Are you in the travel business? The niche is rather competitive so a lot of entrepreneurs face the challenge when they try to outstrip the competitors. In this article, I’m going to tell you how to boost your travel blog with the help of graphics.
It is difficult to overestimate the power of graphics. However, if used wrong it can kill your site. Everything rotates around great user experience today. And all of us know that first we judge how nice and only then how wise. So if your travel blog looks ugly, most people will never know about your incredible offers. They will just hit the “back” button and go somewhere else.
By the way, don’t forget that a picture is worth a thousand words. Besides, human brain processes images faster than words and they stay in our memory for longer periods of time.
How Do Bloggers Reach High Traffic Numbers?
There are no shortcuts, magic pills, or silver bullets. If you ask any top-notch blog in your industry, the answer will be pretty much the same. (If this blog is open enough to reveal their traffic numbers and marketing strategies at all.)
Well, being a marketing professional myself, I can tell you that high traffic numbers are achieved with a combination of smart SEO targeting search engines, in other words, the knowledge what people are searching for, and strategic content promotion.
Let’s make an accent on strategic content promotion as it is closely related to graphics. Why do I repeat the word “content” so often? Because this is the reason why people come to your website. They come to see/read your content, so it should help them solve their issues and be of the highest quality.
Ways to Promote Your Blog
There are tons of ways to effectively promote your blog. (Remember that you definitely need content to build up your marketing campaign). For instance, you can use
- podcasts
- blogger outreach
- share videos on LinkedIn
- promote your blog posts and videos on any video channel like YouTube.
Two Things that Never Fail
Amplify your content with video and advertise with top performing content on Facebook and Instagram. People want to see the destinations of their dreams.
These might seem easy things to do, but there’re some proven formulas you can use to create videos and to create ads that drive consistent traffic to your website. What I’m trying to say is that it shouldn’t be a guessing game. I am going to help you with removing the guesswork from your travel blog promotion techniques.
Let’s Dive into a Couple of Things that I Promise Will Work
Amplify your content with video. There are so many techniques and tactics out there, so why video? Why do I consider video one of the best ways to do it?
There’s a ton of stats about why video is one of the most important mediums currently for consumers, but I would like to point your attention to a couple. Facebook, for one, generates eight billion video views a day on average. Social video generates 1200% more shares than text and images combined.
Companies using video enjoy 41% web traffic from search than non-users of the video. All in all, the video is the primary way that people are consuming content in 2018 and beyond, outside of the reading content of course.
The video is super important for your brand to build a reputation as a thought leader in your industry. For instance, product showcases are a super robust and versatile way to educate your existing and potential customers. At the end of the day, what else are we here for than to help our customers solve a challenge, and video is a great way to do that.
What Kind of Videos Should I Shoot?
I’ll say it once again. Don’t guess when you’re thinking about promoting blog content on your website. Don’t guess which content people are going to like the most. Go to Google Analytics, sort out blog content by the most page views, and then go back through the last three months. You’ll get one to 100, depending on how much blog content you have, ideas for videos that you can create for social media for your travel website, for your blog to embed in your blog posts themselves, et cetera.
The takeaway: The first step is going into Google Analytics, sorting by most page views, and starting ideating and creating lists of topics that would make for a good video.
You can do the following right now – take some top blog posts from your travel blog, turn those into videos, embed them all into blog posts, send them to your customers in an email, put them on YouTube, promote them on social media, advertise with them on social media. The tactics will drive hundreds and thousands of views to the content itself, and then thousands of visits to the blog post itself where people can read more. Your video shouldn’t be an entire summary of the blog post. Videos are teasers as to the content the viewer is going to get from reading the content. It’s essentially just finding the most popular content, create videos essentially summarizing it.
A lot of times people don’t necessarily know about your travel business yet, or they’re not in a place where they can click on a link and read an entire article. What videos do is helping you to supplement your written content, your website content, into easily digestible pieces that people can view in 30 seconds to a minute. If they want to see more, that’s when you give them a link to go check out your website for more.
Videos or graphics are going to get more engagement. Blog posts are going to get more engagement and shares if there are actually videos embedded on there. And, of course, it gives people a variety of ways to consume your content. Not everybody wants to read a blog post, some prefer to watch a video or listen to a podcast. It just makes your content more evergreen and more robust.
Well, I’ve just told you how to create videos to promote your blog content if you have current blog content.
But What to Do if You Don’t Have a Ton of Content on Your Website or on Your Blog?
Don’t worry, that’s okay. There are other ways you can develop really great ideas for your travel blog outside of keyword research, even though obviously keyword research is one of the best ways to do it. There’re things like YouTube search bar, Ahrefs’ Keyword Explorer, Google Keyword Planner, FAQs on your website, Quora, Reddit. These are all really good resources.
Let’s take an example here. What do I mean by YouTube search bar for developing content that will get shared and popular topics for your blog? The YouTube search bar is one of my favorite tools. It’s free, by the way.
Ok, with video, obviously, it’s a win-win-win. Studies show that videos and graphics perform three to five times better on average than generic link posts on social media. Blog posts with videos are more likely to be shared. It gives people a variety of ways to consume your content.
All you have to do is go in and you start typing a keyword that’s relevant to your niche. For a travel blog, it might be “top ski resorts,” right? So you start typing in “top ski resorts,” and YouTube, just like Google, starts to return the most popular keywords around the term that you’re typing into the bar.
Right here, as soon as you type in “top ski resorts,” you’re presented with five to eight, I would say, really great ideas for topics that would make popular video content. Then you could take that video content and make it even more evergreen by producing a piece of blog content, a website page, whatever it may be. You can actually, instead of starting with blog content, start with the video side of things and make your way back towards blog content.
What’s great about this technique is that if you’re out of blog content to promote and you’re doing all the things with SEO research, there’re still more ways to generate really great content to promote using video. YouTube’s a great channel to do that. You can also put this video on Facebook and Twitter and elsewhere.
Promotion Is a Team Game
I mean each promotional technique does not live in a silo. It does not exist by itself. It all feeds into each other. And that’s how you should be thinking about your promotional strategies, especially when it comes to your website and blog content. Everything feeds into each other and everything should be thought of holistically rather than a single strategy for each platform.
You got to think, “Okay, if we create this piece of blog content, we’re also going to want a video. We’re also going to want maybe a podcast episode, or we’re also going to want a social media campaign around it.” The more you treat each individual blog post that you write like a mini-campaign in itself, the more successful your content’s going to be.
Each blog post really is a mini-campaign, or an opportunity to create a campaign in and of its own. Don’t just create the blog post and let them go. Create the blog post and create a promotional strategy around it.
Start to Move People Down the Funnel
After you’ve created videos for your blog posts and you’re wondering what to do next, it’s time to move people down the funnel. Big companies, like Buffer, for instance, have two teams. One is focused on creating awareness (people that are on top of the funnel). They create leadership pieces, blog teasers, etc. And the second team starts to move people down the funnel. This is the advertising side of things where you can start to convert people to actual customers by means of webinars, product demos, product onboarding, personal messaging, FAQs.
Think of your entire promotional strategy holistically and think about how you’re going to create videos and create other types of content that fit into the part of the journey that your customers are actually in. Because sometimes people aren’t ready to buy from you, right? Sometimes people are thinking about other products or they just want a specific problem solved now, but they might be open to buying from you down the line.
Put your strategy into holistic thoughts, then you can start to break it down depending on where your customers are in the funnel.
Advertising with Top Performing Content
If you’re on social media and you’re looking for a really creative way to drive more traffic to your websites, advertising is one of the best ways to do so. Back in 2016, 2015 a lot of businesses were like, “Well, do we really have to advertise? Today, in 2018, it’s becoming “How much money should we be putting behind advertising?”
You don’t need to spend thousands of bucks on advertising at once. Start small, and once you see results, you could move up. If you’re just starting out or if you’re having trouble finding traction, I don’t think there’s a much better opportunity for the cost per click at least than Facebook is right now. Facebook and Instagram.
Which Posts to Boost and Advertise?
Let me give you a quick formula for how to decide which posts to boost and advertise with, and then I’ll give you some more tips after that. Go into your travel blog, or into Facebook, or into Twitter, and just go into your analytics section and see which posts have the most engagement and reach, and which ones are higher than average than normal.
Look at not only engagement, but at reach, and then at engagement per reach. If you have to identify top performers based on what you want your goals to be. What do I mean by that? Some companies are not necessarily focused on driving bottom of the funnel conversions. They are more focused on brand awareness and driving traffic to their blogs because they know if they can get people to their blog, then they’re going to convert at a much higher rate than they would be driving more expensive bottom of the funnel advertising.
That’s another way to engage or decide on which ones to do. You might find a post that Facebook for whatever reason or Instagram gave … amount of organic reach to. But maybe the post has a lower organic reach, but it has an irregularly high engagement rate, so the number of engagements divided by reach times 100. That can help you decide, “Okay, well if we want to increase engagement around my brand, that might be a way to identify top performers.”
You can also do the total number of engagement or a total amount of reach. If you have conversions set up with your Facebook Pixel, you might choose to boost score advertisement posts based on conversions, which is a default obviously for a lot of businesses.
But you can also realize that instead of optimizing your ads for conversions, which are very hard to do and require a lot of A/B testing and experimenting, you can actually just optimize for clicks and engagement rates. You’ll find that converts actually eventually more than optimizing ads for conversions.
Create Your Ideal Audience
The second thing you’re going to want to do when you’re advertising is to create your ideal audience. Believe it or not, this is actually simpler than you might think. The first one is based on website traffic. The more traffic you drive, if you have your Facebook Pixel set up on your website, the easier it is to obviously advertise to people who have been there.
Now, if you’re just starting out or if you don’t have a ton of traffic to your websites, that’s okay. General demographics are also a highly effective way to grow your brand awareness and also drive traffic to your website based on what people might find interesting.
The three biggest things I would say you should target people based on with advertising:
- page likes
- interests
- location
Five Best Practices for Advertising
I have five best practices for advertising. Successful social media advertising and promotion require:
- testing your images
- testing captions
- headlines
- and testing until you find the right combination, and then you roll with it.
When you’re advertising, if you’re familiar with this, at Facebook they give you a relevancy score for each ad. You’re aiming for a relevancy score from eight to ten for that traffic driving type content. Your promotional stuff really should be in that eight to ten range. If you’re doing more bottom of the funnel type advertisements, you could be down in the three to five and still be okay.
Obviously, you can start small and increase budget with success, and immediately shut down the ads that are not performing. I think that’s the biggest misconception is that you have to stick with ads if they’re not performing well. You’d better double down on the ones that are performing well and don’t be afraid to shut of unsuccessful posts.
Of course, try to keep an eye on frequency rates. That’s the number of times that people will see your ad in the newsfeed. Generally, 2.0 is what I recommend to businesses. If your people are starting to see your add more than twice, they probably don’t want to interact with it. Facebook’s algorithm is pretty good with that. And then, of course, evergreen content can run as long as you want. As long as the content is relevant and it’s working, let it run.
Let’s illustrate that point. Make sure that the caption is a teaser. Actually, a lot of people have differing opinions on what a good caption’s all about. I think the shorter and the sweeter the better, and the more you can tease what people are going to learn in the caption, the more successful it’ll be.
The eye-catching image is the second most important thing. I like to pull nice images from Unsplash but you can use one of your branded images. And of course, the compelling headline is critical. To create the one you will need to do thorough keyword research, study your competitors, and so on. You should know how to gain a following on Instagram and other social media with a popular topic. This mustn’t be a guess. This is sooner a scientific process that is going to bring you success.
Again, if you don’t have content to advertise with, you can reverse engineer it. Maybe even if you’re advertising on social media and you’re finding stuff isn’t working, you can reverse engineer it. One of my favorite free tools to do that is Facebook Pages to Watch. If you have a Facebook page with more than 100 followers, you go into your Insights tab and you can actually watch your competitors. Look at what competitors are generating in terms of search volume and search terms. You can actually see what your competitors are doing in terms of what’s working on social content-wise, video-wise, topic-wise.
If you actually set this up and you were to click on, say, some top-notch travel blog, it would actually pull up a list its most successful posts over the last week ranked by engagement. It would give you things like caption ideas, headline and topics ideas, and then it’ll give, obviously rank it by engagement.
You can start to pick and choose from your competitors. Then decide if that makes sense for you. You can start to pick and choose these little ideas around the internet and you could use it to give you a full picture outside of just keyword research of what’s trending in your industry, what’s popular as a topic, because I think one of the tougher things to do in terms of content marketing is finding not only topics and keywords that are going to rank well on Google and these other search engines, but finding topics that are going to be popular on social media too because part of driving traffic to your website isn’t just organic traffic, right? It’s social virality and shares and word of mouth. That’s another great way to do this, Facebook Pages to Watch.
Instagram and Facebook Stories
I couldn’t help mentioning Instagram and Facebook Stories as one of the biggest opportunities for travel blogs, as well as brands and other businesses right now. I advise you to get on it as fast as you can because it’s still an emerging platform. Advertising platform for businesses who haven’t quite figured it out yet. With 400 million daily active users, very low cost per click. I think it’s next evolution advertising. We’re seeing the cost per click rates as low as a few dollars.
I think this is really relatable for businesses because it’s an easy way to advertise and it’s a great way to drive traffic. Keep an eye out for Instagram and Facebook Stories in the future. They just opened up brand advertising on Facebook Stories.
Instant Articles
Instant Articles, for those not familiar, is essentially Facebook’s version of Google AMP, which actually Google just got rid of Google AMP. Facebook Instant Articles is their way of allowing people to quickly load stories on the mobile platform. If you have WordPress or a plugin, every time you write a blog article, can you just click Enable For Facebook Instant Articles and it’ll automatically make it available for Facebook Instant Articles? I recommend just using if you have WordPress, some sort of plugin. If not, I think you can actually go the Google Developer Tools and add that to your website. It doesn’t hurt ranking at all and it definitely helps.
Now, the only thing that’s tricky about Facebook Instant Articles is it’s actually not going to show up under your traffic sources because it loads natively within the Facebook app, which is a little tricky. However, my viewpoint on that is, well, would you rather have somebody read your article or not read it at all because Facebook’s potentially prioritizing Instant Articles? It’s a tricky stage for businesses. I haven’t seen as many Instant Articles today as I used to, so maybe they’re phasing that out a little bit, but I would say just enable it if you can.
Best Tools for Creating Videos
This couple of recommendations is from strategic promotion professionals. They use Animoto as one of the favorite tools for creating super good looking templated videos. You can create an Animoto account and then they give you these templates you can drag and drop text and video clips into.
If you’re looking for more of the advanced editing tools, you could use Adobe Sparks mobile editing tool, which is awesome. And then for actually creating really professional looking ads, but it’s a lot bigger learning curve, is, of course, Adobe After Effects. Adobe After Effects allows to create those really highly curated, highly professional Instagram stories and Facebook Stories ads, which you can’t do with the editors, but it also takes a lot longer.
Using Memes for Promotion
Actually, it’s funny, because there’s an entire industry around the meme-style promotional stuff. Like there’s entire Instagram accounts that have 40, 50 million followers based on pure memes. However, I caution businesses from doing that unless you’re particularly talented at it. Because I think a lot of times businesses try to take that route and they don’t necessarily have the comedic intuition that feels on the brand that might actually grow this following.
I think if you’re particularly skilled at it and your experiment and you see some success with that, it’s a good strategy. If you want to try something new, absolutely experiment with it. Try it a few times. If it doesn’t work, then don’t be afraid to sort of say, “Okay, we experimented, it didn’t work. Let’s move on to something else.”
Yeah, I guess if the KPI of the marketing team is to get some kind of traffic or to get views or to get engagement, this might work like a charm and boost the numbers in your reports. But will it have any effect on the bottom line because you just entertained people but you didn’t really sell them your product or your service? That’s another question.
Wrapping up
Okay, I think that’s it for now. I am hoping I was able to teach travel blog owners some good tips on how to use graphics to grow their websites. I hope you guys enjoyed the article. If you have any further questions, please feel free to ask them in the comments. I promise to share everything I can to help you in every way. So, let me know your feedback and don’t forget to share the blog post with your friends on social networks ;).
