BLOG REPORT, 1st Quarter 2015
Professional travel bloggers? Not yet!
Hi there, I hope you had great and relaxing Easter holidays and that you could spend some time with your family and friends. Today, I want to talk about our last 3 months in our blogging life and the many up and downs BoB, Liane and I had. Of course, I will also show you our statistics as usual and most important I want to talk a bit about our future plans.
But let’s start with the past.
As you might know we flew back home for Christmas in December last year as a surprise for our families. They had no clue and thought we were still in Argentina to practice some tango moves. Our surprise was a fantastic idea. Our families were totally “shocked” and super happy to see us again after such a long time.
We had been traveling for exactly 18 months without a break, and I have to admit it was a great feeling to be back home and to celebrate Christmas with our family and friends. After New Years Eve, BoB, Liane and I had another little surpise for our loved ones.
When we stayed in Peru, back in July 2014, we already planned to leave Germany again and to fly to a new destination, a new contintent: South East Asia. However we wanted to stay at least 3 months in Germany as our original plan was to set up a registered blogging business. But unfortunately that never happened.
To make a long story, or better a very long story short, I just want to talk briefly about what happened. As usual, it’s all about money. We are very honest people and wanted to fulfill all the German regulations to work offically as travel bloggers. I have no idea how that works in other countries like the US or Thailand etc. but in Germany you cannot just work as a freelancer and sell e.g. e-books via your blog. That makes you a salesman and therefore you have other restrictions and rules to follow. Anyway, if we want to set up a business as travel bloggers, we would have to pay over 1,500 euros for fixed costs every month e.g. health insurances for Germany and abroad (no matter, if we are in Germany or not), taxes. Together with our travel and food costs we would need about 3,000 euros per month.
-Yeiks-
Just to make it clear, we are no millionairs (sorry ladies :P) and we have not worked for the last 2 years. Our blog generates 0 income and life (no matter where you life) costs money. So without any income we just can’t afford to run a business in Germany. And we don’t want to take out a loan from a bank. Especially not, as long as we don’t know, if our blog will ever be good enough for generating income.
That’s why we decided to build up a big and loyal audience first, before thinking about making money with our blog. How we want to do that? I will tell you later.
But our time in Germany was definetly not wasted. First of all, we could visit our friends who we really missed during our travel. It was super cool to talk and lough with them again and to see how happy they were to see us again. Friends are amazing and we miss you all already!
We also had a lot of administration stuff to do and after 18 months of traveling our teeth were quiet happy to see a German dentist again. ?
We had enough time to set up a marketing plan for our blog and to upgrade it with new plugins etc. We also designed our new logo in simple comic style (Have you seen it yet?) and had enough time to plan our next trip to SE Asia.
On the 14th of March 2015 we started our trip to Thailand. Liane’s brother visited us during the first three weeks and we had so much fun exploring Central and South Thailand. At the moment we are very busy to put all the things we have seen and done into words. New funny BoB videos, golf course reviews, photos of amazing beaches and many more will come soon. Stay tuned!
Last quarter achievements and statistics
To be honest, there is not much I can tell you. We had a lot of work but did absolutely NOTHING to push our blog. At least, I finally wrote my detailed guide for travel blogger beginners. It’s a post I wanted to write for such a long time. Feel free to have a look at it. Here is the link.
Back to the numbers. We get most of our readers from SEO and we are actually a bit surprised how “many” visitors we have without doing anything. I mean, we just have about 35 SEO friendly posts which is almost nothing. Hhmmm… It’s good to see that those posts bring regular traffic.
Talking about statistics, I will keep those like you know them from our previous blog reports. I just changed the Google Analytic statistics to a quaterly report. Here we go:
Analytics:
Visits: 4,113
Unique visitors: 3,063
Page views: 7,942
Social media:
facebook: 713 (+50)
twitter: 3,115 (224)
google+: 106 (+15)
instagram: 1,089 (209)
pinterest: 399 (+83)
youtube clicks: 7,329 (+1349)
email subscriber: 48 (+7)
Ranks:
Google page rank: 0
Alexa rank: 1,77 M (-0,6M)
Goals for 2nd quarter 2015 and future plans
You won’t believe it but we will finally work like real travel bloggers :). We will post three times a week which is nothing for most of you bloggers out there, I know, but for us it is a lot. Our fixed days for new posts are Tuesday, Thursday, and Saturday. You don’t believe me huh? ? Why don’t you sign up for our WEEKLY newsletter, so you can check it! hehe ? We decided to send a newsletter to our readers every Sunday. We need to use this great marketing tool more often and we will.
Finally, I want to tell you how we want to get more readers to our blog. There are sooo many travel blogs in the internet and almost every travel blogger talks about the same topics. 90% of them are backpackers and when I see how many travel bloggers live here in Thailand, I’m a bit worried that we will never have a chance, if we keep posting the same topics like everybody else. I mean, we are no native Englisch speakers, so why should they prefer our blog over others?
But we also realized that we have a very powerfull USP called BoB. For the future we will concentrate more and more on Golf. Over 60,000,000 people are official golfers, so if just 1% of them gets to know BoB, it would boost our blog immensely.
In the next three months we will concentrate on contacting as many online and offline golf magazines as possible. But also TV channels with a golf programm and golf related facebook sites are on our list. What we won’t do is pushing our social media channels. I know, many of you are very successful with it but we need to focus more on other media at the moment. Therefore we will only post daily on facebook, twitter, and instagram. Sorry google+ and pinterest… maybe another time ?
I really hope we can manage our plans as we will visit Singapore and Malaysia in Mai to test some more golf courses until we are back in Thailand. Cross fingers.
You see, the next three months will show in which direction we will go with our blog. Money runs out probably at the end of July. Not much time left to make BoB famous ?
This is it for now. Make sure you sign up for our newsletter as I will write about more blogging topics in the next weeks.
I wish you all the best for your travel blog and feel free to share this blog report and to leave a comment.
Safe travels,
Lars
1 Comment
Leave your reply.