8 tips to help you become a super travel blogger from scratch (For Bing)

This is an email I sent to my friend Bing. He is starting a blog about his adventures in Brazil and it's much better than this blog. He's a much better writer than me but doesn’t have many readers. (Check out Bristol to Brazil) Since my blog gets hits in the tens of thousands, (and I'm a very lazy blogger who hardly even follows his own advice) I thought I'd help him out. It's all good stuff so I thought I'd publish it here. Tell me what you think? Perhaps I missed something out or I'm wrong about something. Leave a comment.

My friend James George Constantine Crofts (Aka Bing) in Matipo, Brazil. His writing is much better than mine. These tips are for him but might help you too...

Dear Bing,

I sincerely apologise for missing our appointment, I called you at 8pm your time but clearly you were busy and at 9pm I was being sick as I drank too much beer. As an apology, I am going to give you a step by step guide on how to improve your blog.

Step 1:

Think of a name for your blog.

This doesn’t have to be anything clever, just something to differentiate you from the crowd of bloggers. My blog is Sammy's Generic Travel Blog, if you google that, you'll find me and it describes my blog perfectly, it's about travel and it's rather generic considering the amount of travel blogs out there. Make sure your blogs name identifies what your blog is about so people aren’t disappointed when they visit. Bristol to Brazil is okay for describing what your blog is about, however, if I google it I'm overwhelmed by flight comparison websites. You might want to consider changing it. Jimvlog is unique, but it tells me nothing about what you're going to be talking about.

Step 2:

Get Registering.

Register a website, I would get a .com for ease although it's not really that important, as long as it's memorable for family, friends and fans. Most people will find your website via incoming links and search engines anyway. Make sure the server you register with supports wordpress, you'll need it later! Don't get stuck on tumbr or blogspot like I did, it really limits you and people won't take you quite as seriously which is fair as I don't take myself very seriously.

Step 3:

Twitter

Twitter will be instrumental for driving traffic to your site. Get yourself a twitter handle linked to what you do or your blogs name. I'm travelpoop as I write about travel and the quality of my writing can be compared to poop. Maybe you can be less derogatory about yourself as it's not really helpful for anyone. Spend time thinking about your twitter description. Your description will be what attracts people to follow you.  My description is:

"Round the World Traveller, Travel Writer and Blogger. Editor at the World in Motion Magazine. Vagabonding from China to the UK Overland. Writing my 1st Book!"

It makes me seem like a real douche bag but it gets followers and explains what the blog is about. 

Then you need to start following people similar to you, once you follow them, they might follow you back. Unfollow the ones who don't follow you and build a base gradually, if you keep it up you can get thousands of followers this way. I've stopped at 2000 because I'm too busy with work and it can be quite time consuming. Also tweeting interesting stuff helps attract followers.

Join a community and participate. #TTOT is the travel community, search for it and ask when is #TTOT, someone will tell you. Then you can have fun discussing travel stuff and make lots of new friends, networking is important when running a blog for link building purposes, I don't do this much as, again, I'm so busy with work.

Step 4:

Make your website

Install wordpress onto your site, this will be easy if you choose a good host. Choose a template and customise it. You'll need to get you hands dirty with a bit of code, I wont go into this here because I'm no expert and it will take all day, but there's a lot of info out there. This can be quite difficult but not impossible for a novice. Set aside a day or two for it and you'll be fine, the template will do nearly all the work for you anyway.

Step 5:

Content

Fill your website with wonderful, funny, original, interesting, captivating content. This is where I fail, but you're a much better writer than me! Use interesting pictures, tag your pictures, tag all your posts, don't be afraid to be very specific. A tag like "teaching english in Matipo Brazil" is better than "Brazil" Teach" "English". I made that mistake. This way, people who find your blog will really want to be there and could come back.

Build your following on Youtube, your videos are great, lots of people will be interested in them.

Your content should be original, so you need to get rid of the same content on another platform like tumblr as it will hurt your search rankings.

Step 6:

Getting links.

Your blog needs incoming links. Link all your social media accounts to your blog. These are usually no follow links so they wont help your search rank but they will make your blog easier to find for friends and followers. To get some incoming links, these links are crawled by search engines and are considered in the rankings, the more natural ones the better. If you just pay for 10,000, google will suss you out and put you to the bottom as punishment. To get links, add your blog to blog ranking websites, good directories, nominate yourself for blogging prizes and comment on other blogs as you can usually leave a link next to your name.

Also ask other bloggers if you can guest post on their site and include a link to yours. It's good for both of you as your giving the great content and their readers will no doubt like your site too, especially if you've written a great guest post. Remember, the more links you make naturally like this, the better.

Step 7:

Turn twitter into an automaton.

You need to keep directing people to your content via twitter, you cant tweet constantly, it's impossible. Go to ifttt.com and set up and account. Set up some automatic tweets which happen at timed intervals automatically. Don't do this too much as it pisses people off but you need to keep links to your content out there. The more content you have the better as people don't like seeing the same tweet over and over again. Never post the same tweet more than once a day and keep tweets on average less than one an hour otherwise it just gets silly.

Doing this will significantly boost your readership.

Step 8:

Keep it up! Building a great blog takes time!