The Panamanian Rainforest, a familiar sight for the travel bloggers living in Panama’s Kalu Yala village.
Tips For The Conscientious Travel Blogger
Over the past decade, travel blogging has grown and experts attribute this growth to the availability of learning resources that new bloggers can use to start off. But even with these resources, many people who have started blogs in travel have failed because they are not able to differentiate between useful tips and generic advice.
In order to break through this noise, we have compiled some tips from the pros at Kalu Yala, the sustainable village in Panama which boasts a collection of some of the brightest minds from across the globe.
- Seek inspiration but don’t plagiarize ideas
It is common practice to read other established blogs in the hope you will get some ideas that can be useful when building your blog. Even experts in travel blogging will encourage you to do this if you want to gain insight into professional content sharing that will get your audience hooked. But many of us miss the point that seeking inspiration from established bloggers does not translate to plagiarizing their work.
In fact, it is very easy to fall for the temptation to copy the work of someone else, and the only thing you achieve with this is getting low ratings from your readers. As much as it makes sense to see what established travel bloggers are doing, you should be careful not to copy their work or share anything that reads like theirs. Readers can easily detect copied content, so make sure to always share unique and original content.
- Be informative, have passion
The most important point to consider when writing for your travel blog is to ensure you are informative. One of the reasons people will choose to read your blog posts is because they are looking for some information. If your posts are not informative, you will not sustain a huge audience as most of them will prefer other blogs that are able to answer their questions. But more importantly, while writing your posts ensure your tone is passionate.
Make it sound like something you love to do because this will position you as a knowledgeable figure in the travel industry. While reviewing a destination, you need to be as detailed as possible so your readers can get a clear preview.
The bloggers at Kalu Yala are a fitting example of this principle. They routinely publish information and passionate content detailing the truth about Kalu Yala and their day to day life in the forest of Panama. This provides readers with a unique glimpse into a remote village and their mission.
- Boost your photography skills
A good blog post does not include just plain text. There is the visual aspect of blogging that you should exploit to ensure your audience is served the best content. Photos are a good way to share a message with little words. A picture speaks for itself and even before your readers proceed to the written text, they are able to know the topic you are writing about. What you should understand is that the attention span of readers on the internet is short, and therefore you must look for a way to keep them engaged.
Using photos is a great way to ensure your readers don’t switch from your blog to something else. However, this does not mean you must have perfect skills in photography. What you should do is to acquire basic skills that will enable you to take quality photos and if necessary edit them to suit your blog.
- Grammar and spelling
You cannot deny the fact that the flow of your sentences and words is what contributes to quality. Having poorly constructed sentences with many grammatical errors serves to make your content poor, and this is one of the mistakes that will deny your blog visitors. Even the Google search algorithm considers the quality of content on your pages when assigning ranking, so having poorly written articles is a recipe for failure.
As a travel blogger who is starting out, you need to focus on writing content that flows well. Always ensure your articles are free from grammatical and spelling errors. If you feel writing a good article is not easy, it is advisable to hire an experienced copywriter to do it for you.
- Use social media
Once you are done producing your articles, the next task is ensuring the content is shared with your target audience. You can share your blog posts through different channels including social sites like Facebook and Twitter. If you don’t have social media pages for your blog, you should consider building several. Social media allows you to reach a wide audience and this can boost readership on your blog posts. Google alone is not sufficient to give you the results you are looking for.
If you are in need of ideas, check out Kalu Yala’s Instagram feed.
- Collaborate
The demand for new content might be too heavy on you when your blog starts to grow. Your readers expect to receive fresh content regularly, so any delays arising from the inability to write regularly might affect ratings. Therefore, it is necessary to consider collaborating with another blogger who has the passion and skills to produce interesting content. This ensures that when you are not writing your partner is doing, so your audience is served content on a regular basis.
- Be original and take risks
Who wants to read the same thing many times? Repetition is one of the styles you should shun if you want your blog to pull an audience. What your audience is interested in is unique content that highlights something they have not come across in the past. Be original and look for new facts to share as this is the only way you can keep your audience yearning for more.
For some bloggers, part of being original means not being afraid to tackle tricky or negative subjects head-on. At one time there were rumors circulating about a Kalu Yala lawsuit, so their bloggers got together and decided to be proactive. They held interviews and published blog posts detailing the facts of the situation and set the rumors to rest. Now, it’s clear there never was a Kalu Yala lawsuit in the first place.
- Guest posting
The most challenging step for new bloggers is getting their blogs discovered by readers. After setting up your blog, you would not like to keep sharing content when you are not certain there are people reading, so one of the ways you can draw the attention of readers to your blog is guest blogging. Request one established travel blogger to grant you an opportunity to share a guest post and at the end of the post leave information about your blog.