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Update 01/2020: Meanwhile, our blog grew to over 100k+ pageviews in December 2019!
Wow, I can’t believe that our blog is already one year old and that I am sharing our personal success story with you now! Time has passed like crazy since we came back from our trip around the world in July 2018!
Since then, a lot has changed. When we came back, we had already decided that I would not go back into my former corporate life for various reasons, but instead would focus on our startup idea and our travel blog.
Read: Why I left my six-figure corporate career and became a travel blogger instead
In this blog post, we want to tell you about out personal blogging story and what has helped us to be successful. If you are a blogger as well, we hope this will help you with your own personal success story!
Table of Contents
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Our “blogging journey” so far
We had already started writing about our travel adventures during our journey (only for friends and family) and now decided that it was time to “go public”. We decided to set up our blog with Bluehost (and we are super happy with them!)
At that time, my Instagram Account @fernwehsarah had already grown to 15k followers within half a year (which was also a huge personal success story that went viral on Reddit). We had strategically worked on that and thought that we should be able to do this for our new blog as well.
And here we are, one year later: Our blog has indeed grown really well and in July 2019 we already had over 30,000 sessions and 50,000 pageviews! Meanwhile, our email list has grown to almost 10,000 subscribers and my social media channels now have a combined following of a bit over 45,000 followers.
Click here to get our exclusive Bluehost discount (51%!) + a FREE .com Domain!
While this is still far from what big travel blogger like “Goats on the Road”, “Nomadic Matt”, “The Blonde Abroad” or “Adventure In You” are seeing each month, it still feels like quite a personal success story for such a young travel blog!
But actually, this blog post is not about bragging on how awesome it feels when your blog finally gets a lot of visitors.
No, we want to share with you the factors that we think were the root of our personal success story. We may have been lucky with one or two posts, but mainly this was strategy and it is something you can replicate as well to get more readers to your blog as well!
So let’s dive into our “lessons learned from one year of travel blogging”!
How our blog readers find us
One of the questions I get asked the most when I talk about our blogging journey is how our blog readers find our travel blog. Or in technical terms, “how we drive traffic to our blog“.
Basically, there are a few different categories of traffic: “Social”, “Organic” (aka Google), “Direct / Referrals” (someone linking to you) and “Email”. Some bloggers get most of their traffic from Google, for others, “Social” is the biggest traffic driver.
For us, “Social” is our biggest traffic driver (making up for over 60% of our traffic in July 2019). Although, “Organic Search” (Google) has really picked up over the last months (now a bit over 20%).
Update 01/2020: Google is now our biggest source of traffic as we successfully targeted some keywords we found with Keysearch!
As you can see, we did not get a lot of traffic from Email in July. The main reason is that I was simply too lazy to send out a newsletter in July (or June…) and thus, Email traffic is coming only from our Automation campaigns for the Lightroom Presets we are selling in our shop.
We do get some “Direct” and “Referral” traffic (I STILL don’t really understand the difference) which is mainly one big photo blog referring to my Lightroom Presets.
And if we look a bit deeper, it is pretty obvious which website has the lion share of our social traffic: Pinterest.
Interestingly, Facebook has slowly started to generate some of our traffic as well even though I almost don’t do anything for Facebook except for sharing our blog posts to our Facebook page.
It’s also pretty obvious that Instagram is not a good source of traffic either – despite my larger following there. I could probably promote my blog better in my stories – but then again, marketeers have already researched that Instagram is not a good source for traffic.
Twitter pretty much does not give us a lot of traffic either – even though I have recently put work into it. So that maybe, one day, it will generate some traffic. We’ll update you if I find a way to make Twitter a personal success story as well!
So let’s have a look at why we do so well with Pinterest!
How we got blog readers with Pinterest
As you can see, Pinterest is super important for our blog.
And it has been right from the beginning! At the beginning of this year, Google still accounted for less than 10% of our traffic. That’s something that a lot of bloggers will see.
And the reason is simple: Google does not trust new websites. And thus, they will not rank your content well enough to be visible by anyone in search results. There’s a number of things we did to improve this, but we will get to this later.
Pinterest, on the other hand, is a visual search engine (not, it’s NOT a social network). If you create beautiful images for your blog that are optimized for Pinterest and they get shared by some bigger bloggers, your blog post can literally go viral within days.
That’s also the personal success story that has happened to us in December 2018: Our blog post about the best places to visit in 2019 went viral on Pinterest and caused a big traffic spike to our (at that time) very small blog.
And the good thing with Pinterest traffic is that it sticks. Sure, it’s eventually going down a bit after a while, but great pins can drive you traffic YEARS after you have successfully posted them to Pinterest.
The main reasons for our blog success
So, now that we had a look at how our readers find us and where we are right now with our blog, it is finally time to jump into WHY we were able to grow our blog that fast.
We think that there are three main reasons behind our blogging success:
- The Blogging Fast Lane (a blogging course by Adventure In You that we bought in November 2019)
- Tailwind (A Pinterest scheduler with “Pinterest Engagement Groups”)
- Keysearch (An affordable keyword research tool)
The Blogging Fast Lane – the ONE blogging course that made our personal success story possible
I have to admit that Markus wanted me to get a blogging course right from the beginning. I resisted and thought “oh these are all scammers and I will not give them my money. I can do this on my own”. Well, and MAYBE I could have done this on my own. But it’s not very likely.
And I have to say that I still think that most people out there selling you blogging courses only make money with one thing: Selling blogging courses. There are definitely more bad courses out there than good ones.
But there is one course that I personally can vouch for: The Blogging Fast Lane from Anna and Tom (Adventure In You).
So was it accidental that my blog post went viral in December? No, not really. I created this blog post after finishing about half of the lessons of the Blogging Fast Lane (although it’s planned to be an eight-week course). And the tips helped me get to this post idea and to write it so that it could be successful.
Update 01/2020: I finally found the time to write an extensive review of the Blogging Fast Lane and our experience with this blogging course!
Read: Blogging Fast Lane Review – is this blogging course worth it?
But back to my blog post and its success: I directly told Anna and Tom about my personal success story in the Blogging Fast Lane private Facebook Group (where they personally answer EACH question one their students) and asked them for advice. And Anna was there to give me advice straight away!
I then created a second post about which places to visit in Europe in 2019. And it also got a lot of traction right from the beginning (you can see the other peak slightly right of the first). And again, I was following one of their strategies about using LSI keywords.
This story probably already tells you why I say the Blogging Fast Lane was the main reason behind my own success. Anna and Tom also offer a FREE blogging Fast Lane webinar that’s totally worth watching. And if you are unsure if this blogging course is right for you, it’s best if you read my review about the Blogging Fast Lane (there are lots of insider information and screenshots!)
Tailwind – our secret Pinterest weapon
As I mentioned, Tailwind has been the second reason why we were able to grow our Pinterest traffic this big within one year.
In case you don’t know it yet: Tailwind is officially a scheduling tool for Pinterest Pins (they also have an Instagram scheduler now). But in reality, it’s much more. I just paid for another year of Tailwind Plus + the Ultimate Powerup (so I have their largest package) and I don’t regret a single cent I spent on it.
So what does Tailwind offer you? With Tailwind, you are able to schedule your Pins throughout the day so they get automatically pinned to your boards at the best times. Tailwind’s smart schedule is infamous for knowing the best timings to push out your pins.
Pinterest has been very open about that the Pinterest algorithm prefers constant pinning throughout the day. And that you can easily pin 30-50 pins a day. Imagine doing that manually. It’s impossible.
And while Instagram hates third party app, Pinterest loves Tailwind! They frequently gave interviews to Tailwind and you can rest assured that Tailwind will never break any rules with Pinterest (or Instagram).
Not even with Tribes. Tailwind Tribes are basically engagement groups for Pinterest!
You join a tribe and you put in your pins (an image from your website with some text about your blog post). And then you share another tribe member’s pin to one of your Pinterest boards.
And Tribes are smart – the tribe owner (the person who founded the tribe) can see how many pins you placed in the group and how many pins you have shared. This way, Tribes are always reciprocal – much more than Facebook Group or Pinterest Group Boards
Aside from the Scheduling Tool and the Tribes, Tailwind is also an incredible analytics tool to help you understand which of your pins and Pinterest boards perform well. This way, you can optimize your Pins and your Boards so that your Pins will perform much better.
I know that especially at the beginning of your blogging journey, you are probably hesitant to spend money on a monthly subscription for anything. But I can only tell you that I am honestly 100% sure that our blog would be nowhere close to where it is now without Pinterest and Tailwind.
By the way, with this link, you can get a free trial for one month without any risk (they don’t even require a credit card for it). Just go for it and get to learn the magic of Tailwind and Pinterest for yourself!
I personally subscribed before the trial was over because it was so clear to me how valuable Tailwind is!
Keysearch – Our keyword research tool
As you might have seen earlier in the graph about our blog visits, we also marked the moment where we started using Keysearch because this is also part of our personal success story!
Keysearch is a Keyword Research Tool that helps you finding the right keywords to optimize your blog post for SEO (Search Engine Optimization).
We have to admit that Anna and Tom already recommend Keysearch in the Blogging Fast Lane Course and we ignored it. Too long. Now that we are using it, we know WHY they recommend it…
But we CAN already see that it works and that the blog posts that we optimized after researching the keywords thoroughly before DO show up in search results and that they keep getting more and more organic traffic from Google.
We still have a ton of ideas for blog posts simply because we know that these keywords are not well covered and that we could write a killer article about it. We’ll keep you updated on our progress with Keyword research and Keysearch (and hopefully, another personal success story!)
Update 01/2020: Google is now our main source of traffic – so there’s our next success story! We guess it is time to do a keysearch review at one point…!
If you want to try Keysearch for your blog as well, make sure to use the discount code KSDISC to get 20% off!
A reliable hosting company: Bluehost
Last but not least, we also want to mention that we are incredibly happy with our web hoster Bluehost.
Setting up our blog with Bluehost was super easy and we did have zero downtime during this one year of blogging! That’s what makes a hoster awesome!
Also, I once contacted Bluehost over a question and their support is super quick to respond. So we feel like we can recommend then from the bottom of our heart – and we decided to pay our hosting for another 3 years straight away!
And the cool thing is that Bluehost loves working with Bloggers and thus, we have an exclusive offer for you as we are Bluehost affiliates. If you click on the button below to sign up for their hosting plan, you will get 51% off their annual plan + a free .com Domain!
So that’s it: Our personal success story on how we grew our blog in 2019…
So that’s it – we have shared all our “secrets” about our personal success story on how we grew our blog in 2019. We know the blogging world is becoming more and more competitive every day as people dream about independent work/lifestyle and decide to become bloggers.
And we think this is a good thing. We are part of a generation that dares to ask about what is most important in life and how we can reach that. It’s not about the biggest house or the fastest car anymore – it’s about going off the beaten path and following dreams.
Read: Why I left back my six-figure corporate career and became a travel blogger instead
We hope that you can see that we tried to be as helpful for you as possible with that blog post. We want to motivate you to go your own way and give you a hand in doing that.
But we don’t want to promise you that if you follow our path, that it is gonna work for you 100% too. We hate those clickbaity post titles aka “Explode your blog traffic by 5000% TOMORROW by using THIS ONE SINGLE tool”. Trust us, they are NEVER true. We have also tried numerous stuff that DID NOT WORK for us. It’s part of the journey…
But this strategy here is what worked for us and is part of our personal success story. And it might do the same for you. And that’s why we hope that these tips here will give you the best chances to build a successful blog too!
Are you a blogger as well or planning to become one?
We would love to hear about your situation! Are you a blogger already or are you planning to become one? If your blog is out there already, we’d love to hear about how your blogging journey is evolving!
Creating a successful blog is definitely not easy – but we hope that you see that it is still possible! And even though there will always be these days where you won’t believe that you can make this work – there’s gonna be others where you see the success. And it’s gonna make you damn proud! 🙂
f you are interested in following our journey further, make sure to subscribe to our newsletter simply by filling out the form below. Don’t worry, we won’t spam you – and you can leave at any time! Plus, we do share our travel resources and some Instagram/Social Media Tips there as well!
