Blog Pimping

Promoting your blog can take you down many avenues given the amount of available recommendations, plug-ins and other bells and whistles you can incorporate into your website to promote your blog.  It’s not that I am an in-decisive person but I do want to think about how I want to go about branding the blog in the long run and not just hitting a checklist for an assignment.  Perhaps not so surprising since I started out as a journalism major a lifetime ago, I am really enjoying the writing portion of the blog.  The topics are subjects I am familiar with and passionate about, however, I’ve decided I need to hire a Blog Pimp, so I can concentrate on the content. 

D. M Scott’s The New Rules of Marketing and PR, Chapter 17 best summed up where I needed to go:  “People read blogs because they want to find an honest voice speaking passionately about a subject.”  I am still basking in the afterglow of a summer trip to Italy, so I landed on travel as my blog.  

The resources I found most helpful in the assignment was to look at other travel sites and the approach they took with their blog.  I was pleasantly surprised to see there are several travel blogs reporting on the writer’s personal travel experiences with a much wider following that I would have first imagined.   Some of these may have started out as a ‘niche’ site for the author, but the best of the best seem to have taken it to an art form and made it a career.  Some of the blogs made me want to start planning and packing for my next trip as well as re-evaluate my ‘bucket list’ of destinations.    Creative site names such as Go Big or Go Home, Uncornered Market, Delicious Baby, and Wild Junket grabbed my attention, but pimping out a site name won’t keep the interest if the content and navigation of the site isn’t easy to understand.  These sites showed up in a ‘best of’ from  travel blogger Christopher Elliott.  If successful and continued, one of my goals would be to show up on this site sometime in the future.

In Chapter 13’s discussion on effective writing for buyers D. M Scott’s advice was geared more towards business, but applicable in several ways to my blog site Bucket List Travel Adventures.  “You should avoid jargon-laden phrases that are overused, unless this is the language the persona actually uses.”   I don’t think that means eliminating descriptive words from a travel blog, because visualization, in some cases, is exactly what I would want my readers to experience from my posts. 

I’ll still need help from a Blog Pimp, so please apply with references to ashleyly@msu.edu.