A ton of Canadians are making money online. That’s a good thing and I am happy to say I am one of them. However, once you get into it, you realize that we get into a bit of a pickle because of two things. One, Paypal is the easiest form of payment and the majority of clients prefer it over wire transfers. Two, you will most likely get paid in US dollars. The problem for Canadians with USD balance in Paypal On the onset this doesn’t seem like that big of a problem. In...
Going to your first conference is a little nerve-wracking. You’re not really sure what to expect. You don’t know who you’re going to meet. You don’t know what to bring. And thoughts about “is there anything I should do beforehand” start revolving around your head. Well I’m going through one of these moments right now. With less than a week to go before Affiliate Summit West in Las Vegas, I’m trying to get ready for my very first...
I know a lot of bloggers are using AddThis on their WordPress blog and most do not realize that the sharing sidebar service they provide is not optimized for Twitter shares. I couldn’t find any solid resources online that described things step by step so in today’s toolkit, I wanted to lay it out and make it as easy as possible. On Going Awesome Places, I have the sharing sidebar, amongst a few other tools to make it easy for my readers to share content. This tool can be...
Wow I finally did it, all my old Travel Blogger’s Toolkit posts from Going Awesome Places have been fully migrated and redirected over to Travel Blog Breakthrough. This is the first toolkit in the #TBB era and so you’re reading brand new content! Enjoy! – Will On this week’s Travel Blogger’s Toolkit, I wanted to talk about a simple method of keeping organized that has really helped me these past couple of months. Before using this tool, I had a vague idea of...
As most of you know, getting Facebook likes on your blog’s page. There’s a natural reluctancy to give away likes freely on FB because most people are afraid of spam that show up on their newsfeeds. It’s naturally more “expensive” for someone to give you a like on Facebook versus Twitter because Facebook is that much more personal for people. So for me, while my Twitter follower count was trending up to 10K, my Facebook like count was growing a measly 10-20...
So you’ve done a lot of travelling and you want to write a travel blog. What do you write? How do you write it? What style should it be in? These are all questions that I honestly didn’t think about when I first started but looking back, there was a huge inflection point in traffic when I changed my mind set about what type of content suited my niche. What I learned So as most of you know, I started off blogging after I quit my corporate job and travelled all around...
Free travel is the big aspiration for most of you travel bloggers. Even if you don’t admit it, the thought of jetsetting around the world, representing brands, properties, tours, cities or even provinces for free is pretty darn awesome. Imagine that – getting paid to travel. Now that’s the dream right? Getting there is a whole other story. Getting over the fear Earlier on in my blogging career, I think a lot of what was holding me back was fear. There was fear of...
Acquiring new Twitter followers is one of those great mysteries that seems impossible to crack. Around the blogging circles, I always hear “I really need to work on my Twitter following” or “It’s so tough to build followers”. I too had the same thoughts running through my mind as I was ramping up. Growing at 100-200 followers a month was great and all but at that rate, I calculated that 3 and a half years to get to 10k followers. That was completely...
Twitter recently made their analytics dashboard completely open for all members of Twitter. Now you can get quick and easy access to information that other third party sites have been leveraging for years now. Although not perfect, it gives you some pretty good snapshots of what’s going on with your Twitter account. I’m a numbers junkie and I’m not ashamed of it though sometimes I wonder if I spend too much time hitting the refresh key. Accessing your dashboard Make sure...
Today I talk about a seemingly trivial topic but I’ll be honest, figuring out to properly format my blog post took over half a year to figure out. Having a properly formatted post has many benefits that aren’t really apparent at first. Although creating a blog post on WordPress may seem like exactly the same as how you’d write a document in say Word, it’s actually a bit more involved than that. Not quite like Microsoft Word Alright so let’s go back to my example...
If there’s one thing that’ll make your travel blog stand out from the crowd to a sponsor and convince them to spend hundreds of dollars on you for their next campaign, it’s the media kit. As a travel blogger, having that polished media kit will easily give you the edge in securing sponsorship over others that haven’t caught on yet. The media kit is an integral part of any blog when you’re at the point when you want to reach out to brands, PR, agencies and other...
When I first started blogging, I had the mentality of “if I blog it, they will come” but was disillusioned when I realized this wasn’t the case. As awesome your content is, building a following and readership just doesn’t happen overnight. Does that mean things are hopeless and you have to rely on SEO? The answer is NO. In the past I talked about the importance of getting yourself out there and meeting other travel bloggers through local events like Travel Massive...
SEO may seem like a mystery for some but the honest truth is that when you’re starting off and don’t have much of an audience, SEO matters. At the beginning you won’t be able to rely on a steady flow of loyal readers. If your blog is anything like mine, at least 60% of your traffic will all come from Google. That wasn’t by some sort of fluke but putting some stuff in place to make sure you can rock at optimizing for search engines. SEO Basics Search Engine...
If there’s one thing I learned from blogging all these years is the power of networking, being part of the larger travel blogging community and making friends with so many others that are doing what you’re doing. Coming from the startup world, I’ve been a huge advocate of “getting out and meeting people” and as you’ll learn below, Travel Massive is simply amazing for travel bloggers.
WordPress and plugins are almost synonymous and what makes it so easy to use. You got a problem? There’s a plugin for it. Plugins make blogs better. The thing is, there are so many plugins out there. Which ones are good and worth your time? I’m here to help you with focusing on the essential plugins you need to have. What are plugins? If you haven’t played with plugins yet, well you’re in for a serious treat. They are basically add ons to your WordPress site...
