As a former middle school English teacher, Carly Heyward knows a thing or two about persuasive writing.
“I used to talk with my writing students a lot about audience,” said Heyward, who now works full-time as a travel advisor in Atlanta, Ga. “And it’s the same with my travel clients today — you really need to know your audience.”
A longtime international traveler, Heyward has visited more than 75 countries and all seven continents. She took advantage of her summer vacations while she was still teaching to hit that number, and she launched her travel blog, Flight of the Educator, in 2016. Part of the reason she started the blog was to answer the many questions her friends routinely asked about her international trips.
Your blog posts are like real estate — very important real estate.
“Then I started working with SEO [search engine optimization] and actually trying to write ranking articles, instead of just whatever occurred to me, trying to get eyes on it and get some ad revenue,” Heyward said. “When I started getting more followers and more page visits, I also got a lot more questions from people asking me to help them plan their own trips. And I was like, ‘Well, why not try and get paid for this?’ So, I signed up to be a travel agent.”
Early on, Heyward sold travel only part time, but she ultimately decided to quit teaching after the pandemic to focus full-time on her career as an advisor. She regularly sells vacations to clients interested in Antarctica, the Galapagos or safaris in Africa, but Heyward believes that her success as an advisor came out of the work she put in early on, developing an audience for Flight of the Educator, which attracted more than 23,000 views a month at its peak.
How To Start a Travel Blog
If you’re an advisor intrigued by blogging, Heyward says to first carefully consider what it is you hope to accomplish.
“I think the biggest thing to decide is: Do you want to be hustling for the SEO … or do you just want to use your blog as a resource?” Heyward said. “If you're already selling at least $500,000 a year, you're probably just having a blog for resource things, like the common packing list for cruise ships, or what to do at a cruise port. In that case, it’s well worth your effort, because now you're slimming down your workload, [answering] common questions from clients.”
Heyward noted that Flight of the Educator functions as an important resource tool these days for her existing clients, providing experienced know-how about a host of fundamental questions.
However, advisors aiming to attract new clients through blogging will need to concentrate on SEO strategy.
“And that can be a lot,” she cautioned. “It’s a whole lot of technicalities. And do you have the time, the drive, and the ability to learn all that stuff? It’s certainly a little more intense.”
A blog is a fantastic resource, but it is also very time-consuming. It has to be consistent.
Consistency is Key
Allison Jones, who co-owns Destinations to Explore Inc. out of Jacksonville Beach, Fla., and who has been selling travel for 25 years, started her popular Jones Family Travels blog with her husband in 2008. The site regularly attracts more than 50,000 visitors per month, and it has generated a tremendous amount of vacation-selling business over the years.
But, like Heyward, Jones was quick to say that SEO-focused blogging requires a great deal of work.
“A blog is a fantastic resource, but it also is very time-consuming,” Jones said. “You can't just create a blog and post on it once every two or three weeks. It has to be consistent, because if a customer comes to your blog and sees, ‘Oh, well, they didn't post anything in the past three weeks, maybe they're not active, maybe they're not selling travel anymore,’ that causes trust to disappear."
Jones said search engine algorithms these days favor longer, content-rich blog posts that are roughly 2,500 words long. Her team at Jones Family Travel posts twice a week, every week.
“It's almost a full-time job to do it — if you want it to be good,” Jones explained. “If you are looking to bring in new customers, you definitely need to post at least two times a week.”
Jones and Heyward agree that photos are also essential for effective travel blogging. And while beautiful shots certainly add value to a post, Heyward said informative images are also important.
One example?
“Taking a picture of the hotel bathroom, so people know how big it is,” Heyward said. “I try to think about [showing the] creature comforts.”
Jones also noted that she tries to post only horizontal photos in her blog.
“Keep in mind that your blog posts are like real estate — very important real estate,” she explained. “So stay away from vertical photos, because they take up a lot of your space, [especially] if someone's looking at your blog on their phone. You want to make sure there's more [written] content, so having horizontal pictures is much better.”
Helpful SEO Tools For Advisors
Jones recommends SEO products by Yoast, including the online company’s free SEO Academy module.
“Yoast can help you see if you are maximizing the keywords within your blog post, and if you're doing everything to potentially help it get searched by search engines,” she said.
Meanwhile, Flight of the Educator’s Heyward said she’s made extensive use of products and tools at KeySearch.co and Google Search Console to better understand how keywords impact rankings for her blog posts, as well as how to tailor what she writes to fill existing gaps on the internet.
With a more narrow niche — as a brand, as a travel agent and as a blogger — you’re going to have more success.
“One time I discovered that 800 people in a month had searched for ‘clothes for Antarctica,’” Heyward said. “And then I found that no one had really written anything for that, because it turns out ‘clothes for Antarctica’ is kind of a weird phrase. So, I titled my blog post: ‘Clothes for Antarctica.’”
Both Jones and Heyward make use of social media, too, hoping to drive traffic to their blogs through those platforms. Jones prefers Pinterest and the app Tailwind, which offers a product call Tailwind Tribes that she absolutely loves.
“There is an extra cost to it, but again, it is one of those resources where it does the work for you,” Jones said. “You literally just share your blog post once and schedule it through Tailwind Tribes, and then they continue to get the content out for you.”
Specialization is also critical, according to both Jones and Heyward, who say consistently focusing a blog on a unique niche provides real advantages.
“If you're focused, for example, on travel with your furry friend — traveling with your pets — you're going to get a more consistent following,” Jones said. “If you're selling honeymoons, everything on your blog should be focusing on honeymoons. With a narrow niche — as a brand, as a travel agent and as a blogger — you’re going to have more success and more of a following.”
