After gaining real 200,000 followers on social media in 15 months, I think I have a right to say a few words about it.. What I will write is not encyclopedic information, but things based on my own experience.
Social media is now an indispensable part of our lives.. You must have social media accounts along with your web page.. It should be, but how do you stand out from the mushrooming travel blogs? That’s what’s hard. Unfortunately, it doesn’t work for you to travel around the world without money, to visit beautiful places, to talk about cheap travel methods.. ‘Cause everybody does it. Your trip should have a purpose and somehow project it. My advantage comes from being a photographer.. We have Turkish travelers who have traveled the world very well, but I have never seen a photographer among them.. In this way, I both reflected my location well to my followers and included them in my travels by telling the story of my portrait photos.. I have always been a person who likes to take portrait photos.. I preferred to meet the people living in that area and take their photos rather than taking photos with my feet on the beach.. Then I started to discover the natives in the countries I’ve been to. Even though local visits were extremely difficult and costly, the experience he gave me was incredible.. The effect of this was reflected on my followers and their interest in my trip increased even more.. When I started my trip 15 months ago, I used to say “human” as the main theme of my trips and it still is.
So what can you do?
If you are a photographer, do what I do.. People are tired of seeing beautiful buildings, squares, seas and beaches.. Set your main theme as “human” and continue your tour.. You will have a diverse and engaged audience. But as I said, you must have the ability to take pictures.. Unfortunately, good pictures are not taken by buying the most expensive camera.. Of course, if you also have a plain and readable language, things will go smoothly.. While describing the events and your experiences, do not go into unnecessary topics and do not prolong the article unnecessarily.. If you don’t have anything to say, don’t tell.. No, I was sick, I couldn’t get up in the morning, I missed the bus, I missed my family, I was very tired, etc. Do not share things that do not interest the followers.. Be simple, concise and clear. Another thing is, don’t share your own photo all the time.. Most female travelers do this. Look at the page of an X female traveler, two out of every five photos are of herself. In fact, some of them have themselves in every photo somehow 🙂 This event seems a little unnecessary to me.. Don’t do it.
Of course, it’s not enough to take pictures.. Your country texts on your website should also be in simple language.. Likewise, I missed the bus, don’t give room for unnecessary things to the reader like I’m sick.. Write in detail the cost of the place you stay, where you go, how you go, which vehicle you use.. This information is very important because the biggest problem of those who want to travel the world is the money problem.. If you support your route with a map, it can be a useful resource for those who will come to your site.. I said social media, but your website is also very important.. If your travel articles increase and the users who come to your site stay on your site for a long time, over time, Google will show you at the top of the searches.. Since the person who visits your website can follow you on your social media accounts, consider all these channels as a whole and remember that they are related to each other.
Make your travel articles absolutely unique.. Do not fill your site by scraping from right to left or copy/paste from wikipedia as some well-known travel sites in Turkey do.. When you do this, even though you will be shown in google searches at first, it will do more harm than good in the long run.. Likewise, there are those who take their travel articles from foreign travel sites and translate them into Turkish.. I don’t know what to say about these situations.. Another issue is definitely don’t buy fake followers either.. This kind of stuff is so funny to me, don’t make yourself look ridiculous.. Because that’s understandable eventually.
Another thing I’ve seen is that people are now extremely bored with travel shows on TV.. It is no longer realistic for the server to praise every place he goes, to describe every dish he eats and every drink he tastes as unbelievable.. Especially when travelers like us shared on their blogs, the programs on TV started to feel boring.. Don’t just talk about the good things just because you’ve been there, of course there are also negative things.. Tell them as well.
Well, if you are not a photographer, what could be the main theme of your trip?
Let me share a few of my own thoughts and conclusions from the questions I received.. You can examine the lives of pregnant women and newborn babies in the country you are visiting.. What do they eat, what do they drink, how do they live, do they take medicine? Questions like these come to me a lot.. I realized that there is such a need.. It is not possible for me to do it, but I think someone can use this theme. If not, you can find many topics such as study the education life in the place you go, look at coffee cultures, research herbal medicines and their benefits, focus on yoga for those who are interested in yoga, examine male-female relationships.. In other words, take your trip out of the mode of “I have a bad trip, I can travel strangely” and gather it around a subject.. Thus, you will have a unique way of traveling and you will be able to attract followers on the subject.. Of course, it is also possible that the companies related to the subject will support/sponsor you in the future.. Think about it, if you are examining the lives of pregnant women in the countries you visit, if your audience is like that, why shouldn’t companies selling products for pregnant women support/sponsor you?
A video alongside photos and articles you can also share. But know that the hardest thing is to shoot quality video and edit it.. It takes serious time, effort and knowledge.. If you don’t have experience in this field, I would say don’t get involved in the video business.. But if you are going to share a video, open a youtube channel and share it from there.. As your forward-looking videos increase, you can also earn money from youtube, albeit a little.. You can check out my Youtube page from the link.
Don’t say that I have a friend and he will do it while you are making your website.. Find someone who has a good grasp on the subject, pay whatever he can and have a solid site built. Considering that you will continue for many years, you can understand how important the website is.. Of course, the job does not end with building the site.. You should learn the technical side of the job, good or bad.. You should learn certain things such as what is WordPress, what is a domain, what is hosting, how to manage the user panel.
WordPress: www.rotasizseyyah.com the website was built with wordpress infrastructure. I mean, roughly, a platform that allows you to make a website.. There are paid/free themes.
Domain: The name “rotasizseyyah.com” on the www.rotasizseyyah.com website is called a domain. Turkish equivalent is the domain name.. It goes as far as .com, .net, .gov. Annual domain fee is between 6-7 usd. If you are going to be a long-term blogger, I would say buy a domain for at least 5 years.. Rumor has it that long-term domains help to rank higher in google.
Hosting: Have you purchased a domain?. Now you need to set up your site. The place where your site will be set up is called hosting. Let me explain roughly as follows; A computer is rented to you in companies that provide this service and your site is installed on that computer.. The quality of the hosting company, the good performance of the biglisayar you rent increase or decrease in direct proportion to the annual money you will pay.. If you have a high hit website, your hosting service should be very good.. Don’t be afraid of money.
If you do travel writing while your trip is going on, know that you will dedicate an average of 1/4 of your entire trip to these works.. So your time will be wasted too much.. I used to write my travel articles when I returned to Turkey, but now I am constantly traveling, so I write my travel article as soon as I finish that country.. Did he miss the end of the rope, the rest unfortunately feels like a sock rip.
Of course, before you start everything, you should find a nice name for yourself.. My advice is not to have a long name and the website address should be easy to understand.. Another difficult part of the job is to find an impressive name.
How should you do social media shares?
You don’t need to share dozens of photos about the region you go to.. Choose 4-5 quality photos on the subject and share them. Instead of writing “Buseyle coffee qeyfi” and posting, give some information about your location so that your followers can learn something new or better understand the photo you shared.. For example, let’s share the beach photo below in two different ways as an example;
Example 1: “Oops, the island, the water, the sands were amazing.. I will come here again next year. #sea #blue #starbucks #whitechocolatemocha”
Example 2: Go to this island of Ina on the Caribbean side of Panama from Panama City, all costs 100 USD. Accommodation in bungalow-style houses on the island, including 3 meals, is 20 USD per night.. You do not need to wear shoes and slippers as long as you stay on this 200-meter-long island, because everywhere is white beach sand.. It is one of the rare places where you can have such an experience.”
Which of these two types of posts do you think will attract the attention of your followers or add something new to them? I think 2. share 🙂
Also, let’s write something for the forest photo above.
Example 1: “Men value green. What a beautiful forest. If it was us, he would enter toki. #walking in the #forest #whitechocolatemocha”
Example 2: “We are in the Santa Elena Cloud Forests in Costa Rica. There are 4-5 different trails to walk.. I spent 6-7 hours here and walked about 12 km and saw the whole park.. It’s called a cloud forest because some parts of it actually stay in the clouds.. They say the vegetation here is richer than the amazons. In fact, it is one of the forests with the richest biodiversity in the world.. Besides the plants, it is possible to see a wide variety of birds and other animals.. Of course, it’s all up to your luck.. You usually hear a variety of bird sounds.. It was one of the most mystical places I’ve been to.” me again 2. i prefer comment. In other words, it will be more effective if you roughly share your posts in this way.
Do not use neighborhood dialect and slang words in your articles.. If you talk like that, the comments of the followers will be like that and a poor quality channel will emerge.. That’s why I always talked to you and us, whoever I didn’t know.. When you and me talk, 15-year-old boy qanka can text you, what’s up, what’s up?. That’s why I say take it seriously.. Another issue is that you should not enter political and religious topics in your articles.. Since our country lives in such extremes in these matters, you can see that people enter politics and curse each other even under an irrelevant post.. These are undesirable things.
If you are going to share such as 18 places to see before you die to save the day, or 24,5 places you will see in this country, know that that mushroom-growing trip Your place is ready among their blogs.
As your followers increase, you will inevitably come into contact with people from all walks of life.. There will be those who insult you in a pointless way, and then they will say, “I criticized it, what’s wrong with that?”. Unfortunately, there are many people who do not understand the difference between insult and criticism.. Here is the solution I found: Whoever hinders me, I delete the comment they made without question and I block the user as well.. There is no other solution to this. On the other side of the world, while traveling under difficult conditions and having barely found the internet, the only thing to do is to block and pass by those who have never been outside the country in their life, who are stunned from where they sit with a smart phone in their hand.
The most well-known of the social media channels, of course, is facebook.. But my personal opinion is that Facebook is turning into a garbage dump day by day.. That’s why I see instagram in better quality. For example, while you can see users aged 10-12 on Facebook, there is no such thing on Instagram.. In addition, I can say that user satisfaction is also on the ground, as Facebook is now 50% full of advertising content.. Out of my place here, I think Mark Zuckerberg slaughtered the goose that laid the golden egg.. I hope he doesn’t do the same for instagram. So you will understand, give a little more weight to Instagram.. In my opinion, 1 instagram user is equivalent to 5 facebook users.
Another detail is that the posts you make on facebook are not displayed to all your followers.. For example, you have 10 thousand followers.. If the post you made did not receive much attention, comments or likes in the first minutes, that post will be shown to a maximum of a thousand people, and your other 9 thousand followers will not even know about the event.. Because the facebook algorithm perceives this post as a poor quality post and does not show it to other followers for no reason.. The sub-message that Facebook administrators want to convey here is as follows; “If you want to reach many people with your posts, you will pay me and I will advertise your post”. Here, your followers should come to your page, add your page to the “interests list” and activate the “get notification” option so that they are aware of every post.. But the number of followers who do this is very few.. Here is a more useful platform in my opinion, since there is no such problem on Instagram and everything you share falls on the screens of the followers.
Finally, do not think that you are traveling around the world.. There are hundreds of thousands of people doing this in the world.. There are some people who do it in Turkey, but not everyone shares it on the internet like you and me.. I travel like this, fly like this, fly like this, oh my king, don’t get in their way and alienate yourself from people. The work you do, know that it is ordinary work. Although it is not very popular in Turkey yet, you will soon see a lot of travelers around.. Just as digital cameras became widespread and “Name Surname Photography” pages multiplied, traveler pages also mushroomed and will multiply.
You may need sponsors after you become a travel writer.. I explained how to find a sponsor in the link below;
How to Find a Sponsor?
