Phototravellers: How to set up a successful blog

Launching a well-known travel blog and making a living from it – still a dream of many bloggers. But nowadays it’s anything but easy to get started with a blog. Biggi and Flo from Phototravellers have made it. They tell us more about their recipe for success, the necessary requirements and blogging in times of crisis.

Blogs and SEO

Your travel blog has been around since 2010, and blogging has come a long way since then. What are your personal insights from this time? What do you have to do differently today?

We started out as a classic travel diary for friends and acquaintances. That was the original blogging. Today it’s completely different – at least if you have to or are allowed to make a living from blogging, like we do. Back then, we wrote on a whim – that’s no longer possible today.

At least not if you want to achieve a certain relevance in the search engines. SEO, i.e. search engine optimisation, is a very important aspect of this. But you must never forget the reader. Even today, we still write primarily for our users and not for the search engine.

Phototravellers.de is one of the travel blogs with the widest reach in Germany. What specific measures have you used to achieve this?

First and foremost with a lot of work and diligence. Until 2018, we both still had permanent jobs. We both have a background in journalism (Biggi worked at Süddeutscher Verlag, among others) and have writing and photography in our blood, so to speak.

After a normal day at the office, I often continued blogging from home until three in the morning. However, three to four hours of sleep is not sustainable in the long term. So in 2018, we decided to concentrate fully on blogging.

We have not regretted the move. In July, we expect around 300,000 readers to come to our blog – which of course makes us very happy.

Create reach

What role do co-operations with companies and other magazines play? What are your best tips for establishing them?

It doesn’t happen overnight. Even in the digital age, personal contacts are the best door opener. One way to make new contacts is at events, in our case at the International Tourism Fair (ITB) in Berlin.

Such contacts must then be constantly cultivated. Those who then deliver good work can often look forward to follow-up orders or recommendations.

You have recently switched to Raidboxes. There were various problems with your old hoster. What were they? And how did you get them under control with us?

First of all, we are delighted with the extremely fast loading times at Raidboxes. In the past, we have always had problems with this. In the meantime, this has also become an important ranking factor.

We used to have server outages from time to time. With more than 300,000 visitors a month, it hurts a lot when the blog is unavailable for an hour or two. Some plugins that didn’t work as they should before are finally working perfectly.

The technology and WordPress hosting

How do you ensure that your blog runs as efficiently as possible? With more than 400,000 page views per month, this is an important factor…

Firstly, we always keep WordPress and all plugins up to date. This is also important for security. Then we have opted for a fairly large package with you.

Hosting is of course not cheap. But if you run your blog full-time, you shouldn’t save money in the wrong place. Just half a second of loading time can make a big difference at the end of the month.

You were both full-blooded journalists before you started your own blog in 2018. How much does that help you?

That helps a lot on the one hand. As former print journalists, we know how important good research and a pleasant writing style are. On the other hand, completely different laws often apply on the Internet.

For a print newspaper or magazine, you don’t have to adhere to SEO principles. The important thing is to grab the reader from the introduction to the end. On the Internet, however, people are often looking for very specific information without a lot of “fuss” around it.

How do you deal with the issue of transparency? The travel blogger scene in particular is considered susceptible to surreptitious advertising… Are your readers becoming more critical?

We finance many of our trips entirely ourselves. This is simply so that we can experience what interests us most on site. In the case of co-operations, we clearly indicate this in the articles. But here, too, it is important to us to only recommend things that we personally like.

No, to be honest, we don’t feel any difference here compared to before. As I said, however, we also label all articles that are created as part of a cooperation. We don’t publish anything that we don’t stand behind.

Earn money with blogs

What knowledge should you generally have in order to run a blog professionally?

First of all, you have to enjoy writing. If you set up a blog to make a quick buck or to get free products (beware of the tax office), you will sooner or later have to give up. In that case, a blog is nothing more than an office job. In our opinion, only those with passion can be successful in the long term.

You also need to have everything that is important for any self-employment. In addition to passion, every founder must be able to cope with setbacks – because they will happen. Even those who want to see a fixed income in their bank account every month are likely to have problems with self-employment.

The coronavirus crisis has clearly demonstrated this. From one day to the next, we lost countless planned collaborations – and therefore income. We know some hobby bloggers who have thrown in the towel in the face of the massive loss of visitors in the wake of the coronavirus pandemic.

But for us it was clear: every crisis is also an opportunity – so fire away. We showered our two working students with orders during the crisis. Financially, it was a gamble with fire – but it paid off.

Success with a niche

In 2010, it was much easier to start a new blog. What advice do you have for bloggers who are just starting now? How can you still stand out from the vast amount of content?

All beginnings are difficult. And this is even truer today than it was in 2010. If you start a blog because you simply enjoy writing, you can take a relaxed approach to blogging – as you did in the past – and start writing.

If you want to be successful in the long term and see blogging as a possible business, you should definitely come up with a very good concept. A memorable name (that is easy to pronounce and remember), a DE domain (and preferably all other important domains) and an appealing design (that also works on smartphones) are the basic requirements for a successful blog.

With a niche – such as a blog with the best cream cake recipes – you still have a good chance of becoming big in your field relatively quickly. Anyone tackling non-specific topics – such as travelling in general – faces huge competition today. In addition to high-reach blogs with many backlinks, there are also larger companies that spend huge amounts on SEO.

Anyone starting out here definitely needs a lot of patience and capital. Running a professional blog is quite expensive. In addition to hosting, there are some costs, such as for plugins, special programming, the tax consultant or the trademark registration, which we highly recommend.