Week in Review: The Slow Guide to Building a Better Travel Blog

I have found that every Monday or Tuesday, I have been writing a little review of what steps we have taken to build our travel blog each week. It helps me to organize my thoughts, but I also enjoy sharing my trials and tribulations with people. What worked for us this week and what didn’t. I hope to share my knowledge as I go.  Dave and I started from scratch not knowing a thing about how to gain readers. We didn’t know the first thing about search engines and blog communities. But in the few months that we have been working at this Blog, we have gained a lot of knowledge by spending hours on end at our computers.

We have read every guide out there, we have scoured other blogs to see what is working for them and over time we have built some knowledge about what it takes to run a successful travel blog.

There are way better blogs out there that will give you a lot of information, but I have just enjoyed sharing my step by step process.

I have found it to be a great way to meet other people as well. People have left comments as to what works for them and we all win and grow together.  I always find that I have a lot of information every week to share, so I think that I will make this a regular segment from good old Planetd.

Now for the Week in Review:

We have a fun guest post happening at twortw tomorrow.  There are a few other bloggers talking about the subject that we and some others will be writing about so check it out for your Travel Tuesday tomorrow. Should be a barrel of fun!

We had a guest posts last week at the TravelExperta about our favorite Ruins: Tikal. She has also been kind enough to add daily photo’s from us regarding Tikal too! Check them out here and while you are at it, check out her great website filled with very useful information about Central America.

We were interviewed by Andy Hayes. He had some very insightful questions that made us really have to think about our blogs purpose and our life as an adventure travel couple. He offers many services, advice and excellent information on top of his terrific travel blog.

We had a productive week last week considering I was out of town for a couple of days and Dave is on a series working long hours.

We discovered su.pr to tweet our posts ahead of time from our stumbleupon tool bar. We have a few kinks to iron out, but it worked pretty well. Our first and most embarrassing mistake was posting links ahead of time. You can’t undo a mistake. I posted a couple at the wrong time because su.pr is in PST (which I didn’t notice at first). Naturally, I fixed the time of my link because I wanted it posted at the optimal time for twitter, but when I when to undo my wrong posts, it wasn’t allowed. So we ended up posting a few posts a lot last Wednesday and they were not spread out very well.  I hate to overpost my own posts. It annoys other people and it is just bad for business. It is important to share and spread the wealth and then plug your own blog every so often.

Apparently they are working on that problem and we will be able to fix our mistakes before they are posted to Twitter.

I do like the suggested posting time in the side bar, I posted my tweets at that time and I have seen a lot of traffic. For the first time since joining StumbleUpon, I am seeing regular traffic from them.

We are going to try tweetlater as well. I would like to be able to post directly to my site rather than having my counts go to stumble. So that is something I am going to try out this week.  We also learned last week to post our tweets 3 times over the day. Everyone is on twitter at different times so by only posting once, you are missing a lot of people. I loved the su.pr for setting up a tweet in the middle of the night. I received views that I have probably never gotten before.

We made our first sale through one of our affiliates. It was very surprising to have someone buy something. We have found that by changing our affiliate products to items that are tailored to what people will buy from our site has helped a lot. We originally had things like flight and travel company affiliates. But in reality, would anyone really book a flight through a travel blog?  If you have made commissions on flights, I would love to hear about it.

So we decided to go to products that were affordable and practical. We believe in Lonely Planet, our Web Hosting Service, Nomadic Matts book and booking hotels through the internet cheaply.

Our Amazon store has taken off a bit as well, it is still a work in progress, but we have made a couple of sales through them.  And our adsense clicks are picking up also. So all is looking up. It is a slow process, but at least we are progressing.

We signed up for UniqueArticleWizard and I worked on putting in my first submission this weekend. I was pretty slow at it and it took a while to watch the tutorial videos and to eventually get the hang of it. But after all was said and done, I think it is going to be a big boost for the site.  I will keep you posted over the next month on how traffic goes.

And last but not least, we lost the first leg of our entry in the Vantastic Adventure. Things all work out for the best because to leave in September would be too soon for us anyway. However, we have not given up hope.

We are putting together a new video and concept. (we have written the script already) We are also going to make a much better quality video. We didn’t have a lot of time when we found out about the Vantastic adventure and gave ourselves 2 days to put together our video. We had some issues with compatibility between imovie projects and were stuck filming our introduction with our old camera rather than our digital. We were not happy with sound or quality, but didn’t have the time to re-shoot let alone r-edit. So watch out, this next one is going to be much better and I think (or at least hope) funnier.

Check out our first video below.

So every week we are learning something new, we will try to share information with you as we go. Everyone can find this stuff out themselves, but why not save the 3 months that it has taken us and check out some of our more week in reviews from the past couple of months to see what we have been doing to build our blog.  I don’t claim to know everything by far. Every week it is slow and steady, but our blog is coming along step by step slowly but surely.

Have a great traveltuesday.