In this article, I will talk to you about the steps I took before monetizing my travel blog.
Steps to monetize a travel blog
Let’s assume from the start that you have a WordPress blog installed with your own domain name and your own hosting. At this point, you have a blank blog.
It is almost mandatory to have your own domain name to gain more credibility with advertisers, ad networks, and readers.
I will roughly give you the steps you need to take to have the prerequisites for a blog that can be monetized.
On-site (on site)
- Install useful plugins such as: All in SEO, All in webmaster, Akismet, Contact form 7, a caching plugin, Google XML sitemaps, a blog backup software such as WordPress Backup to Dropbox. These are the most basic plugins.
- Publish content regularly; ideally, have at least 20 to 30 articles after 3 months.
- Sign up on social networks, Google+, Twitter, Facebook, FeedBurner and open an account there; there are useful plugins to automatically post on social networks when you publish an article such as Social or Twitter Tools.
- Switch to a proper architecture for your site.
- Add a contact form, create a page to describe the site author,
SEO for a travel blog:
- Register the site on about fifty directories.
- Comment on other travel blogs every 5 days (at least 10 different blogs each time for 2 months).
- Write guest posts on other travel blogs.
- Post new articles on social networks.
By doing this, you will have different links in Google’s eyes. Your site will have a certain authority that you need to establish to make it known.
Then, if you want to improve its SEO, write guest posts. If you want to make it known, comment and interact with other bloggers on social networks.
Some of these tasks seem simple but they require a lot of time, and working on your SEO is often repetitive work.
The little extras of a travel blog
- Add a newsletter with a free e-book to retain visitors and collect emails.
- Post in Digg-like sites to make your blog articles more popular.
- Install plugins to facilitate the visit of your site or suggest similar articles such as WP Most Popular Post or Related Content.
- Build loyalty among other bloggers by installing plugins such as Top Commentators, CommentLuv, KeywordLuv, etc.
- Do some link exchanges.
Even by doing all this, you are far from being able to monetize your site, but you have done the prerequisites to monetize it. The way you do each step is important, so take your time and prefer quality over quantity.
So, these are the steps I took to monetize my travel blog. However, at the beginning, I did all these steps without knowing that I could make money with my site. These are just the prerequisites, and you need to know many other things to monetize your travel blog.
And you, what have you done in addition to monetize your travel blog?
