Darren Cronian of Travel Rants fame also publishes My Life in Leeds – a destination blog which showcases attractions and acts as a travel guide for Leeds in West Yorkshire, England.
How do you come up with new post topics?
At the moment I am concentrating on topics that I know people are searching for, i.e. Leeds attractions and writing in-depth guides. What I have started to do though is use tools like Twitter to monitor the buzz events that people are discussing and then writing about those events.
In July, we had a free music festival called Party in the Park in the city, so one of the writers put together a guide, highlighting the acts, information on the venue, and public transport information. That guide alone received nine hundred unique visitors, which is pretty incredible for a site only eight weeks old.
What was your most successful blog post ever?
The Party in the Park post has received the most traffic, but a number of the guides have already had a mention in the Guardian, Times and BBC. For Travel Rants there have been some pretty controversial posts written, which have generated thousands of visitors and hundreds of comments.
What is the most common mistake new bloggers make?
I have seen so many corporate blogs that have implemented a blog incorrectly; not switching on the permalinks feature to make the links SEO friendly, to not blocking duplicate content out of their robots.txt file. This causes a lot of work in the future and is simple to do before publishing that first blog post.
What are your 3 best tips for blogging?
Write about something that you enjoy, and if it’s a corporate blog that you’re writing for your company, make it fun for people to read. Don’t be corporate, and write corporately. Be a human, interact and network with other bloggers, and ask questions within your blog posts.
What are your most effective methods of attracting more readers?
For a start, hard work and dedication, but I think one of the things I learnt early on was that you have to network yourself online. Leave comments on other blogs within your niche. I really do believe that if you write unique content that people enjoy reading and commenting on then the rest takes care of itself. I spent zero time link building because so many people link to my posts.
I use social Twitter, but, I think my Travel Rants readership was born pre-Twitter, and it has just grown since using this and other social media tools. The majority of my traffic though comes from Google, and the good thing about WordPress is that if you implement it properly, it can be very search engine friendly. I write a new post and within 5 minutes it’s in the search results and getting traffic. This is incredibly useful when writing about a breaking news story, i.e. airport strikes, airline in administration etc
