Jeremy

Jeremy founded Living the Dream in 2008 to chronicle his long-term trip around Asia. Since then he has been on two long-term trips, visited 69 countries, and is just getting started. He is now on a Lifestyle Design quest to build businesses to pursue a life of travel.

Blogger vs WordPress – Tips for Starting Your Blog

Blogger Homepage

Deciding to start a travel blog for your long-term trip is a big one. Whether you blog to keep friends and family updated, or open a site to run professionally, blogging your journey adds a new assortment of topics you must plan for in addition to your every day travels.

Our Blog Your Trip series is designed to help answer these questions and give you travel blogging ideas as well as the tools to run a successful blog through giving away all of our own secrets!  

But before we get to that, we have to start at the beginning. To start, we have to ask one of the first questions you may find yourself facing: where are you going to blog? And the answer goes a bit deeper than simply asking Blogger vs WordPress.

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Picking the Right Travel Blog Name is the Hardest Part

Travel Blog Names

What is in a name?  Well, if you are talking about the name of a blog, probably a lot.

The problem with a blog name is that it is the first piece of information a potential reader sees on your site. There is no single element that is more reflective of your travel blog idea than a name, and any connotations that arise from that name will stick with potential readers for a very long time- and may even influence whether they open your page at all!

If your name talks about you being broke, you're probably not going to attract luxury travelers or sponsors. If you brand yourself as a party addict, those who don't party may not open up your page.

This trend can extend to any name or theme, so being careful with your choice before registering a domain is very important!

So what can you do to come up with a great name and niche for your new travel blog? Today we cover a few of our best tips to consider on this important topic.

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Instagram Travel Hashtags – Which Ones are Worth It?

Instagram Update Standard

I was a late adopter of Instagram. Where I spent years amassing a large following on the other social media networks through social advertising, my foray into this network did not begin until September 2014 when I finally purchased my first smartphone.

By most standards I consider my growth on Instagram to be rapid. In just 100-days I had a following of 500 and an engagement rate of 5-10% depending on the update (which does not happen as much on other social networks). The next month after that my following grew by a further 50%.

I attribute this growth and engagement to three main travel Instagram strategies:

  1. Asking my community on other social networks to follow us on Instagram.
  2. Having frequent, predictable updates.
  3. Participating in popular hashtags.

In this article I want to ignore the first two topics, and instead focus on the third: participation in popular Instagram tags. This is something many of the top Instagrammers have noted as being one of the keys to their success, and I made it my quest to figure out why that is.

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6 Lessons from Our Blogger to WordPress Migration

Migration Google Pageviews Bombshell: After migrating from Blogger to WordPress, I saw exactly zero loss of referrals from search engines.  On the contrary, my page views actually went up 25% on Day 1 when compared to the same day in previous weeks. It's definitely not going viral, but I'll take that!

After speaking to several bloggers about migrating from Blogger to WordPress, the common fear was that search engine rankings would go down for a while until your blog gets re-indexed.

Thinking about it, this fear is warranted.

If you do not migrate links properly, your high ranking pages could generate 404 hits and may get removed from search engines. Their “link juice” will not cascade through your site and may negatively impact the ranking of lesser pages that are correct. While good sites will recover in time, there is a fear over just how long this will be. (And even the best SEO keyword usage won't save you.)

I'm happy to report that if you do it right, you will not face this issue. Even though I hired a web developer to assist with the change-over, there were still several issues that needed to be dealt with.

Today I'm going to highlight the important tasks I did that saved me from losing substantial traffic that others have frequently reported when migrating.

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