Travel Blog Promotion Blog

Let’s be honest for a minute: travel blogs look a lot nicer in the catalog than they do in real life. Being able to write about your travels and share your stories with the world? Great. Feeing the blogging machine, formatting photos, SEO, promoting, marketing, advertising account management? Not so great.

The truth is, though, there is one mistake that a lot of travel blogs make, and it’s a mistake common in other industries too. Most travel blogs fail to define what makes them different, or special.

USP

The old school term for this dilemma is “unique selling proposition,” but in the blog world you might also call it your voice. That’s a fancy word for asking the question “why should I read your blog rather than all of the other travel blogs out there?

Do you have a unique perspective on the world that is worth listening to?

The Treadmill

Alongside USP, there’s another old school business term that has a much more digestible name: the treadmill. The treadmill is simply the usual cycle people go through in launching a business. You (hopefully) do a little stretching – market research – and then you get on the treadmill and you run and you run and you run. Run as hard and as fast and as long as you can.

To a point, that works; there is no ‘turn-key’ solution for travel blog success (and my, how I despite that word). But a lot of people get so caught up in the running that they lose sight of the big picture. For example:

• Are you Tweeting/Facebooking/Stumbling/Insert-Latest-Fad-Here because it’s adding value to your business, or because everyone else told you to?
• Are you writing that latest list post of the world’s top 10 Destination-or-Experience-Here because your readers love it, or because you think they love it?

Get Off the Treadmill, Get On Your USP

Stop running for the sake of running, and start making strides to your USP – you know, that thing that makes your website different. The thing that makes your website worth tuning in to. The reason why you have a business in the first place. You are different than everybody else, right?

Andy Hayes is the Managing Director of Travel Online Partners, a travel online marketing agency. Visit their website for resources for travel bloggers, like their popular website review service.

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