As I have started this blog for a digital marketing project at the University of Lincoln, I have to take a short break until my blog was examined. However, don't worry, once it has been assessed and will keep on posting about new places in OZ.
Now it's time for me to review how this whole project went.
Writing a blog?! I had no idea about it. However, it was absolutely clear to me that I will write about Australia- traveling is my passion, I spent an absolutely awesome year down under and I think the most important thing is to write about something you are really enthusiastic about.
Getting started
While searching for the right platform, I was already facing some difficulties. First of all, I did not know which platform to choose and it was difficult to work through different surfaces. However, I thought that I should carefully weigh the fundamental basis, the actual platform, of my blog.
Blogspot was one of my first trials. However, I rapidly recognised that I do not like the surface, it was not that easy to operate on and, in my opinion, it did not offer that much scope for creativity. Also, Wordpress and Tumblr did not convince me. Finally, I ended up using Wix. It took a couple of hours to see how this whole thing worked. However, it seemed like an appropriate platform, and meanwhile, I am quite happy with my choice. This platform is pretty straightforward, offers a lot of different features and interactive items. However, one of the disadvantages is that you need the premium version for many features which requires fees. It is not essential but you often get asked to purchase the premium version, and they prevent you from using specific apps, especially for analysing your platform, for example crazyegg.com which would have been very helpful.
Objective
My target audience are people who are interested in travelling and want to discover new places around Australia. It was my objective to inspire people to travel to Australia by showing them all the different areas in Australia where I have been and sharing my experience. Moreover, I wanted to arouse interest in my blog by providing insider tips which are not published in a standard travel guide.
Based on comments of my posts and my Instagram page, I can say that I have met my goals; several people mentioned that they are impressed by the pictures and that the blog inspire them as well as they want to go travelling again.
Promotion
To reach a lot of people and obtain many visitors was probably the trickiest part of this project. In the first instance, I was using my own social media channels (Facebook and Instagram) to promote my blog. After I have uploaded a little bit of content, I continuously announced new blog posts and tried to call attention to my blog.
For example:
However, as not every one of my friends is interested in travelling, I started looking for a different way of promoting my blog to reach my target audience better. Therefore, I posted the link to my blog on several travel forums such as Tripadvisor and LonelyPlanet.
Nevertheless, I had the feeling that this was not very effective and the results still could have been better. Therefore, I set up my own Instagram account at the beginning of March, to additionally promote my blog by announcing every new post and try to interact with my target audience.
Visitors
I was analysing my blog through WebStat which is a basic app provided by the website. Due to the versatile promotional activities, I gained visitors from different countries as shown on the map below. However, most of them were from Europe.
Moreover, I could see that the numbers of visitors continually increased as shown in the graph below. In total, l got 737 visitors as off 15th of April 2019.
Posts were viewed approximately about 80 times and the most traffics was between 8 am to 4 pm.
I have always tried to engage people by offering a forum, the option of direct mailing to get in touch and asked questions in many posts. Looking back, this was not accepted very well. However, I assume that is linked to the fact that people had to sign up to interact. However, the interaction on Instagram was much better which was gratifying.
All in all, I really enjoyed this project and look forward to being back!
Safe travels!
Thanks a lot guys :-)
I wish you a lot of luck as well.
Looking forward to reading your next post and good luck with your assessment!