In response to last week's newsletter titled "Is Food Tourism making a comeback?"
Food tourism has always been a part of the travel experience and it's not new.
Since 2015, I have been writing about local and authentic food experiences on Authentic Food Quest, a food and travel website I co-founded at www.authenticfoodquest.com
The goal has always been and continues to be about inspiring people to seek out local food and culinary activities on their travels. We share content about cooking classes, food and wine tours, recipes of emblematic dishes all aimed at helping people experience local culture through food.
Since the pandemic and also keeping with the rise in travel, we've seen an increased consumption in our content. And, when traveling and participating in various culinary activities around the world, we see more people and a higher interest in learning about local foods and drinks.
The key is not to make food tourism a "passing fad." The plat du jour that will be replac...
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Hey, I'm Ben and I wanted to start a discussion about what people to do attract more readers to their blog.
I run a travel blog ( www.thetravelpocketguide.com ) , and we've seen various success through different advertising channels and strategies. I thought it would be both thought provoking and beneficial to share what's worked best for our blog, and see what other people think is the best way to getting your travel blogging content seen by more people!
How do you promote your travels blogs and what works best?
Here's what strategies I've implemented:
1. Facebook groups
Not only am I posting content to other groups but I've created my own two travel groups to grow our own community and future distribution network. Of course, when sharing content to other groups you must follow the group rules and make sure the content is relevant. My two groups are called Beach Holidays, and the other is called City Breaks. I thought the beach focused group would be more appealing, but it's the City Breaks group which is growing fast (400 new members per week!):
• City Breaks FB group: facebook.com/groups/CityBreaks/
• Beach Holidays FB group: facebook.com/groups/BeachHolidaysGroup/
2. Google SEO / Keywords
We've seen some fantastic results simply by using good keywords, meta descriptions, good titles and using Alt tags on images. By following the SEO friendly best practice for formatting articles and using relevant keywords, we're finding our content appearing high up on Google.
3. Tailored social content and partnerships
Tweaking the content per social platform is certainly beneficial. Even using sites such as LinkedIn is a great way to drive more traffic. We've interviewed professional people in the travel niche and they often share content which is great :) Take for example my interviews with "Vanessa Ruck - The Girl On A Bike", a motorcycle lover who travels around the world pursuing her passion, or TV presenter Laura Hamilton — they both shared our content to their audiences helping to reach more people, links below:
• Vanessa Ruck: thetravelpocketguide.com/news/vanessa-ruck-the-girl-on-a-bike/
• Laura Hamilton: thetravelpocketguide.com/news/laura-hamilton-best-hotels-relocation/
These are just a few examples of what I'm focusing on with my team and are simple and effective to implement.
Good content will always win in my opinion, but if there's no solid strategy then you will certainly be limiting your potential reach.
👉 What works best for you? Share your ideas and thoughts!
Great topic and one that makes me reflect on my own experiences with travel writing. My blog started with the aim of promoting my hyper-local trail guides for those with mobility challenges (like me). I am still tweaking the ways I get folks to sign up to follow my blog and/or subscribe to my newsletter. I also have a facebook group that has hit nearly 13,000 members (Easy Walks, Massachusetts, RI and beyond). I post new blogs there whenever I write another post, which has brought more traffic to my website. As an aside--I also post a tagline at the bottom of each post with links to all my Easy Walks books. Hope this is helpful. Happy trails.
Thank you for going to the effort to share your thoughts and experiences. Sounds like you're doing a great job, and kudos for the nice 13k strong FB group! Another idea that sprung to mind is taking advantage of the FB group rules. You can for example ask members to visit your site, or make the message less intrusive by simply raising awareness of it, in the group rules section, which they see before joining it.
Another idea is to create a pop up from your website to let people know about your FB group. Maybe you've already don't both (or don't want to). But just a couple of extra suggestions :)
Thanks so much for additional ideas. I have FB group rules posted, and it's a great idea (and not intrusive) to invite folks to visit my blog. I'll have to go check what's there. Not something I check regularly. I do on occasion remind folks of my publications but it probably is not a bad practice to pick a schedule to remind folks, since we get new members, and many people miss the posts I do share about the books. Thanks again!
Ben - What kinds of posts are you making in your CityBreaks group? How do you keep your members engaged?
Creating your own Facebook group is a good idea. I have had a hard time finding good groups on Facebook that actually let you post relevant links.
Great question, it’s always an interesting one because there’s so much internet out there for all of us. I’ve seen people all kinds of strategies. I run a travel blog (viatravelers.com).
We mainly focus on SEO which drives 80% of our traffic. For me SEO means filling content gaps and building content clusters around where myself or my writers have personally been.
Then, we also use Quora and Facebook groups to interact with our audience and make sure our content gets seen.
Harvesting a newsletter through lead magnets is still incredibly important. Right now we only get 25-45 email opt ins per day. Would love to see that double in the next couple of months. Our email subscribers then go through a series of travel tips and related emails to guide them on their journey to explore more of the world. These are some of our top pages that we send them.
I’ve used Pinterest in the past but lately its been very hard to gain additional traction.
Video is huge for the site particularly on YouTube and hosting videos through Mediavine. The latter drives more traffic to our site. We do a lot of video because it’s likely all stuff I’ve personally captured and it starts an easy workflow for us to repurpose the content in a variety of ways.
Hi Kyle,
My audience is adults over 50. I profile seniors with positive attitudes towards aging, including travel adventures. I checked out Quora to find out what questions they were asking, and what information they are looking for. How do I connect that to my blog (www.superbubbie.ca)? Should I put content on my blog that answers their questions (e.g., what is one thing you find amazing about getting old?), and put in a link on Quora to the response? I am also using Facebook, Instagram and Linkedin. Thanks and have a great day!
Thanks for the tips. I'm a freelance travel writer, writing mostly for outside publications, and I have a blog that I"m trying to build. I'm trying to find the audience and plan to take a SEO workshop to learn more. Now when I post a new blog, I post it on my social media groups, but I don't get traffic to my site. I do have pop ups for my social media to encourage people to follow, but it's been slow!! Any other ideas would be helpful. Thanks!
I promote across all my social media. FB, Twitter, Pinterest, IG. Which seems to be doing ok. It's really hard to break out with so many people doing the same.