Travel Blogging: Build Your Audience, Improve Rankings and Earn Money
When I started Charlie on Travel six months ago, I thought I’d read enough internet articles and spent enough time blogging on a free WordPress platform for my new travel blog to be smooth sailing.
Not so. Even after six months of dipping my toe in the proverbial travel blogging pool, I’ve still barely scraped the surface of what there is to know. I went back to the internet last week to read some more about how to build up a successful travel blog.
I realised then that there is almost too much to know without having a reliable guide. What better to get than a book from two experienced travel bloggers who have already made their blog a success?
Agness and Cez from Etramping have just released their new eBook: Travel Blogging: Build Audience, Improve Rankings and Earn Money. The book gives an ultimate step-by-step outline of how they have got to where they are now. I got it, I read it and it was awesome.
Who are Agness and Cez?
Agness and Cez from Etramping are two awesome budget travel bloggers known for travelling around the world on less than $25 a day. I’ve been following them for years, reading their tips and searching for the street foods they blog about.
What I Learned from Reading Their eBook
Etramping’s eBook covers a bunch of important things ranging from making content personalised and developing your own niche to being SEO friendly and building a strong social media presence. It’s not a guide to being a good writer – you can just read their blog posts to find that out – but a guide to all the bits and pieces in between that help to build a successful blog.
Here are the top 5 things I learned from reading Travel Blogging: Build Audience, Improve Rankings and Earn Money:
1. Essential WordPress Plug-ins – Oh man, I had absolutely no idea what plug-ins to use for my blog! There are so many to choose from and I never knew what to search for. Agness and Cez have a solid list of all the essentials and I have some shiny new plug-ins.
2. Authority Linking – I always link to research articles in my blog posts when it’s relevant, but sometimes I just write away from personal experiences and in those instances it didn’t even occur to me that I should have an authority link in those posts too – in fact, there should be one in every single post!
3. Nomadic Samuel’s Top 100 Travel Blogs – Before reading this eBook, I hadn’t realised why Sam’s list of the top 100 travel blogs was so important. I’d skimmed the page a few times but the measurements he uses – Alexa, Moz etc. – hadn’t meant anything to me until now. Shucks.
4. SEO Building through Guest Posts – Turns out writing a guest post is a little more intricate than writing some cool content. It was complete news to me that I can enhance the SEO strength of a previous post on my blog through a guest post!
5. Google+ Influences Search Engines – I always just thought Google+ was the poor cousin of the social medias. Actually, Google includes popularity on G+ in their ranking algorithm, which means a good G+ account can provide some decent blog traffic. Turns out G+ is more valuable than I realised.
6. Pay Per Month Ads – I’ve never really looked into having ads on my blog, mainly because I feel I’m not at that stage yet. Reading about Pay Per Month advertising in the eBook, I learned that if you do decide to put these ads on your blog, you should check whether the links have a no-follow attribute – if they don’t you might get a penalty from Google! Ugh!
What’s the Real Secret to Travel Blogging Success?
Agness and Cez’s eBook covers a whole heap of topics that can help you build up your audience, improve your rankings and start earning money with your travel blog. There’s a lot of little things that I just didn’t know and even more that newer bloggers won’t know yet, but Agness and Cez aren’t offering some kind of quick fix success – there is no such thing.
Their secret? Hard work. In their own words: “It is very important to realise that nothing will ever beat the effectiveness of hard work. You get what you give.” At least after reading their eBook, you’ll know exactly what hard work it is that needs to be done!
If you’re interested in reading more about Etramping’s new eBook, head over to their travel blog.
Sharon
Thank you for sharing this, now I know how to get started!:) Every post you write is a new surprise, invaluable, informative and a joy to read.
Charlie on Travel
Very much so! Starting a travel blog can be a really daunting and overwhelming task. It’s great to have a book to help you out in the beginning.
Agness
Thank you Charlie for writing an honest review of our latest eBook. We are so happy to hear you like it and found it so useful :).
Charlie on Travel
You’re very welcome. Thank you for letting me read your excellent book, I genuinely thought it was super and very well-written! :)
Dale
Just today I was talking with someone here in Italy about what bloggers do and how they do it, and mentioning eTramping was one of the first things I did. I love how they work and how they get results, they know exactly what they’re doing and don’t mess around whilst doing it – but that doesn’t mean they don’t have fun, you only have to read their posts to know that.
Charlie on Travel
eTramping have a really great model, I actually mentioned them the other day too when a friend was saying he was thinking of moving his travel blog off of free WordPress onto a self-hosted domain.
I usually also mention Just One Way Ticket too, as Sabrina is very honest about how she got her blog going etc.
Yes, I completely agree with you! And Agness has to be the best, loveliest, most hard working travel blogger there is. I don’t think I’ve ever commented on a blog post that Agness hasn’t read first!