy working on older posts key words. When we first started blogging, we didn’t have a clue that you need to write clearly for the robots to crawl your site and put it at the top of the search engine. While I am not going over board on changes, I am adding a few key words for posts that should be placing higher in searches. Andy Hayes and Shannon O’Donnell have an excellent book out DIY/SEO to explain more about Search Engine Optimization. They do a much better job than I could ever do.
One of the most important things we took away from the Travel Blog Exchange was to optimize your photos from Gary Ardnt of Everything Everywhere. I am a little bias, but Dave’s photos are outstanding would love for people to be able to find his shots in Google. We are now armed with the information on how they should be tagged to help them be searched.
Here is how photos should be tagged.
- The file name of the photo should be relevant to the content and in the file name key words should be separated by dashes.
- Should also have a title tag which can be the same as the file name.
- We should have also had an alt tag that includes some of key words within the description.
As a photo heavy blog, we really should have been doing this all along. With over 300 posts on our site, we have a lot of work to do.
Life
We are staying at our parents for the summer and they think we are a little nuts I am sure. We are on the computer 10 hours a day writing, networking, brainstorming and working on the blog. The weather has been outstanding and while we are trying to get out for a jog each day, we really aren’t taking advantage of the beautiful summer we are having here in Ontario.
Travel Blogging is a full time job. People don’t realize the work that goes into it (unless you are managing your own travel blog) We have a goal of being able to fund our travels completely from Blogging and working with tourism boards. We have a long way to go on reaching our goal, but we know that with some hard work we can do it.
It is easy to go for your dreams when you love your work. We are willing to go for it as long as it takes.
41 Responses to The Business of Travel Blogging. Week 1 – Change
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The new changes are looking good! The grey looks much better than the orange did and I like the wider format.
Keeping a travel blog is time consuming, particularly with a lot of photos. There should be a quicker way to upload, inset and SEO! I like to dream
.-= Gourmantic´s last blog ..In the Heat of Avignon =-.
I so wish there was a quicker way! Oh yes, we can all dream. Thanks for the input:)
Looking good, guys! Good luck with implementing the changes.
Keeping a travel blog, or any kind of blog, is indeed very hard work. But it’s also a lot of fun!
Thanks Maria, it was a lot of your suggestions that helped us out!
Go for it! I’ve got the feeling that you’ll belong to the 5% who will be able to live of blogging!
Love your blog & work!
.-= Melvin´s last blog ..7 Tips for finding Cheap Car Rentals During Your Travels =-.
Thanks Melvin! If we can grow as much as your awesome site we will be awesome. I love how traveldudes.org has a community and people can leave tips and write diaries etc. One day we would love to expand to that type of format as well.
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Thanks for sharing. It’s amazing what goes into this whole thing, isn’t it? It seems like I read or head something new every day that I should be implementing. Learning SEO is like trying to learn a new language and can be very frustrating at times. Thanks so much for organizing your thoughts and what it is you are doing. This kind of post is super helpful for someone like me who is just starting out and learning all this stuff as well. Good luck and keep it up. Everything looks great!
.-= Adam´s last blog ..Do American Travelers Get a Bad Rap =-.
Good luck with growing your site Adam. It can be done and it is a lot of fun. The best advice we can come up with is love what you are doing. We love it so much and if it takes years to accomplish our goals, well that is O.K. because we don’t mind working at this blogging business each day. Writing, photography, even the code and design is a lot of fun for us. Strange, but true.
Hey Guys, the site wider and the grey looks great. One thing I will say is that if no money came in from the adsense or the affiliate links in the last ten months I would get rid of them, just my opinion.
The travel niche is a funny thing, I think the travel industry in itself is off beat, but thats how it is.
And downsizing the fatty javascript plugins can help with page speed, but everyone has different ways of going about their site.
.-= Shawn´s last blog ..Banja Luka- Internet Woes- and a Detour =-.
Thanks for the tips Shawn. We make about $40 a month from Adsense and just can’t bring ourselves to take it off yet. Every little bit helps eh? We make the odd sale monthly off our affiliates also, but we have been playing around with them lately.
You are right about the javascript. We love having everything on the site though and are going to have to play with that too to speed up the site. So right when you say that everyone is different. I think that is why it is so important to find a happy medium to please yourself and others. Now finding that is another story:)
Sounds like you have been busy in the the short time since TBEX and all your travels! The small changes you’ve made look great and I’m sure it’s just the beginning of a great summer for you both! We’re hoping to take some time this summer in Central Europe to do some similar housekeeping and planning. Good luck with the next steps and plans!
.-= Audrey´s last blog ..Panorama Friday- Market Day and Banana Peels in Yunnan- China =-.
It’s great to see the growth and expansion of your travel blogging !
You folks are doing great ! Keep it going ! Travel and take more pics !
Hope to get the chance someday that I would be able to travel and meet-up with different travel and photography bloggers around the world !
JH
http://www.photojournalist-tgh.tv
.-= JH´s last blog ..Entering into Social Media Arena =-.
Hi JH, I hope you get to meet up with other Travel Bloggers too. It is great to meet other like minded people. Thanks for the words of encouragement. Don’t worry, we will definitely take more pictures, Dave can’t go anywhere without his camera:)
Cool, great changes and keep up the hard work! I also need to really work on photo optimization.
.-= Migration Mark´s last blog ..Get Started with International Volunteering =-.
I think that photo optimization is really important. According to Gary, (who is number 1 after all in the Blog world) he does very well because of his photo optimization. Its a big job, and hopefully it will pay off for all of us!
We also have a photo rich site, problem is I’ve never bothered tagging photos or any of the other things you (or Gary) suggest. Hmmm, guess I also have lots of learning and work to do.
.-= Trans-Americas Journey´s last blog ..Shhhhh- Belize’s Biggest SCUBA Secret – Turneffe Atoll- Belize =-.
Good luck with the photos! It is a ton of work, but worth it I think.
Love the full feeds! Great change and I think will help increase interaction down the line, that’s what I found happened after switching.
Thanks Anil. We definitely value your opinion, you have so much knowledge about the business side of Blogging. If you say full feeds, than we believe it.
Love the new changes! Plus I love your post about business of blogging. I think you guys are one of the few bloggers who are willing to share your knowledge without reservation.
.-= Amy @ The Q Family´s last blog ..Bangkok With Kids- A Quiet Escape In the Midst of Chaos =-.
Thanks Amy, you are always the best and after meeting you in person, you are even more of a shining star. We love to share information. I think that it helps everyone. Hey, that is how we found half of our info. from searching the Internet and talking to other Bloggers. So it all evens out:)
Wow. This is a lot of great information. I know that your focus and heart are in the right place. For that you will be rewarded with what you seek (Did I remind you of your yoga teacher in Nepal?)
What do we do about spam in the comments of our blogs?
I love Dave’s photos and they should be there for everyone to enjoy – well done.
Whre is ThePlanetD logo?
Cheers!
Hi Carrie. yes, I think that we are going to have to make a Logo. You are the second person that has mentioned that. I guess our smiling faces are not enough anymore:) For spam in the comments, we use akismet stats. It is a wordpress plugin that catches most spam. We have a setting on our comments to approve comments. We have to approve the first comment someone leaves, but once they have left a comment on the blog before and it has been approved, it is then automatically approved at all times.
Thanks for the reminder of Swami Gee. Surprisingly we just heard from a woman that we met in India. She found our site when she googled Swami Gee, she wants to go back to India and take a course from him and wants to find where he is. Amazing signs everywhere!
I think you’re doing a great job and I certainly appreciate the sharing of info, especially as it relates to photo tagging. The business of travel blogging is incredibly time consuming & sometimes I do wonder what I’ve got myself into. Lately I have been hiking long distance trails in the UK and then coming back to a B&B to write route notes and blogs. I need a holiday! My friend keeps making snide remarks about traveling with a travel blogger. Successful people like yourselves certainly make it look easy but also interesting to note all the time that goes into making your site user friendly and how you have to keep on learning too. Keep up the good work Deb & Dave.
So true Leigh. Blogging is hard work. We spend so many days in Internet cafes when we are traveling. We are always looking for places with free wifi so that we can work at night. I don’t think that many people understand how much time a Travel Blogger has to spend working while on vacation. But we love every minute of it. Lucky for us, we are traveling with each other and not friends. I am sure we would drive people a little nuts too.
I know how hard it can be to change an existing blog! We’ve just changed everything in our blog too and there are sooo many things to check.
You guys are doing a great job, you’ll reach your goal very soon.
Most important of all are the stories, and I’m sure they won’t be a problem for you!
Keep up and good luck guys!
Thanks Cris. It is good to know that other people are in the same boat:)
I do love the new colors up top! And I have to agree with Anil, the full feed is a great change
Looking forward to more of your tweaks!
The wider screen is sweet as. I definitely agree with the full post on the RSS – I’m more inclined to read the full ones that I subscribe to. Too easy to skip over the summaries .. which is somewhat ironic eh?
Shocking how much of a commitment blogging really can be. It is a proper full time job – which doesn’t properly pay the bills! Balancing the maintaining of my blog with my freelance writing is a major challenge. Like you, the goal is to have the blog pay the bills and support the travels so these are steps we have to take to get there.
Good luck, thanks for keeping us updated.
.-= Matt´s last blog ..Puffin Watching- Isle of Staffa- Scotland =-.
I love the changes guys and I love that you are sharing these steps with us. I would have loved to go and learn at TBEX (hopefully I can go to the next one) but these tips and tricks are really useful! Keep up the great work!
.-= Alison´s last blog ..Expat Life in Belgium- An Interview with Alison =-.
Very nice job with the recent changes – I do like the wider format too, and it looks great on my MacBook Air display, which is much smaller than my desktop monitor (but it’s fine for when I’m on the road). Keep plugging away – I know you two will be a HUGE success someday soon!
.-= Trisha´s last blog ..Q&A- How to Incorporate a Newsletter =-.
Thanks for the SEO tips! I feel like I learn a few new things in this area every week. I wondered how much time you spent on the blog, and I’m not surprised you work so hard on it. It really shows.
.-= Jennifer Barry´s last blog ..Eat Locally- Wherever You Are =-.
Really like the changes. Keep up the good work.
Thanks for taking the time to share what you’re doing to make your blog more user friendly and thus more cash flow friendly as well. I’m just dipping my toe into the waters of location independent living and I think it’ll be winter of 2011 before I’m able to take off. Sure, I’ll take a few little jaunts here and there – but I need to build content and traffic. Right now I have a web gal whose doing a major makeover on my blog so it looks professional and spiffy. Hope to have the changes done in about two weeks. Most people would consider me to have an ideal life as I already own my own business – so I’m entrepreneurial savvy. But I’d like to write a whole lot more and travel a whole lot more and so I’m following both the 4-hour Work Week and the Crush it models to move in the right direction and make my life an excellent adventure.
Denise Michaels Excellent Adventure
http://www.DeniseMichaels.com
That is great Denise. Good luck with everything and don’t hesitate to ask if you need any advice. I wish that I could make this blog work on only 4 hours a week but we spend much more time than that. Although, we do love every minute of it!
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Really very information for a travel blogger like me.
Regards,
Suhasini
http://indiancolumbus.blogspot.com
A unique travel blog
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