Travel Blog Advice » Social Networking

What Happens When You Stop Blogging For 2 Weeks

Anil P. — Wed, 29 Feb 2012 08:00:50 +0000

Several weeks ago I announced on foXnoMad that I would be taking two weeks off from blogging, including related activities like participating in social media, and responding to most emails. More than that this two week break would be part of a larger plan I had in mind – to allow myself 6 weeks of annual leave from my sites. I figured why not give myself what I had years ago when I was working for a boss that wasn’t me before I was in the position where I had to take a break.

I’ll be writing about the personal and travel side to the break in the coming weeks on foXnoMad but many, many of you wrote me wondering what would happen to a travel blog if it went quite for two weeks. I suspect many of you might be considering taking a few breaks yourself, so I’d like to share what I’ve learned and tell you what happened.

Reducing Your Anxiety Through Preparation

You’ve probably had times where your blogging schedule was unexpectedly disrupted. As comforting as a regular posting schedule can be, when something like a site error or that thing called “life” gets in the way, it can have the opposite effect. Stress, worry, and headaches can come with the idea that you’re not tending to your travel blog every moment of the day. What happens in reality, however, is…not much. You’ll find that missing a blog post or leaving Twitter for a day or two doesn’t cause your travel blog to disappear into obscurity. What I’ve found is the length of the break doesn’t cause anxiety, it’s how predictable that break is.

I planned my blogging break in advance and announced about 10 days prior that I’d be taking 6 weeks of annual leave spread over the course of each year. The day before I took off, I let my readers know. This way they knew what to expect and wouldn’t be surprised by me going quiet on my site (although I did still reply to comments albeit slower than normal) and my silence on Twitter or Facebook.

The number of emails I received from my readers telling me that they’d miss me but be patiently awaiting my return was truly touching. People who had never written me before were reaching out and their support encouraged me further.

Looking At The Numbers

I honestly don’t track many blog statistics very closely; the ones I do focus on are my daily email, RSS subscribers, newsletter subscribers, Twitter followers, and Facebook fans. Those are people who’ve made a commitment to follow my travels and site in some way. They’re regulars; those numbers and the traffic from them didn’t decrease over the two weeks. In fact, my email and newsletter subscription rates increased slightly above average over the course of my break.

A few interesting things did happen to my pageviews. During the first 4 days of my break, they actually increased. I suspect this has something to do with the delayed effect of RSS, email, and other subscriptions. That is, most subscribers don’t check out your site immediately after you post something but rather when they’ve got some free time. Usually that ends up being 24-96 hours after your content pops up somewhere. A few people might have also been coming around to see where I had gone in case they missed the announcements too.

I didn’t have the usual spikes from posting new content, which was to be expected since there wasn’t any new content. My traffic from search engines wasn’t effected and created a solid backbone of traffic throughout the 2 weeks. Toward the end of my break my pageviews did decline slightly; however the average pageviews remained fairly the same over two weeks. The increase in the first 4 days helped to balance things out.

Finally, it’s worth noting that my server decided to have several fits (I swear it acts up for my attention) making my site unavailable much more than usual while I was away. Next time, now that those issues have been resolved, I’ll be interested to see how the trends change if they do. Don’t worry, I’ll be sure to share my findings with you.

Timing The Break And Lessons Learned

I decided to take my first two (of the 6 total) week break in February. It was a time in between any big blog events I had planned and I would be returning with my annual Best City to Visit Travel Tournament – typically a very busy time on foXnoMad. In the future I’ll probably plan my vacations at similar times. One thing I wasn’t prepared for was the number of emails waiting for me when I returned. Although I had been answering some emails along the way (yes, I did have a vacation responder set up), many of those “quick” messages I thought I could tackle in a few hours took 2 days. (I was primarily responding to emails related to the server I manage and advertising inquiries. Next time, I’ll probably have an assistant take care of those tasks.) Little things added up so next time I’ll come “back to the online office” with two non-writing days as a cushion.

To those of you who might be anxious about taking a blogging break, I hope I have been able to alleviate some of those concerns. The sky didn’t collapse in on itself and my readers were waiting for me when I got back. They were full of understanding and perhaps a bit more keen to see some new posts of mine.

Feel free to let me know if you have any specific questions about taking a blogging break in the comments below.

Selecting Smart Breaks From Travel Blogging

Are Blog Ranking Widgets Worth Displaying On Your Site?

Anil P. — Fri, 01 Oct 2010 08:00:51 +0000

Scroll down the sidebar of many a travel blog and you’re likely to see a number of 80 pixel blog widgets hanging out in a small cluster. You may also have some on your travel blog, wonder what they’re for, and ask yourself are blog ranking widgets worth displaying on your site. Blog ranking widgets are a trade off between traffic, Pagerank, loading times and a decision you’ll have to weigh carefully to get the right balance.

What Are Blog Ranking Widgets?

Blog ranking widgets, which look a lot like the images above, are visual links back to ranking lists. Many of them often include your site’s rank in the widget as well, announcing your clout to the world. They also typically have “follow” links (here’s how external links work) going back to the front page of the list.

The Ranking Pagerank Cycle

All of those incoming links back to the list from the front pages of travel blogs gives many ranking sites a very high Google Pagerank. The front page of many of the ranking sites usually have the top 10, 20, or 50 sites (as many as possible without hurting Pagerank) so scoring a spot is good for your travel blog. How these sites actually rank their lists varies, although many of them base your score on your Pagerank itself, creating a little loop of reciprocal ranked links.

Disadvantages Of Blog Ranking Widgets

One of the main drawbacks of these widgets is that you don’t get to control the code of the widget itself. (Of course you can modify it but doing so hurts you blog rank.) That can slow down how fast your site loads as the widget calls out to the ranking site to update you numbers and serve up that little widget image. With one or two widgets you won’t notice this effect much but that more you add the bigger a problem it becomes. Now you’re sacrificing loading time, a key factor in determining Pagerank for Google, and one of the most important metrics for keeping readers.

A Balancing Act

Initially, when your travel blog is on the new side, you can display these widgets in hopes of increasing your Pagerank. Once they begin to affect your loading time negatively though it’s time to remove them. Using tools like Pingdom, Website Optimization, or UpTrends it will be easy to determine the specific load time of each widget. Remember, each time your page loads, the longer it takes (i.e. more than 5 seconds) the exponentially greater chance that you’ll miss out on a reader sticking around long enough to discover your travel blog.

In fact gaining links for your blog, finding a niche, and fast load times are infinitely much more effective ways of developing an audience and establishing Pagerank on a successful travel blog.

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A Review Of Travel Blog Exchange (TBEX) 2010

Anil P. — Fri, 16 Jul 2010 08:00:08 +0000

The second annual Travel Blog Exchange Conference (TBEX) 2010, held in New York City over June 26th and 27th, was like a slightly unfinished product with a few rough edges around some stellar moments.

Hundreds of travel bloggers and members of the travel industry came to the conference to meet with their peers, many for the first time. It was this excitement and energy that fueled the pre-TBEX events as well as the TBEX conference, helping to downplay the weekend’s shortcomings.

The TBEX Talks

It seemed as though the TBEX talks tried to cover all of the aspects of travel blogging, reaching out to a mixed bag of travel bloggers, making it difficult to be too focused any one group or topic.

Many of the talks seemed to miss the segment of newer travel bloggers attending the conference.
Gart Arndt gave a particularly enlightening talk on “travel porn”.
The videos submitted by other travel bloggers and writers shown at various intervals of the conference were excellent. There were some great tips, ideas, and advice on editing and creating good travel videos.
You can listen to the entire second day of talks here.

The talks were varied although the need for in-depth breakout sessions was clearly evident. Also, the talks themselves were also hampered by frequent late starts, some scheduling confusion, and a lack of wi-fi. All of that said, there were some very useful nuggets in each of the talks and good leaping off points for further research.

Networking, Networking, Networking

The highlight and strongest point of TBEX 2010 was the massive networking potential. There were parties, cocktail hours, and events in the days leading up to the actual conference. So many familiar faces and Twitter icons all floating around the same venues, it was impossible to try and connect with everyone.

Getting together this many travel bloggers, digital nomads, and location independents, is truly a feat and was in itself, worth the price of admission.

In a digital world and industry, personal connections are still more powerful than any other kind. It was surprisingly nice to find out that so many people I had come to know through their travel blogs, Twitter, and Facebook were, in person, similar to their online personalities.

Planning For TBEX 2011?

Next year, TBEX will be held in Vancouver on June 11th and 12th. If you are planning on attending I’d recommend getting your tickets for TBEX 2011 as early as possible (pre-registration is now over) even if you’re not quite sure you’ll be able attending. The cost is $80 and if you find you won’t be able to make it, there will be plenty of buyers come closer to conference time. I suspect TBEX 2011 will sell out quickly so don’t miss out or get stuck having to purchase tickets above cost.

I’d also recommend, if possible, arriving a week or at least 3 days in advance. There are a number of events scheduled and a good way to make the most out of your time at TBEX by meeting people in advance of the actual conference.
Travel Blog Exchange has a complete round up of TBEX reviews and posts.

I plan on attending TBEX 2011 and arriving in advance to take part in some of the activities I missed out on at TBEX 2010. I’ve read that some of the shortcomings are to be addressed and the crowds to be even bigger, which can only mean an improvement across the board.

Are you planning on attending TBEX 2011, or were you at TBEX 2010? What were your thoughts and impressions? Feel free to leave your opinions in the comments below.

[photos by: galavantinggals (TBEX 2010 logo), z_everson (TBEX swag), Sue Waters (Twitter faces)]

A Review Of Travel Blog Success

Anil P. — Tue, 02 Feb 2010 08:00:10 +0000

Experienced travel blogger and world traveler Dave Lee has just launched a new membership site, Travel Blog Success, aimed at helping people develop successful travel blogs. I was given a sneak peak before the launch and wanted to share some of my thoughts about it with you.

Travel Blog Success is a wealth of information about travel blogging as a whole. The membership site, with an introductory price of $75 (reduced from $135) for a plan of 12 lessons will save you time as your try to figure out two things many bloggers are after – readership and money. The 12 lessons cover some basic aspects of setting up a travel blog such as choosing a good domain name, ideas on formatting posts, and search engine optimization (SEO).

Usually if you stick with blogging long enough you’ll figure these things out but Travel Blog Success will save you months and perhaps years of trial and error if you read through all of the lessons and interact on the community forum. You’ll likely benefit most from the technical details of building a blog and the nuts and bolts of SEO. In the end though, you need to find your own voice, style, and niche within the travel blogging community to succeed.

In Addition To The Lessons

One of the biggest benefits of Travel Blog Success though is the community behind it. Dave has done a good job of bringing in writers from some very successful travel blogs such as Vagabondish and the Indie Travel Podcast. The forums are also full of a wide range of travel bloggers and an excellent place to network, something that is a vital part of building a successful travel blog.

There is also an active travel blog on Travel Blog Success, podcasts and audio interviews, and access to Dave himself.

Travel Blog Success isn’t for casual travel bloggers but rather those looking to turn their websites into a business or take their blog to the next step. As for the cost there are two options, one for $29 per month for 3 months (a total of $87), or a one-time fee of $75. There is also a 60-day money back guarantee and compared to similar products the price is very reasonable for the blogging, SEO advice, and access to other bloggers you get.

Dave has developed two very successful travel blogs (both nominated for 2010 Bloggie Awards) GoBackpacking.com and MedellinLiving.com. I know the amount of effort Dave has put into creating Travel Blog Success and am confident it will be a thriving travel blogging community where most members (and their travel blogs) will benefit.

A Few Good Tweets For Travelers To Learn About Twitter

Anil P. — Fri, 15 Jan 2010 08:00:05 +0000

Several of you have been asking about how to use Twitter in relation with your travel blogs. I’d like to point you to some resources to get you going if you’re new to Twitter and to reexamine your tweeting habits if you aren’t the most appropriate way possible – in a series of tweets of 140 characters or less.

Get a copy of @AlmostFearless ‘s eBook Twitter For Travelers. You can read @TravelBlissful ‘s review to learn more.
As @Heathercowper suggests, ask yourself – why should anyone follow you on Twitter?
Read these 25 Twitter tips from other travelers. Check out the comments section too, lots of great discussion there.
Be personal and tweet about travel, other bloggers, and a *bit*about yourself.
Time your tweets well – morning in the US Eastern time is good for links/blog posts.
Use bit.ly to track clicks. You’ll be better able to see what tweets are more popular and why.
Consider TweetDeck – I didn’t like it at first but find it very useful. Also integrates with bit.ly.
Get over your fears and learn about StumbleUpon. Start the easiest way, tweet occasionally from su.pr.
Use Twitter to jump start your travel blog and harness the power of the tweetup.
Don’t over-think following people. Follow people you like and start slowly, you don’t want to be following 800 and only have 10 followers.

I’d also suggest taking a look to see how others are tweeting, but it’s important to establish your own style and routine. Make your tweets useful, interesting, and efficient and you can easily build up a nice following.

[photo by: futurowoman]

Using Twitter To Jump Start Your Travel Blog

Travel Bloggers (Including Myself) Set Their Goals For 2010

Anil P. — Fri, 01 Jan 2010 08:00:29 +0000

Yesterday on foXnoMad I took a look back on 2009 with other travel bloggers sharing their best posts of 2009. Today I’d like to take a look ahead to the year to come and the goals you’ve set for your travel blogs as well as some of my own.

Your Travel Blogging Goals For 2010

Stephanie (Twenty-Something Travel): Monetization is the biggest one; I’ve been blogging for about six months now and I think it’s time to get that ball rolling. Also, I really want to figure out how Stumbleupon works and how to use it to my advantage. Right now the whole thing just perplexes me.
Chris (Amateur Traveler): I intend to build a business around the Amateur Traveler this year. As I announced recently I am leaving my day job in a few weeks so this is the big experiment.
Sarah (She’s In Love With The World): My biggest goal is really just to keep up with my blog and get it off the ground and running. I want to maintain it while on the road and increase my readership, even though it just launched less than a month ago.

Carol Margolis has a good set of 5 specific goals for 2010 and Dave (GoBackpacking) entices use with the launch of his first digital product coming out in the first 3 months of 2010. That’s about the time Travels With Adam will begin his RTW trip.

Chris (The Aussie Nomad): The goal for my little blog is to gather a few readers and share the experience with them. Money and all the like is nice but really I’d just love to share the adventure and maybe meet a few fellow bloggers along the way.

My Personal Travel Blogging Goals For 2010

I break down my blogging and professional goals into 3 month segments with 2-3 longer 6 month goals so my first set of milestones will be this March. These are just a few of my goals for the upcoming year.

Continuing my blogging schedule. That’s 5 per week on foXnoMad, once per week for Travel Blog Advice and the Tech Guide For Travel, and once a month for How To Travel With Pets. I’ve been pretty good about this over the past year and hope to continue it through the next 3 months. After then I’ll consider expanding and updating some of the weekly sites more frequently.
Write another eBook. Creating my first eBook, Overcoming the 7 Major Obstacles To Traveling the World, was one of my proudest accomplishments. I write all the time but for some reason organizing and putting it into book format was very gratifying and I think it provided to be very useful content for people who want to travel the world (and overcome most fears for that matter). I hope to release my second eBook sometime by June.
More meet ups. I’m a bit shy and don’t take the opportunity to meet other travelers in person enough. I’ve enjoyed meeting other travelers on the road recently and hope to harness the power of the tweet up more in the coming year.
The usual suspects. I’ve got very specific RSS, page view, Google Pagerank, and the other common goals as well. I’m rather superstitious and don’t like to talk about details (until I’ve accomplished them). Overall I’d like to increase the numbers (who doesn’t) and have closer to 100% of my income come from my websites. (A goal I’m not too far off of on.)

Why Goals Are Important

Next week I’ll be talking more about how to set achievable goals for your travel blog. Well defined goals are critical for maintaining a travel blog for the long haul. I appreciate all of you sharing your goals for 2010 and wish you the best of luck. Hopefully Travel Blog Advice can be a part of that in the coming year.

[photos by: keylosa, brtsergio]

Using Twitter To Jump Start Your Travel Blog

Anil P. — Fri, 06 Nov 2009 08:00:42 +0000

Often travelers become at odds with their travel blog. Either you’re traveling and too busy to write or sometimes not traveling enough and get short on ideas. Twitter and the concept of tweets are a good way to energize your travel blog when you’re short on time or inspiration.

Micro-Posts

When I find myself slowing down and finding it difficult to post on my travel blog foXnoMad, instead of getting frustrated in trying to generate longer posts I do the opposite. Twitter is all about brevity and you can use it in several ways to create micro-posts to tide your site over and relieve stress. (Once the stress is gone the ideas will probably start flowing again.)

Create A Post Of Recent Tweets. Funny how when you’re facing writer’s block or have a short amount of time to get a post up you still manage to tweet several times before returning to your blank blog page. Use that material (including and good re-tweets) to make a short post of some travel-related tweets you’ve recently made. You’ll be able to give some useful links, highlight some other travel tweeters, and add a touch of personality to your travel blog.
Highlight an Interesting Discussion. There are often heated debates and open discussions between travel bloggers on Twitter. These conversations bring up interesting questions and points you can highlight for your readers (and doesn’t take much writing from you). Take some screen shots and setup a few lines before the post. An example is when I asked, is English the universal language back in May.
Twitter From The Road. Travel Sights With Lilliy has been posting tweets and pictures (using Twitpic) as she travels from the Middle East to the US. When you’re on the road you can do this using your iPhone/smart phone or have tweets automatically posted to your WordPress blog with Twitter Hack.
#followfriday. Make up some travel categories and highlight (in 140 characters or less) some great tweeps to follow. Again, you’re expanding a bit on what you are already posting on Twitter.
Pose A Question. This method is a bit more proactive than the others but you can easily pose a question for your followers. The responses should make for a good collection to post where hopefully the conversation will continue with more blog comments.

It’s important to keep to a weekly posting schedule which gets tough when you travel a lot or too little. Twitter is filled with good material for a quick post, and much of that is material you’re generating! Posting a series of micro-posts changes the pace of your travel blog which your readers will appreciate. Shorter posts where you let your ideas flow will also remove the burden of “I have to post something before my flight in an hour” and lead to less stress, more ideas and better writing in the long term.

[photos by: Mark Hamm]

A Few Good Tweets For Travelers To Learn About Twitter

How To Use Social Networks To Expand Your Travel Blog

Anil P. — Thu, 15 Oct 2009 20:00:02 +0000

Connecting with other travelers is essential if you want to expand your travel blog. Social networks give you the opportunity to get in touch with readers outside of your blog comments and as they (and hopefully you) are actively traveling. This article isn’t about any particular social network (if you’re interested in that check out the social networks every travel blogger should be using) but rather how to be someone worth connecting with.

You need to provide useful, topical, and some personal information to increase your online presence through social networks to directly and indirectly benefit your travel blog.

Establish Your Persona

Maintain the same identity across all of the social networks you belong to. Have the same name, similar profile pictures, and same voice across all of them. This helps to establish your personality with other travelers and across the Internet. Your personality is closely tied to your travel blog – that’s the reason people will continue to follow you.

People become attached to things they can identify with and social networks are where you can let your personality shine. Social networks are where you can show off a side of you that’s a bit more fun and real than you would on your travel blog.

Have A Purpose

Just like your travel blog needs direction, so do your social networking accounts. Travel bloggers need to Tweet, update their Facebook statuses, and Stumble generally travel-related material. Don’t let your social networks be the place where you rant about random events all the time or put vague messages like “blah today”.

Social networks are an extension of your travel blog and as such you need to stay on topic when possible. It’s important to not only maintain your identity across all of your social networking account but between your social network profiles and your travel blog. Think before you post and try to make everything count.

Make Them Part of Your Blogging Schedule

Hopefully you’ve established a travel blogging schedule for yourself and your posts. As soon as you join any social network however, you need to make time for it as well. Consider posting to your social networks as another regular blogging task. Update them on a consistent basis and don’t neglect any of the accounts you set up. Try and see what social networks work for you and get rid of the accounts that don’t.

If you’re constantly creating new profiles on different social networks but never updating them you’ll eventually lose the faith of your readers and the people that follow you there. It’s vital to establish some sort of flexible routine and some basic goals like ‘at least 2 tweets a day’.

Be Positive

Don’t trash talk anyone and rather than post negative things help highlight many of the good things that are going on in the travel industry, your travel blog, and in your personal life (that’s travel-related of course). Controversy is good to foster in your travel blog posts from time to time but you want to connect with other potential readers through the various social networks. The golden rule applies, if you don’t have something nice to say, don’t say it.

Remember that it goes both ways – be positive about others and they won’t write bad things about you.

Connect, Don’t Over-Promote

While it’s important to establish a strong identity and inject your personality into your social networking presence don’t get consumed by yourself. Don’t always write about yourself – there are other people on those social networks who you should be connecting with. Don’t get obsessed with drawing hits to your travel blog. It may work at first to bombard people with links to your latest posts but to increase your credibility online you need others to promote your material in the long run.

Promote and talk about all of the great things that other travel bloggers are posting and writing about. Not only will they reciprocate but you’ll ultimately be helping your own travel blog by getting new ideas, finding out what your peers are writing about, and understanding that you aren’t the only travel blogger out there.

Basics Not To Forget

Make it easy to contact you and reply to every personal message.
Have a link to your travel blog – almost all social networking tools have a place for urls.
Include a profile picture. The default picture won’t cut it and shows that you’re not serious about being social.

Take Your Time

Everything worth doing with your travel blog takes times and social networks are no different. Posting a flurry of updates only to realize your blog page views haven’t tripled and you don’t have a thousand followers shouldn’t discourage you and cause you to give up. In fact that’s the worst thing that you can do. Much like your travel blog people want to see that you’re in it for the long haul.

It will take time for people to see that you’re posting useful travel related material, talking about your peers, while getting to know a bit more about you at the same time. Plant the seeds of your travel blog in a few good places, be patient and persistent, and connect with as many like-minded people as you can and you’ll expand your travel blog for years to come.

[photo by: luc legay]

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