Establishing a travel blog can be very rewarding experience. It’s a process that tests the multi-tasking, business skills, writing abilities and technical skills of everyone who tries it.
While it’s an enjoyable sensation to get it right and to see visitors coming to your site, the road to get to this stage is often fraught with mistakes, surprises, and the constant urge to give up. Identifying these mistakes are is the first step to overcoming them.
Don’t make these three common mistakes when starting your travel blog.
3 Common Mistakes Travel Bloggers Make When Starting a Blog
1. Not Using a Scalable Platform
It can be hard for many new bloggers to picture the idea of having hundreds, or possibly thousands, of readers. From the start, it’s important to integrate email signup forms, social media connectivity, third-party extensions and many of the other features required for a blog at this level.
It may seem far off to have that level of readership, but when the time comes it will be a truly painful experience to try to upgrade. As your site becomes more successful, so, too, does the amount of work, and the increased workload makes it very difficult to find the time required to overhaul a website.
Once you have a successful site, it’s a laborious task to transfer all the media and content to a new platform. It can also mean you’ll need to change web hosting providers.
Fortunately, it’s easy for bloggers to start with a free CMS that will grow with their needs. WordPress powers over 37% of the internet and is the software of choice for many of the world’s largest sites. With many hosting companies offering one-click install of WordPress, it makes it easy for beginners to use the same software that the experts are using.
2. Using Cheap Hosting
Using cheap hosting can cause the slow death of a website. As one of the first costs that a new site owner will come across, many opt for the cheapest option as a means to keep overhead costs down.
Many of the pitfalls that come from cheap hosting include an unacceptable rate of server downtime, which will not only frustrate users but will lead to penalized search engine rankings. As many blogs rely on SEO as their primary form of traffic, low rankings are a pretty big problem!
There are lots of factors to consider when it comes to web hosting, but having a good support team is of utmost importance. Nearly all bloggers will at some point require the assistance of a support team member of their hosting company. Invest money upfront in a good web host so the support is there when you need it most.
Wanting to Give Up
This is possibly the most common problem for a new travel blogger.From the realization of just how much social media promotion is needed, how competitive SEO for the travel niche is, and the hassle of keeping the site up to date with regular content, it’s a given that you’ll want to give up at some point.
It’s crucial to learn to push through the failures, as success is often just around the corner. One of the biggest hurdles for new bloggers is that newly registered domains will be in the “Google sandbox” for three months, effectively negating any organic clickthroughs you might get, regardless of how well you have tweaked your SEO.
However, once this period has passed, you may see a surge in the number of visitors your site gets, assuming that you’ve optimized for SEO.
Remember: it’s important to stick it out and be disciplined, even when it’s not going perfectly. If you want the rainbow, you have to put up with the rain first.
TO HELP MANAGE & STAY ORGANIZED WITH YOUR BLOGGING ↓
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6 Comments
Thanks, I have been thinking about starting a travel blog, this has been very helpfu.
Glad we could help :) Feel free to reach out if you have any questions along the way.
this was short and sweet it helped me to skip the pit I might have fallen into
1-should I start a blog on blogger as it is free during my initial period?
Glad the post was helpful for you Yahiya. Re starting a blog on blogger, it depends what your goals are. If your goal is to make money blogging, or build a professional brand, I would skip blogger and start with your own domain straight away. Yes, you’ll have to pay for hosting and domain name registration, but it’s far easier to start out from the beginning than to try and change everything over to a new blog once you’ve been doing it for a year. And you lose things like your traffic history, ranking in search engines like Google for existing posts when you change to a new domain.
However if you’re blogging as a hobby blog, by all means, blogger is a great platform to use :)
Hope that helps!
The most common mistake is not choosing a niche that they’re interested it, instead choosing the category which makes money. It’s extremely important to get into a niche that they love writing about.
Also, another common mistake is not doing SEO for that blog. There are many more mistakes, however your article is also worth considering.
Absolutely Saad – being passionate about what you write about is so essential to ensuring longevity for your blog. Otherwise it’s all too easy to get bored with a topic and give up.
And SEO is a great tip; something I wish I had put time into from the start!
Glad you enjoyed the article, thankyou for commenting with your insights :)