Blog Your Long-Term Trip - Advice from the Experts

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:

Asking my community on other social networks to follow us on Instagram.
Having frequent, predictable updates.
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.

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.