BLOG REPORT, 2nd Quarter 2015
Sorry, I am late
I am a bit late, right? ? Today is the 13th of August and this post should had been published at the end of July. But many, many things happened in the last month and I really did not feel like writing a post at all. To make a long story short, I needed to visit a hospital right after we crossed the border to Laos. But we did not feel very good with the hospitals there and went back to Thailand to go to a hospital in Bangkok; a hospital which looked more like a 5-star hotel than a hospital. Luckily, I don’t have anything serious *touch wood* but a few things the doctor said to me are still in my mind. Can you get a burnout from travel blogging? This is a question for another post and I am actually writing it, so it will be online next week.
But now back to the blog report. In the last three months, from April till June, we just visited Singapore and Langkawi, Malaysia. It was our plan to travel slower because we needed so much time for writing and we still have sooo many topics we want to write about. Our plan worked out pretty well. We published a new post on the blog every 3 to 4 days (which is really good for us ? ) and we started to send off a newsletter on a regular basis; every Sunday. If this is a good day for a B2C newsletter, is still the question. But it is too early to analyse our statistics and to make any decisions about it. We will keep it like it is for now.
What else… oh yes of course. The travel blog award. This was my big project in the last 3 months. As you probably now I analyzed over 2,000 different travel blogs in 7 categories. This was a lot of work and I am really happy that this project is over. But I have to say I really learned a lot about travel blogs during this analysis. I will talk a bit about it in my next post. You know, the one with the burnout.
Except for writing and analyzing we did not too much for the blog. Of course we changed a bit of the design here and there and we also published a new ABOUT page but I am sure every travel blogger does that from time to time so I don’t want to talk about it in detail. BUT I figured out that the About page is really important for your blog. Even if you knew that already, you should check your About page regularly to see if it’s up-to-date and catches your reader’s attention. If you want to change something on your blog and you don’t know where to start, you should have a closer look at this page.
What about my marketing plans? In my last blog report I told you I wanted to call online and offline magazines etc. To be honest… I didn’t make any marketing at all. I can’t even tell you why we haven’t started our marketing strategy yet but it is still on my to-do list. We will see when I am in the mood for it.
Last quarter achievements and statistics
It was about time to write our first guest post on someone else’s blog. Yes, you heard it right. The first time in more than one year of blogging. We know that one of our biggest weaknesses is that we are not so interested in the whole travel blogging community.
Travel bloggers need to write guest posts for a good page rank and to get their name out there but, to be honest, we just found a few travel blogs we would like to write for. And as non-English speakers we need so much time to write one good blog post which is not full of mistakes and we feel comfortable with :).
But hey, at least we started. And we started with a photo story. Not too much text, that’s good ? We still feel very honored (and I am not just saying that) that our first guest post was a photo story for Dave and Deb’s ThePlanetD. The communication was so super friendly and we hope we can write another guest post one day for this lovely couple.
But was it worth it? If we look at our numbers, I have to say no. We had just a few visitors coming from their blog to ours. To be honest, we hoped to get more traffic. But even though it did not generate big traffic it was still a very good experience. And as I said before we hope we can repeat it.
Another thing we had never done before are sponsored posts. We wanted to check out if our blog is already interesting enough for companies to sponsor a post, and a good opportunity to test it was our journey to Singapore. Liane sent emails and grabed the telephone to call some attractions in this amazing city and we got very positive feedbacks. We did not need to pay for the Singapore Flyer (we got a private capsule and two rounds instead of one), the beautiful Orchid Garden, the Observation Deck of the Marina Bay Sands Hotel, the Flower Dome and Cloud Forest as well as the Skywalk at Gardens by the Bay. We saved over $US 200 and just needed to write about it what we would have done anyway. Good deal. BUT on the other hand we thought about what would be if we did not like any of these attractions? Is it possible to write an honest opinion about something you get sponsored? Luckily we really liked the attractions in Singapore (we really did ? ) but that question was still in our mind when we contacted Naturally Langkawi for the first time.
It is no big secret that almost EVERY travel blogger gets the chance to work with Naturally Langkawi. If you want to visit Malaysia and this beautiful island, just visit their homepage and write them an email. While checking other blogs who worked with them we realized they all got the same sponsored program. To make a long story short, we decided NOT to write any sponsored posts about Langkawi. Looking back I think it was the right decision but, of course, it was also the more expensive one :).
Let’s have a look at our statistics. I think there is nothing I need to explain. Our numbers increase slowely. Very slowely. Maybe too slowely but as I write this post in August I can tell you already that we got more traffic in July than in April, May and June together.
Analytics:
Visits: 6,525 (+2412)
Unique visitors: 4704 (+1641)
Page views: 12,833 (+4891)
Social media:
facebook: 750 (+37)
twitter: 4,740 (+625)
google+: 130 (+24)
instagram: 1,203 (+114)
pinterest: 441 (+42)
youtube clicks: 9,041 (+1712)
email subscriber: 61 (+13)
Ranks:
Google page rank: 0
Alexa rank: 1,57 M (-0,2M)
Goals for 3rd quarter 2015 and future plans
What can I say… Actually we decided to finish our long-term journey, go back to Germany, find a job and travel through Europe. We have no goals we want to achieve with the blog at the moment and half of the 3rd quarter is over already anyway ?
But hey, no worries. We won’t stop blogging, of course. We just want to push our blog in a slightly different direction and therefore we need some time. Right now we just relax a bit here in Bangkok and try to get our passion about travel blogging back again.
I wish you all a great and relaxing week and hope to see you on the TBEX in Bangkok.
Cheers and safe travels,
Lars