5 Travel Blog Content Tips from Successful Travel Website TheBetterVacation.com
For people who love to travel, write, and share their experiences, creating a travel blog can be a perfect synthesis of all these interests – and a way to make money while following your passion. But for your travel blog content to be profitable, and discoverable, you need a tactical approach beyond just writing about what you love.
In a conversation with Tiqets, Jamshed Velayuda Rajan, founder of TheBetterVacation.com, shared his own successful approach to travel blog content, and how he manages that content to get his blog on the radars of travelers. While Rajan started his site out of a simple desire to share travel knowledge, he’s been able to build a team around the project and turn it into a viable business.
Founder of TheBetterVacation.com
Travel blogging is one of the highest-paying blogging niches out there, and your travel blog, too, has the potential to become a real business, once you understand what to write in your travel blog and where to apply your focus. Rajan says, “In the last three years, we’ve helped a lot of travelers have a better vacation, and in the process, we’ve learned a lot.
In his first piece of advice, Rajan talked about where not to focus at first.
Travel blog content tip 1: Focus on content, not branding
While branding gets a lot of buzz in the world of startups, when it comes to a travel blog, good content will always give you more for your effort than resources directed at raising the profile of your brand. As Rajan says, “If you’re just starting out, you don’t need to spend time on branding, because with the limited resources you have, you won’t achieve much. Instead, spend all your energy on good content, which will result in users and sales – and, eventually, branding.”
When people read travel blogs, it’s often in the planning stages of their travel adventures. Where travelers used to turn to travel agents for both advice and logistics, they can now get both online. With online travel agent websites (OTAs), they can easily purchase airline tickets, book hotel rooms, and reserve tickets for events and attractions. But to know where they want to go, and what they want to do there, they rely on the advice of peers.
Your travel blog content could make all the difference in someone's trip planning, and the more content you have, the more choices you give them. Content, by the way, does not only include what you choose to write about. Photographs and videos are an important component of any travel blog. So if you’re deciding where to invest your small budget, a decent camera or a professional videographer might be a wise choice.
Travel blog content tip 2: Differentiate your blog with your subject matter
Photo by Alex Paganelli on Unsplash
According to Rajan, 75% of tourists that step outside their homes go to just the top 50 cities in the world. For that reason, most travel bloggers tend to write about those cities. But, as he explains, “When all the bloggers focus on those 50 cities, it gets very competitive and muddy – and almost impossible to make a living out of. So why not target different cities where the other 25% are going?”
Bangkok, Paris, London, Dubai, and Singapore are some of the most visited cities every year. But there are some compelling contenders that don’t make it into the top 50 by most metrics, including Hanoi, Jakarta, St. Petersburg, Brussels, Jerusalem, Budapest, and, Lisbon – all fascinating places with rich history and culture.
Even within a highly popular city there’s an opportunity to differentiate your travel blog from the fray with other travel post ideas. Most travel bloggers focus on the top attractions, and that makes sense: According to Rajan, 80% of tourists stick to those top five attractions in a city. Let's take Rome as an example. According to Rome.net, the top five attractions would be the Colosseum, the Roman Forum, the Piazza Navona, the Trevi Fountain, and St. Peter’s Square in the Vatican. But what about the Gladiator School? The Catacombs? “These are easily available opportunities we can latch onto,” says Rajan.
Travel blog content tip 3: Help travelers make up their minds
Travelers have a lot of choices, and it’s easy to be torn between two or more options. “Should we visit the Empire State Building? Or the One World Observatory?” Rajan advises, “If you can serve to help travelers decide, you have a winner in your travel blog.” Be that voice of authority and expertise that breaks the spell of indecision.
Sometimes, too, travelers are looking to maximize their tourism time by going two places in one day — Herculaneum and Pompei, for example, are two experiences people offer search together. A useful format of travel content is advice about which experiences work best in tandem, and how to get from one place to another in the most efficient way. As Rajan puts it, “Not the way Google Maps wants you to, but the way actual human beings like.”
If your research – both quantitative and anecdotal – tells you that travelers often visit Sagrada Familia in the morning and Park Guell in the afternoon, write about the best way to get from A to B – and where to stop for lunch in between. TheBetterVacation did this, and has held a strong spot in the top three search results for three years as a result.
Travel blog content tip 4: Game the system
While you got into this to write about a subject you’re passionate about, high-quality writing and groovy subject matter are only half the battle when it comes to monetizing a travel blog and building up a brand. Yes, that was the thing we said not to focus on, but eventually, you do want to get there, right?
Regardless, you want people to find your blog and read it, so search engine optimization, or SEO, is a critical effort. The “game” here is to get people to find your site, then stay on it and fall in love with it.
One of the most widely accepted SEO techniques for travel blogs and all kinds of websites is to link like content together in a “content hub” – a collection of similar content within a website. For instance, you might have a content hub about Barcelona, or a content hub about art museums in Japan. A visitor finds one page with a search, and because the articles are interlinked, is easily able to cruise from one article to the next within your site, getting deeper into the research rabbit hole about a destination or travel theme. This action triggers what Rajan calls “the positive loop,” because when people spend more time on your blog, search engines notice, and ultimately rank your site higher as it is deemed more “popular.”
There are plenty of other SEO techniques available to travel blogs, too. For instance, keyword tools such as Google AdWords can help you discover which keywords are most popular so that you can sprinkle them throughout your posts or, even better, create content intentions based on those keywords.
Travel blog content tip 5: Never abandon your content
One of the biggest mistakes travel bloggers make, according to Rajan, is to pump out endless content without ever revisiting it again. At TheBetterVacation.com, his team takes a very intentional approach to cataloging and continuously measuring existing content. They bucket published travel content into three specific categories:
- Content stars – the top 10% of blog posts that perform the best, meaning they see the most traffic.
- Potential stars – 20% of content that isn’t quite there yet in terms of performance, but has potential to get there.
- Question marks – the remaining 70% of content, often content that is either new or struggling to rank because it’s on such a competitive subject matter.
With this ranking system, the team can focus on improving the ranking of existing content so they’re not constantly having to write new stuff to get on the radar of search engines and, thus, travelers. Rajan describes a strategic approach to bumping up the status of potential star content: “We are always trying different tricks to get those potential stars into the stars category. First of all, we check the rankings (mainly page views) every fortnight to see if progress has been made.”
For star content, though, they’re on high alert, checking site traffic, search queries, number of transactions, and affiliate links, every single day to see if anything has changed or could be improved. The goal is to keep star content in a starring role and move additional potential stars into that top tier. The “question mark” content gets far less attention.
The website’s team also pays strict attention to Google’s ranking rules. If there are changes to algorithms and rules, they plug into them in order to keep content ranking as high as possible.
The right priorities for travel blog content
At the end of the day, Rajan says, “Management of content is far more important than creation of content.” But of course, as a new travel blog, you have to create that content before you can manage it. With his first three pieces of advice, you’re on your way to creating more and better travel content. With the last two, you capitalize on your library of content and focus on getting it out in front of real readers.