How to be a Travel Writer

by Don George

  Having said that, there is a tried-and-tested formula for an effective blog post headline that will help you construct effective headlines:

  • Use a number, preferably an odd one, and not too big.

  • Or, use a trigger word like what, why, how or when.

  • Use an interesting or attention-grabbing adjectives.

  • Include at least one keyword.

  • Make a promise to your reader – what will they gain by reading this article?

  Using this formula, you might for instance come up with ‘9 unexpected ways to earn money when you travel’ or ‘How you can effortlessly earn money while travelling’.

  Calls to action

  Every copywriter knows that the ‘call to action’ is a vital piece of any online content. It’s an expression of what you want the reader to do next, as a result of reading your post. Do you want them to leave a comment below the article? Do you want them to sign up for your newsletter? Or perhaps you want to lead them to another post that they might be interested in?

  You must be clear in your own mind what the call to action is (there should only be one per post), express it clearly and simply, and make it achievable. If appropriate – say, if you’re promoting an affiliate product – you might want to offer an incentive. Many bloggers use ebook giveaways as an incentive for newsletter sign-up – it’s a great way to help build an email list, and you can often create the ebook easily by repackaging useful content you’ve already created for your blog.

  Non-travel travel writing

  Whatever your niche and your travel schedule, you may find it difficult to write about an on-the-ground travel experience each time you blog, even if you have a good backlog of material. There will be times when you’re at home between trips, and weeks where you’re staying still, recharging. How to keep your blog’s content fresh when you’re not traveling?

  Many travel bloggers get around this problem by having a good supply of non-travel subjects to blog about. These are posts that will be of interest to your travel-loving audience even if they aren’t directly connected to a travel experience. Lists of great films to watch or books to read, ‘how-to’ guides, trends connected to travel – think about your niche and brainstorm the kinds of things you could blog about, without leaving home. The more of this kind of writing your niche allows, the easier it will be for you to keep a consistent, regular posting schedule.

  As your blog matures, you’ll also benefit from having ‘evergreen’ content that that can be enhanced and improved, brought up to date, and re-posted. That means that you won’t have to write something brand new from scratch every time you post.

  Understanding SEO

  Over two million blog posts are published each day – and counting. If you want your blog to spread beyond your inner circle of friends and family, thinking a little about search engine optimization, or SEO, is step number one.

  SEO is the science/art of increasing the number of people who come to your website as a result of typing words into a search field (through organic, rather than paid, results). Because Google virtually own the market for search (over 90 percent of organic search results came through them at the time of writing), most SEO is focused squarely on them.

  The good news is, if your site is regularly updated, if you understand your audience and write clear, useful and informative content that’s targeted to their needs, you’re already doing a lot of SEO, naturally.

  SEO is a book unto itself, or rather, 1001 ebooks, all available online for free when you sign up to 1001 ‘how to blog’ newsletter lists. It’s a big, complex and ever-changing subject. Here we’ll give you a brief overview of two of the key elements to think about: keywords and links. When you’re ready to go deeper, online markers Moz publish a fantastically comprehensive beginners’ guide to SEO on their website at moz.com. (Plus, see chapter 7 for more of our favorite online experts.)

  Writer’s tip: Nine blog-writing tips you can’t ignore

  When you’re writing your blog (or indeed anything online), think of your reader, sitting at their computer/tablet/phone, with the pressure of literally millions of other things they could be reading instead pressing down on them at every moment. You need to grab, and keep, their attention. How do you stop them from clicking away?

  • Plan your post so it has a point, is well structured and builds toward a conclusion.

  • Hook them with the first sentence – pose a question they have to answer ‘yes’ to, ask an intriguing question, say something unexpected, make a bold claim or promise – find a way to grab your reader’s attention.

  • Keep your style conversational – sound like someone they’re sitting down having a coffee with.

  • Write for scanners – short sharp paragraphs, broken up with headings and short sentences.

  • Lists are easily digestible at a glance – there’s a reason they’re everywhere online. Can you structure your post as a list?

  • Make your post unique – it’s hard to find new subjects, but you can always find a new angle.

  • Photos are vital – at least one for each blog, ideally your own, and ideally stunning.

  • Be you. Relatability, sincerity and authenticity are the gold dust of blogs. Find your authentic voice – it might take a while, but your audience will respond.

  • Don’t be afraid to try things out – play, experiment, and learn from the results.

  Writer’s tip: White hat vs black hat SEO

  Not all SEO is created equal. What’s known as ‘black hat SEO’ uses deceptive tactics to attempt to trick the algorithms into a better ranking: keyword stuffing (overusing keywords) or using invisible text to include lists of keywords that only the spiders will see, posting the same content in numerous places to increase keyword count, and ‘link farming’ – trading links with other black hat websites.

  ‘White hat SEO’ strategies revolve around creating clear, well written content of high relevance, building a genuinely engaged community and promoting your website to relevant people in a personal way. Bloggers who know their audience well and are using site metrics to closely target their content are white hat SEO naturals.

  How search works

  At the moment of writing, Google was performing 40,000 searches per second. By now, that has already increased. The algorithms Google uses to search and rank the web’s 60 trillion (also growing by the day) pages are constantly upgraded and changed. The latest SEO best practice has to keep up with Google’s famously secretive engineers as they continuously tweak their formulas. The SEO landscape is constantly changing, and if you’re serious about blogging you need to keep up to date with the latest thinking.

  In a nutshell, Google uses ‘spiders’ to navigate the web by crawling from link to link. The pages it finds are sorted by their content and other factors, and organized into Google’s index. For each search, Google uses algorithms to decide which pages in its index are relevant to the search, and rank them, using over 200 factors, some of the most important being:

  • How many times does the page contain the search keywords?

  • Do the words appear in the title? The URL? Directly adjacent?

  • Does the page include synonyms for those words?

  • What is the page’s PageRank? The PageRank algorithm counts the number and quality of links to a page to determine how important the website is, on the basis that more important websites are likely to receive more links from other websites.

  These formulas produce each page’s overall score, which determines where it will rank in the search results. When you figure that the first five results get around 70 percent of the clicks, you start to see why SEO is the holy grail of online success. SEO pros joke: Where’s the best place to hide a dead body? On the second page of Google’s search results. If you’re not on that first page, you might as well not exist.

  Using keywords

  Now that you know how important keywords are to getting good search results, what’s the next step?
Discovering what keywords you should focus on to make sure your audience finds you. Keyword research is vital if you want to optimize your content for SEO.

  You can do this in a few basic steps, and you should do it before you start blogging, if you want your blog to go places. It might be time-consuming, but will help you immensely down the track as you plan your content strategy, build an editorial calendar and think about monetizing your blog.

  1. List the 5–10 broad topics you blog about most frequently and that you want to build an audience around.

  2. Underneath those topics, brainstorm the specific keywords and keyword phrases that you think your audience will be searching for.

  3. Google your keywords and see what related search terms are suggested at the bottom of the page – should these be incorporated into your list?

  4. Make sure you have a good mix of ‘head’ keywords (popular keywords with high search volume) and ‘long-tail’ keywords (longer, more specific phrases). While more people search head keywords, long-tail searches will deliver well-targeted clicks – readers who want exactly what you’re serving up. It will be hard to rank for ‘travel’, but the targeted traffic you’ll get from ‘budget travel in Greece with children’ will generally be more valuable.

  5. See how your competitors are ranking for these keywords, either by Googling incognito or using a tool like SEMrush.

  There are lots of tools out there to help you, depending on how deeply you want to get into it and how much you’re prepared to outlay. Google’s AdWords Keyword Planner tool is a common starting point, suggesting keywords and providing estimated search volume, as well as predicting the cost of running paid campaigns for these terms. Moz have a custom-built Keyword Explorer that helps improve keyword discovery and prioritization – it cuts out a lot of manual work and it’s free to try, so worth giving a go.

  A blogger’s view: Pam Mandel

  Pam Mandel is a travel writer whose work has been published in AFAR, the San Francisco Chronicle, Condé Nast Traveler, Lonely Planet and many other places. She started blogging in 1997. Find her at www.nerdseyeview.com.

  I didn’t start my blog as a portfolio site, but now, it’s very much a portfolio site and a place to work out ideas. It does bring me writing gigs, I’ve been hired more than once by folks who said, ‘I love your blog and your style’. That’s the best.

  I’ve been blogging for nearly 20 years (!!!) and many things came to me simply because I existed as a blogger. Now that everyone’s got a blog many of those offers have dried up. I’m opinionated, and most brands like a blogger who will reflect their message; I’m a risk. So the things that came to me when I started, like all that coveted ‘free travel’, has diminished considerably over time.

  I blog when I feel like it. This runs counter to so much advice you’ll see, but if I don’t feel like posting, I don’t. I’ve posted once a month, I’ve posted five times a week, it just depends. I can tell when a blogger is phoning it in to keep a site on life support, but that’s how you lose readers. As for keeping it fresh, well, writing when you’ve genuinely got something to say does that by default.

  Well-researched, fact-checked, insightful work is not common, and hiring editors will notice that you’ve bothered. So many blogs fall back on the ‘what I did on my summer vacation/funded junket’ model, and they provide zero practical information or insight. How much does this cost? How do you get around? Why are things this way?

  We love it when we come across a great travel storyteller, someone who takes us with them on the journey, does more than make us wish we were there. Pick a well-known travel blogger at random, read the post, and ask yourself, ‘Who is this post written for? What does this post do? Did I learn something useful or feel anything but FOMO?’ Writers who help us experience a place from our screen have our loyalty. And we love it when we get great, actionable advice, things that help us save money or have an exceptional experience. Great travel writing benefits the reader in some way.

  I went to Antarctica to blog for a tour operator, I got to interview (and play music) with Chris Hadfield, the Canadian astronaut and social media phenomenon, I’ve been invited to teach and speak, a tourism board hired me to write their website for them. And that’s before we hit the social benefits – I have made so many wonderful friends around the world simply because we read each other’s stuff.

  Because I’ve been blogging for so long, I really do know who reads my blog. Marilyn, who used to live in the British Virgin Islands, then California, and now, Montana. Sal, who was once an expat in Spain, and now lives in Chicago. Doug, an author of two travel books. I can do this all day. My readers aren’t a mass, they’re people with names.

  I still think back to that time – it must be 15 years ago now – I got on a plane and flew to Antwerp to spend a weekend with Di (an expat from New Zealand) and her Belgian husband Gert. It’s the first time I packed up to spend time with a complete stranger. I’ve done this dozens of times since, gone to spend time with ‘strangers from the internet’ and every time, it’s been a complete delight. I cannot overstate the value of being able to make meaningful connections with people all over the world. That’s why we travel, right?

  Link building

  To decide how your page ranks, search engines are not only looking at its content, but the links pointing to it – both the number of external websites linking to it, and the quality of those sites. When a link points to a page, it’s passing some of its authority, or ‘link juice’ to that page. So, the more high-quality websites that link to you, the more likely you are to rank well in search results.

  Link building is the process of acquiring new links to your site from external sites. It involves a mixture of marketing the content you’ve created to the online world, and building relationships with other bloggers and webmasters.

  It’s worth mentioning that there are links and links. Building low-quality links will not improve your ranking, and worse, can aggressively harm it as Google continually tweaks its algorithms against these kinds of black-hat tactics. Avoid links from sites that Google considers to be engaging in link schemes – these might be ‘link farms’ (sites that engage heavily in reciprocal linking), sites that contain a lot of spam comments or that are in a very spammy niche such as gambling.

  The best kinds of links are natural links – links you don’t actively pursue, but are freely given when someone finds a piece of your content that they like so much they want to link to it. Of course, the best way to get these links is to concentrate on the quality of your content, but you can take it a step further by experimenting with ‘linkable assets’ – pieces of content created for the purpose of attracting links. This might be something like an infographic, a how-to guide, a video or image gallery.

  These types of content can be easier to market and create excitement about when you carry out an outreach campaign – the way you’re likely to obtain most of your links. This is getting in touch with other bloggers and website owners and simply asking them if they will link to your content. It’s similar to the rules of pitching a travel article – you should be clear about why each of them would be interested in your content, and be able to demonstrate that you understand their website and their audience. When you contact them, it’s important that you tell them why they should care about you and your content, show that you’re genuine and not a spammer, and tell them what action you’d like them to take. Use their name, refer to something specific about their content and show how your content appeals to their audience. And remember – these are relationships you want to build and foster, not one-off communications.

  Writer’s tip: Using keywords well

  If you’re writing appealing, useful content that’s mindful of keywords and above all seeks to address the needs of your audience, you’re improving your chances of ranking well. But here are a couple of extra tricks to make sure you’re not missing any opportunities to make search work for you:

  • Try to make sure that you include keyw
ords in your blog headlines.

  • Optimize your URLs so they’re search-friendly: www.crazybudgettravel.com/budget-greece/athens-on-ten-dollars-a-day is better than www.crazybudgettravel.com/77329/s507.htm.

  • Include ALT tags for images – good for accessibility as well as an opportunity to emphasize keywords.

  • Caption your images with relevant keywords.

  Social sharing

  The effect of social signals like Facebook likes and Twitter follows on search rankings is one of the hottest topics in SEO-land. Google have said (as of the time of writing) that these signals, although they can be seen to indicate authority and influence, do not affect search rankings.

  That’s not to say that they’re not important. Just because Google says that these signals don’t currently impact search rankings doesn’t mean they never will – social is not going away as a vital force online and search engines like Google constantly review how they work to ensure that quality content is recognized.

  Social sharing brings traffic to a page and directly increases its visibility. More people visiting your content makes it more likely that it will be noticed and linked to by another blogger, journalist, or author, earning you more precious link juice. So even if there is not a direct link between social shares and ranking, the indirect benefit of getting your content out there in front of more sets of eyes increases its likelihood of ranking.