Is Anybody Out There? Hang in There, Travel Bloggers
Recently I've noticed more than a few travel bloggers becoming frustrated. Frustrated about being passed over for blogging opportunities. Frustrated at being left off lists of “top” travel bloggers. Frustrated over feeling left out of the clique of “cool” travel bloggers who seem to be so much more successful than everyone else.
Someone said that travel blogging feels a lot like being back in high school. The kids who are deemed cool remain so, and it's difficult for any newcomers to reach that same level of coolness.
I've felt frustrated, too. It's not easy to always feel left out, or feel like you're lagging behind with no chance of catching up. I think it's especially bad when I put a blog post out there that I'm really proud of, and then it flops. Some days, I wonder who I'm even blogging for; I wonder if anyone is even out there, paying attention.
But I think this feeling of frustration is only natural.
The “cool kids” of travel blogging started in the exact same place that I am now. True, there wasn't as much competition in the travel blogging market a decade ago as there is now. But everyone has to start somewhere.
So, on those days when I start feeling frustrated, I try to remind myself of a few things:
- It's not the end of the world if no one leaves a comment, or retweets my new post. Sure, it's disheartening. But, in the grand scheme of things, one off day shouldn't ruin my whole week. If anything, it should just inspire me to try harder next time.
- Sometimes, it's just dumb luck. I can write what I think is a brilliant post, but maybe I just post it on the wrong day. Maybe the people who would also view it as brilliant just aren't around. And maybe the next day, when I post some silly Top 10 list, that's the day someone like Lonely Planet decides to retweet my post. Often, I think it's just one of those things that's very hard to predict, and impossible to control.
- There can be no success without failure. I'm really just a baby blogger when it comes to the travel blogging universe. I haven't been doing it for that long, and yet I'm slowly crawling my way up in the ranks. The little successes — the RTs from Lonely Planet, the occasional big boosts in traffic — feel even better due to the little failures. If I keep at it and don't let the frustrations ruin the experience, eventually those successes will come more and more frequently.
- It's not anyone's “fault.” I cannot blame everything on the successful bloggers. I can be jealous that they continually get opportunities I would kill for, but I can't blame them for being successful. They've worked hard to get where they are, and what I should be doing is taking note of how they made it happen for themselves.
Obviously I'm not going to become one of the “cool kids” overnight. Contrary to popular belief outside of blogging circles, travel blogging is not easy. It takes a lot of hard work, and even more dedication. It's not something you can just half-ass and expect to be successful at.
I know that, in the end, I'm the only one who can make my blog as successful as I want it to be.
And no amount of whining or feeling sorry for myself is going to change that fact.
Are you feeling like this too? Are there days when you feel like you're just screaming into a void, begging to know if anybody is even out there?
Well, you're not alone. Believe me.
Giving advice on handling this sort of frustration is near impossible. But here are the best tips I can come up with to try and break into that “cool kids” clique. It's my plan of attack, at least:
- Post a variety of quality things. Some insightful, some silly, some practical. You don't want to pigeon hole yourself into one specific sort of advice or writing. (Or maybe you do?) Especially when first starting out, I think a bit of experimentation with your writing can help you figure out what works and what doesn't for your blog. But, no matter what, focus on quality. Proofread your stuff. Make people believe that you know what you're talking about.
- Stay true to yourself. Even though you want to try and hone in on what people want to read by trying a variety of approaches, you also want to stay true to yourself. Don't write about something you don't enjoy. And certainly don't write about something you don't believe in, just because it's what you think people want to hear. Stay true to your own convictions; your voice will shine through.
- Don't make comparisons. No two blogs are the same, because no two bloggers are the same. You shouldn't be comparing yourself to others, or feeling bad because you don't feel like you stack up. If all bloggers were the same, what would be the point? Be who you are, and others will undoubtedly appreciate it.
- Read and comment on other blogs. If you remain in your own little blogging bubble, it's going to be much more difficult for people to find you, and — more importantly — relate to you. Read other travel blogs. Leave comments and share your insights. After all, how can you expect others to do the same on your blog if you're not doing it yourself? Plus, reading other blogs can give you a sense of different styles, and perhaps help you figure out the sorts of things you do and do not want to write about yourself.
- Be active in social networking. Start a Twitter account. Utilize StumbleUpon. Create a Facebook page. Engage with your potential readers, and forge some online relationships with other travel bloggers. Not only will you make some friends, but it's likely that you can help each other out by driving new traffic to one another's sites.
- Be open to guest blogging. A good way to gain some free exposure when you're just starting out is to write a guest post for another (perhaps even more successful) blog. Save something good for your guest posts, and you'll likely be rewarded with some new readers.
- Try new things. Never tried your hand at video editing? Not sure if travel photography is really your thing? Try it out anyway. Who knows, you may discover a new talent. And adding things like strong images and video to your blog will only make it more appealing.
And, most importantly:
- Don't give up. If travel blogging is really what you want to pursue, then don't let those rough days get you down. Don't let anybody tell you that you'll never succeed. Because, if you're serious about it, I think you can make it happen. You have to be persistent. You have to actively go after what you want. Eventually, it will pay off.
The frustrating days suck. But, often, at the end of those days, I get an e-mail from someone who has just discovered my blog, or a great comment, or a kind retweet from someone I respect. And those make all the difference.
So hang in there, fellow travel bloggers.
Because, yes, it seems there is somebody out there, paying attention.
Do you sometimes get frustrated with blogging, too? How do you cope?
Amanda Williams is the award-winning blogger behind A Dangerous Business Travel Blog. She has traveled to more than 60 countries on 6 continents from her home base in Ohio, specializing in experiential and thoughtful travel through the US, Europe, and rest of the world. Amanda only shares tips based on her personal experiences and places she's actually traveled!
153 comments, 71 re-tweets, and 135 stumbles for this entry alone, and this blogger complains she’s not a popular one? Or not popular enough? What a joke!
Well, in my defense, before this post, I WASN’T very popular at all! Talk about ironic.
I just started blogging about our upcoming journey to Asia with my husband and two children. Thanks for this post….I’m just starting to find out how vast the travel blogging community is!
Well good luck with blogging, and with your upcoming trip to Asia! The travel blogging community IS vast, but it’s also incredibly supportive and fun to be a part of. Just stay true to yourself, blog about what YOU want to blog about, and you’ll be great.
Amanda, I’ll try to condense my reply as I have so many opinions on this. Firstly-what an excellent article. I love how you turned it solution focused after you outlined potential problems. I can relate to a lot of this, except I never get jealous. I know that cool kid of blogging has worked damn hard to get where they are and deserve to be where they are. “Good on them” I say.
I agree with Aussie Chris, I blog for me as I enjoy it BUT truth be told I do get frustrated when I have low comments and traffic….and I shouldn’t-as you have stated above. My favourites were “stay true to yourself” and “don’t give up.” Simple but effective advice for any arena 🙂
I’m so glad you responded well to this, Anthony. 🙂 It’s been great to receive such fantastic feedback on what was originally written as a mini-rant post with some tips tagged onto the end. I think everybody gets frustrated with blogging at some point – even the “cool kids”! So it’s always nice to know that other people feel the same way.
Damn I’m late to this party by the looks of it. I blog for me, just me. I started it all to document my travels for myself and my friends/family. I also wanted to give a bit of help to people looking to do the same as me because I was frustrated about not being able to find some of the information.
It’s never been about trying to make money, just about telling my story.
And that’s really the best way to go about it, Chris! Just blogging for yourself, first and foremost, is the best approach, in my opinion. And, if others decide they enjoy reading the story you’re telling, well then that’s an added bonus.
Thanks for re-posting this on twitter today, I really needed to read this. Thanks for the reminder that patience and persistence are key 🙂
I need the reminder myself sometimes! Glad it helped. 🙂
I think Gary pretty much summed up the reality of travel blogging. And Audrey and Dan ARE cool.
We have had the opportunity to meet Gary, once for dinner in NYC and traveled with Dan and Audrey for a week or so in Argentina. And having met them and many others does change our relationship with them. I am not a big commenter on blogs, but if I do comment, it is most likely because I either know them or have a connection with the article. It’s not because I don’t have the time, but more so because I am like that socially in person as well. But, my point is, relationships are very important.
It’s also about time and beating the competition. We are coming up on 2 years of blogging. When we started, the market began to get crowded, relatively speaking. And now, it’s flooded. This is all do to social media and the continued proliferation of the Internet. Google is king and Google likes you to be around for a while and likes you to have a lot of content. Many of the travel bloggers out there now will not exist after they finish traveling. That’s probably a good chunk of people. Ayngelina described this pretty well through travel generations.
Another thing that takes a lot of time and focus is SEO and other technical things that many writers dislike. Once I had the time to learn about and focus on SEO, things really began to change in terms of traffic. It’s the challenging side of blogging for many of us, but it is an important part.
Most importantly, as almost everyone has pointed out, stay positive if you enjoy what you are doing. When we enjoy something, we have a higher rate of success. And time will always remain a battle, but it will believe it will happen.
Thanks for the words of encouragement, Jason. And I consider myself lucky, then, for you to have commented on my content. 🙂
I know this whole blogging thing is tough. But, if it were easy, then everyone would be wildly successful at it, right? I’ve been at it for less than a year, but I’ve already come a long way. For me, this isn’t something that’s just going to fizzle out once I’m no longer traveling (partially because I’m not even traveling at the moment!). This is something I want to pursue – maybe even as more than just a hobby someday.
But, until then, I’m just going to do my thing and keep enjoying it. And that’s enough for me right now.
This post is exactly what I needed. I started by blog as a means for my family to keep track of me on my travels, but now I want it to be so much more. My blog is only a few months old and I feel like I still have so much to learn. I think, as bloggers, we take offense that people must not like our thoughts or ideas if they don’t read our blog. It’s certainly not the case, but it can often feel that way. That’s again for this uplifting post. 🙂
I’m so glad I could offer up something encouraging for you to read. I think we all need that from time to time. Good luck with your blog!
Reading this post make me happy, and hopeful too. We haven’t been producing many articles lately, since we were on national parks a lot, and then family events hit. Haha, is that an excuse? Well, glad to know I’m not alone, glad to read this post. It’s easier to deal with worries if we can spell that out! Btw, love the photo illustration.
You’re most certainly not alone, and I’m glad this post could give you a little hope! Thanks for reading, and I’m glad you liked the photos I chose!
Hey Amanda,
I just came across your blog and I really love this post. I do think the most important thing to do is to keep going and focus on relationships, be yourself, and try new things. This is something I find myself telling… myself. 🙂 Also, I think I saw “Findlay” Ohio somewhere in here… Is that where you are? ‘Cause I know where that is, and have been there many times!
Hey Ryan! I’m so glad you stopped by, and happy that you could identify with this post. I know it’s not always easy to keep your chin up when blogging gets tough, but just being yourself and keeping at it really is the best advice I can give!
And yes, I live in Findlay, Ohio!
OMG… hahaha…. AND you like LOTR! Fate has brought us together. 🙂
Haha, clearly it has! I’m glad you’ve discovered my blog!
Nice blog ! Brings out the sentiments of the travel bloggers. The pic of battery park is amazing !
Thank you, Sankalp! Glad you enjoyed it. And thanks for the compliment on the photo. It’s one of my favorites I took in NYC, and I thought it kind of complimented this post nicely.
Can’t believe I missed this post the first time around – I’m glad I caught it on Suzy Guese’s end of year post! As someone who just started this summer, I can so relate to this. It can be frustrating to write what I think is a great post and get almost no hits on it, but then at the same time, I get so excited when someone I don’t know “in real life” actually comments on something! I just try to remind myself that it’s all a work in progress and that I won’t appeal to everyone so I need to focus on what I know and love when I’m coming up with new posts.
p.s. I also love the high school analogies…they’re so true!
I’m so glad I submitted this post to Suzy’s year-end round-up! It seems quite a few people are reading it for the first time, which is great! I love being able to encourage my fellow bloggers.
It sounds like you’ve got a great attitude toward blogging – realizing that not everything you write will appeal to everyone and accepting that. It’s tough to do, I know! The key really is just being persistent and keeping at it, even on the slow days when you feel like nobody is paying attention. Because, guess what? Somebody probably IS paying attention, and you’re definitely not alone!
amanda this is SO incredible! i’m just getting here via suzy guese’s best of. i love this! when i started in july of this year i didn’t even know how to tweet, but was encouraged to finally get going by a good friend already in the swing of it. i realized quickly that NONE of my other family or friends used twitter. holy crap what a deficit to start from- ha ha. initially i felt like a fly on the wall, then progressed to the girl standing close to the other kids waiting for an opportunity to jump in. i made lots of twitter mistakes and under-appreciated gestures (due to plain ignorance of what they meant) that i would deal with very differently now. finally i got into a groove and am so grateful for the amazing group of incredibly friendly, supportive and inspiring people i’ve *met* (you included!). of course a host of insecurities and challenges remain, but i’m hanging in there. awesome encouragement and great tips here for mitigating the “flight” in fight or flight. cheers to you! 🙂
Thanks, Lorna! I’m glad some new people are discovering (or re-discovering) this post in various year-end round-ups. Hands down, it’s my most popular post ever on this blog, and the amount of encouragement and feedback it’s garnered has been amazing! I never expected it, but it’s so awesome.
I’m glad to hear that you finally feel like you’re getting into the swing of things! It definitely takes some time, and it’s not always easy (as this post aims to communicate), but I think it’s completely worth it in the end. Hang in there! I think you’ve already got a great blog going (in fact, my boyfriend was reading over my shoulder last week and commented on the catchy title of your blog!), so if you just keep at it, I know you’ll succeed!
Love this post – and it’s all true. It is hard to not get jealous when you see the top guns getting ranked so high and receiving so much fb, twitter, comment loving and then wondering how it’s not happening to you even though you’re pretty much doing the same thing. At the end of the day though, you just need to stick in there and keep doing what you’re passionate about and hope that people just as passionate agree with you 🙂
Thanks for the support, Lynda! And you’re right – following your passions and being persistent can go a long way! And, at the end of the day, if you’re enjoying what you’re doing, the rest hopefully won’t matter so much.
It’s funny because @mobilelawyer and I once had a talk about how there seems to be generations of bloggers and I’m very close to the people who all seem to have started their blog at the same time I did (10 months ago) because we were the only ones commenting on each other blogs.
An online relationship is just like any other relationship. It takes time and it’s a give and take. I’d say I have very healthy comments but if you look back a few months you’ll see I was getting 4 comments max on a good day.
I have 100 blogs in my RSS that I comment on regularly and I’m still on the road. Those are 100 blogs that I’ve somehow formed a relationship with over months. Just as Jaime said, give it time and you will see your generation at the top of the list as my generation comes back home and forgets to blog.
It’s all a cycle and if you give enough, your turn will come.
Thanks for the kind words, Ayngelina. I like that idea of blogger “generations” — it makes sense.
It definitely is a give and take, but I’m confident that I give enough — of my time, support, and comments — to the blogs that I regularly read. And hopefully that gets reciprocated!
Ever since this post, I’ve seen a pretty decent increase in traffic and comments. Which is almost ironic, really, when you think about it. But hey, I won’t complain!
Yeah sometimes all it takes is a ´hey I´m here too!¨´ you have a great blog with solid content, it´s only going to go up from here
Thanks! I really appreciate the encouragement. 🙂 And yes, “I’m here, too!”
Excellent article! I can relate to your same feelings about travel blogging and agree with all of your tips. I like the point about staying true to yourself. The biggest reason that I am travel blogging is because I love to travel, take pictures, and share things with others. You’ve got an awesome blog here, keep pushing!
Thanks for the kind words, and for stopping by! I too blog because I enjoy doing it, and enjoy sharing my travels with others. But I think staying true to yourself is so important because, especially in the blogging world, people come to your blog because of YOU. And if you start trying to be like someone else, I feel like the readers can sense that and it cheapens the whole experience. Plus, what fun is it trying to fake a personality?