You’ve read everything there is to know about SEO. You are a master of key words and phrases. Your Pinterest is tightly scheduled; your Tweets ready and waiting. You’ve spent hours turning your Instagram account into a tastefully curated feed and are an encyclopedia of trending hashtags.
But yet growth is still slow – painfully slow. You watch as you gain an Instagram follower, only to lose five an hour later. Trying to grow your own online community has turned into a unique form of torture – one that makes you want to carefully place your phone in the road, before gently driving over it.
When we began our blog in 2014, we were acutely conscious of the task that lay ahead of us. If we were to focus solely on growing our own immediate audience, the we knew that things might take years to establish themselves.
So, we decided to do things differently.
Turning growth strategies on their head and ignoring the demands of Tailwind and Hootsuite, we stopped focusing on our own audience and instead, turned our attention to others. Across all social media platforms were waiting endless collections of large, engaged and relatable audiences; all of whom were interested in what we were: travel. Rather than growing our own social media following, we began to wonder: how we might use these ready made audiences for our own growth and gain?
We decided to give this strategy a go and within two years, were working with global brands and had a leveraged and extended audience of nearly 10 million – all from our own audience of 50,000.
In this podcast episode we share with you our somewhat alternative guide to growing a successful blog and turning your online community into a business. The best bit? You don’t need a huge audience of your own to do it.
Have a listen – we hope it helps! Let us know what you think in the comments below.
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13 comments
Really interesting and useful podcast. Thank you for sharing all of your insights. I wonder if you’ll get lots of people contacting you for collaborations to get access to your audience as a result! 🙂
Thank you Jade – we’re glad it was useful! x
Thank you, this was great! I think our biggest issue is how do you appeal to bigger channels when your following is small but your content is good? I believe in our content, but we don’t have the followers and traffic to show how a collaboration with us would benefit the bigger channel. Definitely some good takeaways here though!
Hi Brian! Good question! For some brands we were eager to work with, we did a lot of work ‘in-kind’ (i.e. no cost to the brand) to show the value and quality of the content we could create for them. Once this was done, we were then in a stronger position to negotiate on larger campaigns.
Honestly, this is the best advice I’ve ever been given about how to grow my blog. There’s so much information out there with tips and pointers, but you two really go in-depth to explain how this works for you. I’ve been following this method to an extent since beginning my blog, but I didn’t really appreciate the value of it now. Thank you so much for your insight! Do you believe it can still be beneficial if applied not to Instagram, but to blog content and other social media such as Facebook?
http://www.thegingerpassports.com
Dani, we are so pleased this was helpful! we didn’t want it to come across as making anyone suck lemons! Oh yes, we completely apply it to other platforms – the blog most specifically, but I’m sure you could also apply it to FB. It’s all about just maximising what opportunities you have already (on or outside of FB) to your advantage, rather than thinking that your only strength lies in your immediate following xx
Ladies, thank you so much for this podcast!!! I think I really needed it, first to relax a bit, and then to start thinking things differently. I started writing, and then stopped, honestly?, scared of all the blogs out there and the amount of Instagram accounts… how could I do it being so little? I still fight against that feeling… but decided to start writing again as I really enjoy it.
One quick question… how do you pitch tourism boards? Any advise on that? Or you just email them the post and thats it? Thank you again, it was super helpful!!!!! Now, time to put that into practice (insert scary face here haha) xoxo
Hi Ana! We’re so glad it was helpful! In terms of tourist boards – it’s rarely the tourism board recruiting but actually a PR firm. So, maybe get on the radar of some well know travel PR firms so they can consider you for their clients! xx
Thank you!!!!!
Girls this was such a great listen! All inspired 🙂 I just contacted my next two hotels I’m staying at about an instagram takeover 🙂 Thank-you! xX
Thanks gorgeous girl!! So glad it was of help.
Hi Ladies. I have been following you both for a while now and this is the first podcast of yours I’ve listened to. It’s not only engaging but also super useful and different to a lot of other information out there! So thank you for all your hard work on it (including having to record it all over again 😉 ). I’ve literally just launched my blog and keen to use it as a platform to nudge my way into freelance travel writing etc. Your advice has got me brainstorming all over a pad of paper and I have signed up to the Lonely Plant Pathfinders community too. So thank you again and keep up with your inspiring work, as ever!
https://travellingtam.com/
Thank you so much Tamara, we’re so glad it was helpful! I think sometimes we get stuck in a rut of thinking when it comes to growing our blogs – focusing just on our own following, rather than who can lend a helping hand! Good luck, we’ll be rooting for you! x