This was potentially the most technical and insightful meetup to date.
We had a regular meetup attender speak, Jo Fitzsimons, digital nomad who runs the blog,
IndianaJo.com. Jo kindly brought along her friend as well,
Helen Davies, also a travel blogger with a focus on African tours.
They both shared their blogging journeys, how they got started, what worked, didn't work and the ins and outs of how they have achieved 2.5m website visits a year and in the 100ks respectively.
Amazing achievements from both and hearing how they managed to do all this, WITHOUT relying so much on social media channels.
The talks touched on certain social media channels and how creating and curating content is important for relevance, keeping users engaged with video and Facebook Lives/Instagram Stories but a lot was around optimising your website and creating your own audience, on your own channel.
They both shared their preference on the channels, mainly using Pinterest and how creating images using
PicMonkey and
Canva help with making a post visualy appealing so that it ranks, people click and share.
Jo shared a story about how one of her Venice blogs and Pinterest Pin driven so much traffic to the website because of how Google recognised this as a sign of importance and ranked venice based searches favourable to her website.
This proves the blurred lines between Google ranking algorithm and social media engagement being linked. There were a lot of helpful and technical tips for those with websites that both shared.
Tools To Takeaway
- Keysearch - Find what's popular online by number of times people search
- Hotjar - create heatmaps of your website, pop up surveys to get feedback
- Performance Foundry & Siteground - hosting for website speed to rank on Google
- Fastory - Canva for Instagram Stories
- Elementor - Wordpress page builder/plug in that is very adaptable and easy to use
- MediaVine - Set up Amazon affiliate schemes
Key Takeaways
1. Find out what people are searching for so that you can create content about this
2. Don't be afriad to go for big search volume terms
3. Go in with confidence
4. Expect it to fail
5. Blogging is a long game
6. Stick to the channels that you use/like
7. Have clean URLs (for example, take out the date as not needed)
8. Don't put all your eggs in one basket (one social media channel)