At the second edition of Traverse, we were welcomed by The Sage at Gateshead in Newcastle upon Tyne. With over 100 international travel bloggers and industry attending, the weekend was filled with networking, socializing and learning through inspiring workshops and one-on-one pro bars.
I’ve attended four of the workshops and here are my key takeaways from this great, information-packed day:
Making the Transition from Full-Time Work to Freelance – Julie Falconer
(A Lady in London)
Julie took us through the stages of launching a career as a freelancer and gave tips on making the transition from full-time work as smooth as possible.
1) Preparation:
Know yourself, start saving and start planning before going freelance. You need a good amount of self discipline (from actually getting out of bed to dealing with deadlines) and organisational skills (time management, accounting, chasing down invoices) in order to make freelance work actually work for you.
Think about what takes priority and focus on that.
What are the income needs for your specific type of lifestyle? Set a (monthly) budget goal accordingly.
2) Anticipation:
Networking and building a pipeline of work are of great importance.
Think about who your key contacts are and who your potential partners could be and start lining up projects as soon as possible.
Everyone wants to work with you, but nobody wants to pay you.
3) Starting
Decide on your work space (home/co-working space/hotdesking) and find your personal routine (time to get up/daily tasks/diary reminders/to-do list) to keep yourself dedicated to your work.
Taxes: register as self-employed, check monthly contributions and self-assessment (depends on your country) and perhaps consider getting an accountant.
Tracking: make sure to track your income & expenses, your projects (have people paid?), your pipeline (source different types of work and think about the long-life-cycle as well) and your time (make sure to write down how long certain projects take you from start to finish for future reference).
4) Building Momentum
Think about growing (build relationships, source projects continually, think medium to long-term), but also about expanding (leverage previous work, leverage growth and leverage partnership).
Never name your price first. You are then negotiating against yourself.
5) Thriving
Make sure to evaluate your success by reviewing your income, projects and passions. Find out where most of your revenue comes from and focus on that.
Find new opportunities by being open to trying new things.
Launch early and often. Don’t be late to the party by spending too much time on thinking about projects instead of actually doing it. When you launch, it doesn’t have to be perfect. There is always space for change.
Lesson Learned: Hold yourself accountable for getting your work done and think about different revenue streams and types of freelance activities that will get you enough money and satisfaction for what you need for your specific lifestyle. Be open to change and don’t be afraid of what the result is going to be. And never forget that spreadsheets are your best friend.
Julie’s slides can be found here
SEO – David Tutin
David works for Expedia and in his talk he tried to demystify SEO a bit, as well as giving practical advice on SEO for bloggers.
1) Site Structure
Think about what your want your website to rank for.
A good site structure does not only help in getting better listings in the search engines, but it’s also important for your users to easily find their way around.
Choose a good theme for your website for better SEO.
Make use of your categories and look at keywords when choosing them (add tags additionally, but categories are more important for SEO)
Think about the overall topic your site is covering to think about posts/pages to add: when for example you have a site about a specific city, make sure to cover food/accommodation/what to do, as Google will crawl your site looking for this complete set of content.
2) Research
Always do keyword research (with the adwords tool, any paid keyword tool or your website’s internal search engine for example) and focus on exact matches.
Your keywords should answer the who/what/where/when/why/how questions of your site’s specific topic.
Always ask yourself: does my content answer a specific question?
3) Analytics
There is a free course you can download from the Google Analytics Academy (here) that tells you everything about reading your Google Analytics account. Or check Google Analytics Help here.
Important metrics to keep track of are: engagement (how long do people stay on your site and how many pages do they visit?), bounce rate (when it’s high, check on your site why, it could be as simple as the page being a contact page where people just visit to quickly grab your phone number, in that case don’t worry about the high bounce rate), referral sites (where else do people come from, like social media, etc) and unique number of visitors.
For advanced users, some point to consider are exit pages, custom funnels, acquisition, visitor profiles / demographics.
Set up Goals, for example check advertising campaigns where you use a specific tracking code and see which pages people visit.
Don’t forget that most of the social media websites also have their own analytics you can track (Facebook, Pinterest and Twitter through Hootsuite)
Not all links are created equally. Have a good mix of them on your website.
4) On-Page
On-Page ranking factors: Content Quality, Research, Keywords, User Engagement, Content Freshness.
Additional On-Page to consider: Mark-Up: Rich Snippets en Structured Data. They give a little extra information to your listing in the Google search results and make people click on it sooner. It doesn’t affect your place in the rankings though.
5) Linking
Use breadcrumbs (wordpress plugin, for example by Yoast) as it’s user friendly and makes it clear for Google how your site is set up.
Internal Linking helps bolster or improve evergreen content, helps search engines understand your site structure and provides references for users to find related posts or pages.
Linking out to other websites can provide added experience to users.
Links can be do-follow, no-follow or redirect, using a mix of them is best practice on your site. Only link to websites/pages that you feel like provide good value.
6) Content Creation / Curation
Don’t just think about creating your own content for single use only. Think about more ways to re-shape your already published content in a different way (as a podcast/video/whitepaper/ebook)
Be a good content curator to and become an authority in your niche.
Think carefully about your site design and hire someone to do it. Most universities will have students who are happy to do design work for you as part of their school assignments!
7) Guest Posting
Guest Posting has been abused too much, so Google is getting stricter on it.
Writing your own content is always best, only let your guest posts be written by people you know and trust will deliver good content.
Lesson Learned: Always keep your users in mind when designing your website and optimise for search engines. Only create good content and be creative in using it. And remember to always think CONTENT (Create Optimize Network Track Engage Nurture Test)
Keeping it Legal – Steve Keenan (Travel Perspective)
Steve went into the pitfalls and pratfalls of writing by talking about the confidence, reliability and ways to keep your content legal.
1) Blog Comments
Online travel agency DialAFlight finds that an identical comment, written under an apparent pseudonym (they argued that it was written by a competitor), is posted on seven travel-related sites. This comment alleges improper conduct over a customer service issue. Darren Cronian from TravelRants (now: Beelocal Media) got sued big time for leaving the comment on his site.
Generally, anyone who repeats someone else’s statement is just as responsible for the defamatory content as the original speaker.
Think about how you are going to moderate your comments, but outsourcing or not, make sure to always do it!
Generally, defamation is a false and unprivileged statement of fact that is harmful to someone’s reputation and published ‘with fault’, meaning as a result of negligence or malice – eff.org
2) Changes in the Law
The “defamation act” of 2013 changed a lot in the legal work concerning websites and blogs. Make sure to pay attention to this!
Elements of a defamation claim are: 1) a publication to one other than the person defamed 2) a false statement of fact 3) that is under stood as a) being of and concerning the plaintiff b) tending to harm the reputation of plaintiff.
Have a complaints policy on your website and implement a “report abuse button” on your site too.
Check eff.org for a legal guide for bloggers.
Know your defamation from your libel (written) and slander (spoken)
3) Photo Theft
Vogue got into trouble after using a photographers photo without credit – and stating it was in Paris, instead of New York.
Canon got into trouble when during their contest one contestant entered with a stolen (reversed and filtered) Instagram photo – and won.
Flight Center got into trouble when their social media manager used 4 images that they didn’t own – and ended up paying 28k pounds.
Babel got into trouble when travel blogger Kash (see below) found out an image depicting his own face was used in the language course’s online app – they got the image from Flickr with the Creative Commons attribution the photographer had set to it.
4) Attributes
There are different attributions for visual images and it’s important you know them before publishing this content to any platform online.
Check all attributions here.
Lesson Learned: Think about every single piece of content you publish on your site: from comments, photos to text: you are responsible in the end and will have to pay for it. Also think about content you bring out into the online world and cover yourself legally if needed.
Steve’s Slides:
Traverse 2014 – keeping it legal from Steve Keenan
How to Create and Build Successful Publishing Projects – Kash Bhattacharya
(Budget Traveller)
Kash has an impressive range of successful publishing project on his CV and is still going strong by create even more in the future. He shared some of his great tips with us, which is great because with 152.000.000 competing travel blogs around, you really want to stand out:
No man but a blockhead ever wrote except for money. – Samuel Johnson
1) Have a really damn good idea.
Look for a way to add value to the dialogue. To thrive in the current world of digital publishing you have to see yourself as an innovator.
Don’t always think about projects for your own blog, but think beyond it.
Great Projects by Kash: “Film Traveller Côte d’Azur”, “Budget Traveller’s German Wanderlust – 48 Hours guides to Germany”
Great Projects by Others: “Wild Junket Magazine” by Nelly Huang, “Social Traveller” by Bjorn Troch, “52 Sleeps” by Laterooms and a team of travel bloggers.
2) How you execute the idea will determine your success.
Learn to delegate an work with good people who know their shit.
Ask your readers about questions/problems they have (through a survey like Surveymonkey) and turn that into a publishing project.
Examples: “Little Green Map Edinburgh” (with voucher on your site that have a trackable link so you can show your influence), “Luxury Hostels“ / “Cool Budget Hostels of Europe“.
Solve a problem that no one else sees.
3) How to pitch your ideas?
First of all, pitch like a pro. Most great publishing ideas and blogs fail because of their inability to find the cash to take their ideas forward.
You must be able to condense your pitch into one sentence.
Have a mock-up ready when you’re pitching an ebook to let possible sponsors know that the product will look like.
Lara Dunston from Grantourismo once said: “I’ll be spending as much time pitching ideas as responding to them, developing story ideas as writing them, and initiating almost as many project concepts as they’re working on.” (source: An entrepreneurial model for travel writers working in an evolving media – Tnooz)
Don’t underestimate the importance of good design. Hire someone to do this!
It’s good to have a media kit, because it makes you and your blog looks credible.
Be prepared to fail. Many Times.
Tell a story that people can relate to. Hopefully you’ll find brands that relate to your story too.
Lesson Learned: Allow yourself to be creative. You have to let go of the idea of travel blogging as just writing blog posts on your own platform. Think differently and give people a new idea of travel. Also, work with people you know and trust.
Kash’s Slides:
How to build your dream publishing project from Budget Traveller
I hope you found my notes from the Traverse Travel Blogger Event in Newcastle 2014 useful. If you have any questions, let me know – and don’t forget to visit the speaker’s websites!
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