Blog Your Trip

When Considering Niche Ideas, Don’t Forget the SEO!

There is a lot of talk in the blogging circuit on finding the right niche idea, and there are any number of analyses out there as to why niche building is important.

We thoroughly agree with this point, and rather than rewrite the same article a thousand times over (a huge pet peeve of mine), we want to look at niche building a different way.

You see, everyone looks at niche website building as a way to stand out from the crowd and capture an audience- which is true. But we also look at it from a completely different perspective. We look at it as our ability to create content that is 100% relevant to our niche, such that users (and Google) can quickly understand how all of our posts are connected.

If you pick your niche appropriately, a wealth of traffic is available. Today we're going to visually show why we think that is while using our travel blogs as an example.

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When Generating Newsletter Ideas, Consider Increasing Frequency

When it comes to running my blog, I'm normally the first person to ignore conventional wisdom- which at times can be a good thing or a bad thing. No matter the results, the reasons behind my choices are always pretty simple.

  • First, most of the time what the majority believes is a “best practice” is flat out wrong and, even worse, is based on no data whatsoever. As an engineer I hate that even if the tips are true in a roundabout way.
  • Second, hardly anything is repeatable, making even the most encouraging tip worthless as it is often only valuable to the person who wrote it (and like in the above point, may not be the exact reason they got to their result in the first place).

It is because of these reasons that I'm all for going against traditional wisdom to try something to help out my blogs- especially if I can get repeatable results out of it for others to benefit from!

Why is this preface important? Enter our newsletter- one of the biggest features of our sites we now go against all conventional wisdom on.

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Travel Instagram Strategies to Take Your Profile to the Next Level

For those who don't know me, you should know that I am an engineer as well as a travel blogger- which at times is a very dangerous combination. When I try out something new to help my brand grow, I put together a test and log everything so I can get to the real reason for why something works. (We then write about it in our Blog Your Trip series to share it with you).

Over the past year I've been conducting many successful Instagram tests, and they've been picking up in popularity thanks to this social network's continued rise in prominence.

As I've had some time to reflect on our most recent tests (find the one on Instagram hash-tags and the one on gaining targeted Instagram followers here), I need to tweak some of the recommendations I wrote about in those posts to form our game plan moving forward.

So, before reading any further, I highly recommend you read through both of those first. Finished? Good, let's recap.

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Test Results for How to Get More Instagram Followers and Likes

It is a sad day in the world of social media and social media advertising when brand credibility and effectiveness is measured by the number of followers you have and not the type of niche website content you publish and who it is going to.

This phenomenon is especially true on Instagram because the service is so locked down that you really can only measure two things when sharing your account: the number of followers you have and the number of likes you receive on any given photo (which is highly dependent on the amount of followers you have in the first place).

In not being able to effectively measure who makes up your blog traffic, there is a veritable arms race to get more Instagram followers and likes at any cost.

For many years we stayed away from Instagram for reasons similar to this, but it wasn't until we really put social media as a primary focus with our sites that we decided to open an account.  That was in 2013, and over the subsequent year-and-a-half we grew to a decently sized 1,800 followers with a long period of stagnated growth.  We knew we had to take a step back and find out what we were missing, and a test for our Blog Your Trip series was born.

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