Business Blog Boost

I’m trying to answer this question honestly after spending just over a month as editor of the Wandalust UK travel blog. I saw that Wandalust were looking for an editor and pondered if it would be a wise investment of time for me to write for another travel blog. Wandalust is part of Creative Weblogging, a media group network of 130 blogs covering a wide variety of topics. They generate revenue through adverts on the blogs.

One of the aims of blogging for your business is to raise the profile of your business and increase income. My decision to write for Wandalust wasn’t influenced by the pay, at £140 a month for 5 posts a week, I wrote that “writing for another travel related blog would be a good way to enhance my profile and reputation and increase visitor numbers to my site and blog.”

I’ve just finished an evaluation of my first month writing for Wandalust which is so far pretty inconclusive. I’m beginning to think that “Karen Bryan” is as much of a brand as a travel blogger and writer as “Europe a la Carte” is a brand for a European travel information site and blog. This just makes amy evaluation even more complex.
I can only say that if you are considering writing for another blog you have to be very clear about your reasons and aims for doing this and regularly monitor if these aims are being achieved.

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Earlier this week I evaluated the marketing strategy in my travel business. It’s a competitive environment out there in the world of online travel and I need these travellers to find and purchase my travel product or service rather than my competitors

I started looking at the definition of marketing in Wikipedia.

1 Discern consumer desires

2 Design product or service to fulfil these desires

3 Direct consumers to purchasing your product or service.

It’s all very well reading three apparently simple marketing steps but the trick is how you translate these into actions that will be effective for your travel business.

I believe that there is a niche for Europe a la Carte in providing information to travellers who want to experience authentic travel in Europe on a modest budget. I see the rise in the value of the euro against the dollar and sterling as an opportunity for me to attract travellers who want to squeeze more of off their holiday euro but still travel in relative comfort. Also more UK residents are considering taking holidays on home shores and my site has a lot of content about Scotland.

Therefore in order to follow step 2 of fulfilling the desire of travellers to visit authentic Europe on a modest budget I write destination guides to less well known cities and regions where travellers can experience more of the real Europe away from the tourist crowds and inflated prices.

The blog plays a crucial part in part 2 by offering readers posts giving tips and advice about destinations, travel deals, accommodation and links to useful resources.

With regard to step 3, that should follow logically on from the content of the site and blog if my content can be found through the search terms used by potential site visitors. Around 50% my site traffic comes in through the blog, making it a crucial part of my marketing strategy.

With more than half of my site traffic coming from search engines keyword identification and search engine optimisation are crucial. However I find that visitors referred to my site stay longer and look at more pages highlighted the importance of having links on other sites and blogs.

However merely driving traffic to the site is not my aim, I need a percentage of visitors to go on to purchase accommodation, car hire or insurance through the affiliate links and/or click on ads on the site in order to generate revenue. I find that it’s contextual text links that bring the most revenue. You can’t just stick a few banners on your site and expect that to be effective.

You can see that my blog is an excellent fit in my marketing strategy as it is an integral part of satisfying my visitors desire for information to assist them in planning authentic travel in Europe on a modest budget through the content of the blog posts. The blog contains some Google Ads and affiliate links which generate revenue. The blog also has links into the destination guides and search and book facilities in the main site with the likelihood of further revenue generation there.

You really have to ensure that your blog is a good fit with your marketing strategy to maximise the potential of your blog to justify the time and effort you have to spend to research and write quality, unique content for the blog.

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I recently hosted a successful live blogging session on the topic of “What readers want from a travel blog” on my Europe a la Carte travel blog using Coveritlive software. This success was achieved from learning from the mistakes made in earlier attempts at live blogging which led me to write “7 Tips for Successful Live Blogging“.

Don’t be afraid to try new things and if they don’t work out at first be prepared to try again and build on the initial experience. It would have been easy for me to say to myself that I was never going to bother with live blogging again but thanks to some constructive criticism from an observer which I was able to take on the chin and my own observations I gave live blogging another try and it was a great success.

I believe that hosting successful live blogs can help establish you as an expert in your field. As your reputation grows you can invite other authorities in your field to be panelists on your live blog which will further enhance your standing.

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I’ve decided to jump on the bandwagon and start a monthly Europe Travel Blog Carnival on my travel blog. A blog carnival is a collection of blog posts on a topic. I’ve been submitting posts to travel blog carnivals for the last couple of months. I think that blog carnivals are a great idea to help you promote your blog to new readers and to build up links and increase your Technorati ranking.

However I would prefer the carnivals to cover more specific topics. Some carnivals are more like a mere list of links, lacking in coherence. I think this represents a missed opportunity to build up a regular following of readers interested in topic and enhance the reputation and profile of the host blog.

It’s really easy to set up your own blog carnival but you then need to promote the carnival to ensure that you receive submissions. You can write a post about it in your own blog, email contacts and leave messages at Facebook groups and blogging sites.

In the Europe Travel Carnival I aim to collate the best posts with brief summaries in categories such as destinations, accommodation, travel tips, transport and activities. I’d like the Carnival to inform, entertain and inspire anyone who loves travel in Europe.

The first Travel in Europe Blog Carnival will blast into the blogosphere on Monday 3 March 2008 and appear on the first Monday of every month.

I decided to start with a monthly carnival until I test the waters and see how many submissions I receive. Initially I will host the carnival on my own blog but there is the possibility for other related blogs to be hosts. In some ways this is better as it means that regular contributors get links on different blogs. The downside is that I lose editorial control of the carnival, that could also be seen as positive thing to have some different perspectives. I’ll be asking the bloggers who are featured in the Europe Travel Blog Carnival to link back to my site from their posts in order to further promote the Carnival and to build up my links.

Have you or are you going to set up a blog carnival? Let me know how it goes.

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Jens of the Tourism Internet Marketing blog has put out a call for travel marketing secrets and tips. He’s looking for your best kept marketing secret to add to Tips from the T List ebook. This set me thinking about my marketing efforts in my travel business.  So here’s my tip.

Create and maintain a blog for your business by writing content which will inform, interest and/or entertain readers while building brand awareness and loyalty and increasing sales for your business.  Readers need to perceive benefits from your blog, they’re not going to spend time on blatant sales blurb. You need a financial return on the time spent writing and publicising your blog. Aim to achieve the balance of satisfying readers desires and wants and reaching and capturing customers for your product or service to realise the full potential of your business blog.

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I have to admit that I’ve overstretched myself. My Google Pagerank for my travel site has nosedived from 5 to 3. I assume due to the fact I’d written some sponsored posts for my travel blog had some TextLinkAds and some paid links in the main site. I’ve added the “nofollow” to the paid links and resubmitted the site and blog to Google accompanied by a grovelling note listing how I’ve amended my bad ways. I vaguely read about the new Google policy but didn’t pay enough attention to it. I found it devastating to lose my Pagerank which took me five years of hard graft to attain. So far there’s no discernible drop in visitors to the site or blog and my revenue from affiliate links is steadily increasing, so let’s hope Google reinstate me soon.

My Technorati ranking for my travel blog has dropped to around 140,000 although I’ve 54 links and a few months ago I was in the top 100,000. I think the drop is a combination of more blogs competing for top rankings and the number of people favouriting the blog also dropped as the faves are only valid for one year.

I was rather bogged down at the beginning of this year with the implementation of the Content Management system to my site. My son did all the technical site but there was still a lot of work for my to do transferring the content. The destination guides all came out of alignment and I wanted to try inserting my own ads in the margins.

I’ve also had a lot of work in my “day job” as a freelance social research interviewer. There was a lot of work on offer at the end of last year to meet the annual interview targets and this year there is a big survey in my locality. It’a an ongoing dilemma for me as to whether or not I should ditch the day job and just concentrate on the business.

I haven’t written regular posts for Business Blog Boost, partly due to lack of time and partly due to the feeling that I could hardly give advice to aspiring business bloggers with a pagerank of zero.

I’m feeling more optimistic now as my travel blog was highly rated by Bloggedout and I’m been invited to attend a Travel Bloggers Summit in Berlin next month. I’ve started to get more links through my participation in blog carnivals.

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Well according to PhocusWright who’ve invited to attend the PhocusWright Bloggers Summit in Berlin 5 - 6 March as a qualified travel industry blogger. The Summit is a wonderful opportunity for me to meet other travel bloggers, exchange ideas and examine the influence of blogging on travel businesses. Hopefully I’ll come back with some great ideas on how to improve my travel blog. It’s also a vindication for me as it’s very difficult to be objective about one’s own outpourings.

Berlin: Haus der Kultur der Weld by medienfrech

I’m also looking forward to seeing Berlin and doing some research for guide to Berlin for my site.

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I’ve just started experimenting with blog carnivals on my European travel blog. Participating in Blog Carnivals is recommend by Problogger as giving you links to sites in your field, increasing traffic and being easy to do. Although I’ve vaguely heard of blog carnivals, my intention was converted to action by Darren and his Travel Blog Carnival. I’m one of the founding group of bloggers who will host the travel relate posts on their own travel blog starting in January 2008.

Madeira Carnival by Madeira

I then decided to do the carnival rounds and submitted a post on UK budget travel tips to the Travel on a Shoestring Carnival which features Europe on the first Saturday of the month. I’ve also submitted a post about my birthplace of Dundee in Scotland to the Carnival of Cities.

I’ll be hosting the Carnival of Cities on 7 January with the theme of “Off the beaten track: Cities in Europe” if you like to email a post for inclusion. If you’d like to host the Carnival of Cities you can make contact here.

If you’d like to start a new Blog Carnival on a topic related to your blog, you can start the set up on the Blog Carnival site.

I’ll report back on how successful my foray in carnivals has been in terms of promoting my blog by getting more links and more readers and in making mutually beneficial contacts with other travel bloggers.

Have you taken part in Blog Carnivals? Have you found this to be time well spent?

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Today, the 22 October 2007, is the first birthday of the my travel business blog.  A good time for evaluation and reflection.

1st Birthday Cake by PinkCakeBox

I looked back at the my second blog post, “Novice Blogger” where I stated that the aim of the blog was to increase awareness of my travel business without a large marketing budget. I think I’ve achieved this as the number of visitors to the site has more than doubled as have my turnover without any increase in expenditure. However it’s impossible to say exactly how much of this is attributable to the blog as I’ve been writing and publicising more destination guides on the main site. I also installed Google Adsense a year ago which has increased my revenue.

The blog made it into the top 100,000 of the Technorati rankings in September 2007, not bad, considering here are millions of blogs out there. However it has slipped a bit since then.

I’ve spend an enormous amount of time and effort on growing the blog. It’s been on the whole interesting and enjoyable writing for the blog. I was inspired to start this blog, Business Blog Boost, in June 2007, to offer advice and tips on blogging to boost your business to other small business owners, based on my experience creating and growing the travel blog.

I suppose one measure of the success of the travel blog is that I’m now making a bit of extra cash by writing sponsored posts. The best paid so far has been $30 for ReviewMe but the most regular is Blogsvertise which pays between £10 - $20. I know it’s hardly a fortune and I do have concerns about sponsored posts undermining the integrity of the blog.

Well, onwards and upwards, I’ve to keep focused on writing quality content for the blog, so it can keep boosting my travel business. What’s been your experience of blogging for your business?

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