What To Expect From Your First Three Months Of Blogging

Volunteering at Orphanage in Nepal

It has been just over three months since I started this Travel Blog. I created solo female nomad to offer advice, tips and guides on traveling as a solo female.

During the first three months of blogging I was faced with frustrations, challenges and some successes!

I realise that many of you are just starting out too, so I want to let you know what to expect from your first three months of travel blogging.

Mistakes!

Oooh, lots of them. Having started blogging with no web building or blogging experience I had to learn fast. I spent a couple of months researching the business before setting up this blog, but the glitches and mistakes still came.

For instance, I spent way too much time focusing on the theme and messing around with the background color, when I could have been focusing more on the content.

Another mistake I made was changing the theme too early; only a month after starting this blog. This resulted in my site no longer being indexed by Google. There are conflicting views on whether changing the theme affects indexation, but it did affect mine. Before I changed the theme, almost all my pages could be found on Google, afterwards none.

Challenges

Minimal Traffic. During the first few months Google can be slow and temperamental in indexing your site; as a result expect to have only a trickle of people coming to read your blog. Also you are still an unknown in the travel blogging community. There are a lucky few that have had their blog take off almost instantly; however, generally within the first few months of blogging expect no more than 20 visitors per day.

To overcome slow traffic you may think about good SEO to help the search engines find you. Good SEO will result in your website gaining traffic without your personal involvement. Effective SEO will focus on keywords in your titles and content, and good inbound links.

The Travel Blogging community is extremely crowded, so it’s not enough to rely on search engines picking you up.  You have to take an active role in broadcasting your message, whether it’s commenting on blog posts, participating in guest posts or taking part in blogging carnivals.

Getting known within the Travel Blogging community.  This is also a slow process. There is a fine line between commenting on blogs and taking part in blogging conversations, to appearing like a stalker!

Social Networking can help you become known and network in the travel community. I recommend Facebook, Twitter, Stumbleupon and Digg. Once you have set up your accounts the next step is identifying people within your niche.  Make connections with these people by liking them, following them or stumbling upon their findings.

Treat social networking more than a numbers game and interact with these people.

Near disasters

Be prepared for these to happen if you are new to the blogging world.

The disaster I faced was almost losing everything that I created on my blog. I was desperately trying to insert a tracking code for Google analytics. After doing so, I was faced with an error screen when I tried to access my blog! Thank goodness for my web hoster who came to the rescue and fixed it.

I highly recommend backing up your website before tweaking the website codes.

Ongoing Frustrations

My Facebook page.  Facebook is in the process of making many changes to their (and your!) Pages. With the use of applications such as Twitterfeed, it used to be that your posts would automatically feed to your page capturing the image that you inserted. It no longer pulls the image. In order for that to happen you need to go through the open graph protocol. This I hope to overcome and learn about.

The other glitch with the facebook page is that it does not register all the page likes that I receive. Again, I hope to work with facebook to correct this.

Increasing my traffic. I hope to tweak my SEO to receive more traffic. Also I hope to participate in more guest posts to become more known in the world of travel blogging.

The biggest challenge for me is to reduce my bounce rate. Ways to overcome a high bounce rate is reviewing the content and layout of the blog. Theres lots of tweaking ahead!

What I have done right!

I am happy that I have not monetised solofemalenomad.com. My main focus is on building a community and improving the content of my site.

The major success is actually starting my blog! I am not a professional writer, or photographer, and did not expect to create a top ten website. What I do want to do though is share my experiences of traveling as a solo female and offer tips and advice.

Selecting the right niche. There does not seem to be many middle aged solo female travelers out there. This is mainly due to the fact that many females in their mid-life have settled down with families and careers. I want to show people that it is possible to live a life of travel in your middle years, and that you do not have to live the cookie cutter lifestyle of kids and mortgages.

The first three months of blogging have been a challenge, but I have learned so much about blogging and web development. It has been more enjoyable than I expected.

My goal for the next three months is to offer tips and advice to other solo female travelers, entertain people on the countries and places that I visit, and motivate others to do the same.

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