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Building an Audience: Jason Castellani of 2Backpackers.com

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travel blog audience

Remember our favourite travelling couple, Jason & Aracely of 2Backpackers.com?  Well we thought that their expertise needed to be delved into a little further, so today we have our friend Jason discussing how he built his rather phenomenal audience. Sound advice here folks…

1.  Hi Jason, thanks for interviewing for us again.  For those that didn’t read your last interview, could you briefly introduce yourself, your site and why you wanted to write a travel blog?

In 2009, triggered by a casual conversation, my wife, Aracely and I, decided to quit our jobs, sell our possessions and go travel to Central and South America for a year.  Before our departure date and during our research we became inspired by a few travel blogs and decided to start our own. Our travel blog, 2Backpackers.com, began as a chronicle of our personal stories, but has morphed into a community resource for couples traveling to Latin America.

travel blog audience

Travel Blog Audience – Trek Day 7- Torres Del Paine, Chile

2.  Who were/are your major influences when decided to create your own blog?

Our original idea was to create a travel story based on short videos.  This idea was based off of the entertaining videos from twoguysaroundtheworld.com. The site stopped receiving updates over 2 years ago, but it was our motivation to record our story and attempt to make it entertaining.  I still haven’t found anyone else who, till this day, who has made a more entertaining travel video.

Unfortunately, we quickly realized that producing video was extremely time consuming and uploading it was almost impossible from developing nations.

Our blog is over 3 years old, so at this point, there is very little I haven’t seen in terms of what bloggers are doing.  I now look towards larger sites for inspiration. What are the big community sites doing that we can do, or do differently.  We must constantly be improving ourselves to keep our blog afloat.

3.  How would you describe your writing style? How does it differ?

As a multi-contributor blog, there isn’t necessarily one writing style, but the articles are all driven towards sharing the experience of a place, adventure or tour and providing tips about traveling there.  Some writers are more personal than others, but overall we do want a personal style.  We aren’t going to compete with big brand online travel resources, therefore it benefits us more to offer a more intimate story.

Travel Blog Audience

Travel Blog Audience – Jason & Aracely looking over the Pacific Coast in San Francisco, CA

4. How would you describe your travel blog audience? Are they hardcore? Do they just come there once? What do you like about having an audience like yours?

Our audience is 20% returning customers to the website.  That’s as high as it has been since our first year blogging when people were following our personal story.  There also wasn’t many visits to the site back then.  Now, as the site is larger and has many more pages indexed and ranking on Google, we attract mostly one-time visitors.  It’s preferable to have a high return customer rate, but challenging to grow your blog and keep that rate high.  Visitors that only visit a website once are less likely to leave comments, share articles and engage on social media.  That’s another reason we prefer loyal customers, however I understand that our blog is no longer a personal story about Aracely and I backpacking for a year.  That personal story produced loyal customers, is something we have shifted away from.

The challenge is getting one-time visitors to engage.  We attempt to accomplish this through excessive social media integration.  We want to provide our visitors every opportunity possible to share an article.  I strongly believe social media will drive our site to 30,000 visitors a month.

5. What is the best way to get a readers attention? How have you managed to stoke your readers interest so frequently?

Awesome pictures.  Visuals attract attention. This is no secret, yet there are many that still don’t take full benefit of the opportunities great pictures can provide.  If you are an incredible writer, then you can stand on that alone, but for most of us, including me, we can’t rely on basic writing skills to grow our website.  We rely on beautiful travel photos from around the world.  Make them big, and put them at the top of the post.

Travel Blog Audience

Travel Blog Audience – Road Trip Day 3- Drive to Surire

6. How do you interact with your audience? What tools work best?

I interact with our audience on Facebook.  Facebook is where most people spend most of the online day.  If that’s where your audience is, then you must be there too.  You wouldn’t set up a lemonade stand across town from the football stadium.  You go to the football stadium.  I have invested heavily to build Facebook integration into our site and build a good Facebook fan base.  We produce the articles on2backpackers.com, but we interact with those articles on Facebook.

The Facebook commenting system integration is the greatest tool we use to accomplish this.

Travel Blog Audience

Travel Blog Audience – Jason and Aracely Travel on Facebook

7.  What are your thoughts on networking with other bloggers to grow your audience? How do you do it and how does this help?

Networking with other bloggers is very important in the initial stages of growing your audience and increasing exposure.  Once your blog is large and overwhelming by itself to manage, networking becomes a challenge. You must choose your time and investments wisely.  Retweeting each other’s posts, sharing Stumbles and commenting on other blogs won’t get you to 50,000 visits a month, but they will help you get started.

There are other ways to network with bloggers, such as sharing investments of services, web development and affilate programs.  The most popular networking is the sharing of sales referrals.  This isn’t effective until you have enough sales to refer.  I believe these items are more appropriate when your blog breaks the 10,000 per month visit mark.

8.  What is the best thing about having a wide audience? What do you get personally from people sharing in your travels?

An audience in general is gratifying.  To be honest, it makes you feel proud of your accomplishments.  We like the feeling of sharing our experiences and inspiring others to see and do what we have.  We strongly believe the world would be a better place if everyone traveled in their lives.  And, we search for ways to make money to continue traveling indefinitely.  A blog can help accomplish that if done creatively.

9.  Tell us about your most popular post.

Our most popular post was published over 2 years ago.  It was controversial, which explains why it did so well in terms of traffic and attracting comments.  In general, the comments were mostly positive and understanding, but a few were offended and angry.  10 Weird Things About Latin America was intended to highlight things that appeared weird or strange to someone like us, from the United States of America.  The word “Weird” was the spark.  Understand that just one word in a title can cause an article to go viral, but it can also cause confrontation.

Travel Blog Audience

Travel Blog Audience – Moray – Cusco, Peru

10. And lastly, what would be your top 3 tips to a new blogger trying to build an  audience?

  1. Understand SEO from the beginning.  Many of us find ourselves fixing poor SEO strategies or a lack of SEO, from when we first started publishing articles.  Those old, original articles will be very valuable 3 years later and it’s important that the SEO was done correctly.  Poor SEO will also slow your initial growth.  If you don’t understand it, hire someone to set it up and provide you some guidance.  That doesn’t mean pay $100 to your domain provider to get you listed on a bunch of search engines.  That’s bogus.
  2. Focus on Social Media as much as your physical blog.  People are on social media, today, not on your website.  Don’t try to avoid that fact or defeat it.  Just accept it and understand how to benefit from it.
  3. Be willing to invest just like you would in a traditional business. No investments means slow growth and slow returns.  We must always invest in our business.

Wise words Jason!  Thanks very much for sharing and featuring on our site again.

I’m a major fan of 2Backpackers- especially since Jason has let me write for them as a featured blogger over the last few months. But don’t just take my word for it, go over and check the site out.  Like them on Facebook and say hello on Twitter. Networking people!

Kiri

If you have a blog you’d like to share or some advice to offer, contact us for an interiew


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