Marketing your food blog is a tricky thing. Food bloggers are all too familiar with food sharing sites and how important they can be for driving traffic to their blog. Food sharing sites are great for traffic but there are many other traffic sources on which food bloggers can be focusing. To learn more about some other traffic sources, we reached out to Mytanfeet to get an inside look at their marketing plan. Yeison and Samantha share some great tips for both new bloggers and established bloggers who are wanting to grow their audience.
Yeison and Samantha from Mytanfeet
Many travel blogs start out simply as a way to share travel experiences with friends and family with very little thought on monetization or business strategy. When you guys were first getting started, was it mostly for fun or were you building a business from the very beginning?
We first started out like many other bloggers- we did it for fun. And we still do it for fun! We just do it on a different level of fun now. We always had the idea that we could turn the blog into a business one day but in the beginning, it kind of seemed like a far off dream. Now, we have realized it’s completely possible!
You share your income reports on the blog and you guys are certainly making great progress. At what point did you realize you could turn this into a full time income? Was there a specific moment when you knew the site had serious potential?
Hmm, well we always had in the back of our mind that possibly one day we could make an income off of it but it wasn’t until about 6 months after we started we were serious about monetization. I remember in our 3rd month of blogging we took a trip to Arenal in Costa Rica and we received a whole week of free hotel nights and tours through our blog. We were amazed at how much business owners wanted to work with our website even though it was still a baby. We knew that if we kept working hard we could keep it going and take it even further.
Would you mind sharing your traffic numbers and number of email subscribers?
You can see all of our traffic numbers and subscribers on our income report which we post the 1st of every month. As of October 2014, our numbers are 25,000 visits and 965 email subscribers.
What did you focus most on in the beginning?
Writing awesome content. In the beginning we cared nothing more than writing great content and providing valuable information. Of course we also focused on web design, SEO, and things like that but our main priority everyday was high quality content creation.
What has been your primary traffic source and what has your strategy been for that source?
Google Organic. Although we learned about basic SEO and use a plug-in, we don’t do very intense SEO work. We focus more on the content bringing us visitors and Google naturally ranked us higher for certain keywords as more and more people came to our site. Writing articles with important information on specific topics bumped us up in Google search.
How important is social media to your business and which platform have you had the most success with?
Important! You can say social media nowadays is the heart of all online media outlets. Google is great but it takes awhile and it’s not always a 100% guarantee. Social media is one of the best ways to get your stuff seen, especially in the beginning. It drives traffic, produces conversions and establishes yourbrand. I wouldn’t say we are experts in any social media but we focus primarily on 4 – Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and Pinterest. Each one has their own unique purpose but our Pinterest has recently taken off and now is our number one social media referrer.
What has your strategy been for finding links or guest blogging opportunities?
Connecting with other like-minded bloggers. Guest posting is a tricky area and we don’t do it just to get a link. We guest post if it is the right fit for our blog and for the other party but it’s not actually something we focus a lot of attention on. In many of the Facebook travel blogging groups we are in they have a document calling for guest posts. I scour it whenever it is updated to see if I can find one that is the right fit for us and then begin by creating a relationship with the blogger first and discussing a guest posting opportunity.
What advice would you give someone who was just getting started with a blog? What should they focus to gain their first 100 subscribers?
Look at other blogs – find some you really like and draw inspiration from them. I really wish I had done more research in the beginning because you can learn so much about blogging from a well established, successful blogger without even talking to them. Take a look around their site and see how they format their blog posts, their photos, the menus, their layout, the logo, things like that. Also don’t get too caught up in the numbers game. It’s important as a new blogger to celebrate every milestone however big or little. I remember when we got 100 FB likes on our page, I was astonished! I never thought I’d get 100 people from all over the world who I didn’t know follow and like our page. Set practical goals so you have something in mind to work towards, it’s easy to feel overwhelmed when you realize just how much stuff there is to learn about blogging.
To gain subscribers, try to put together something you can offer for free if they sign up. If you have excellent photography, put together a book or calendar of your ten best photos. Create a product that you can offer, people love getting free stuff and are happy to enter their email address. In the beginning you may not have a product to give so make sure you make the subscriber sign up box apparent on your site, don’t just leave it on your sidebar and that’s it. People will not pay attention to it. Put it in the middle of posts, add a subscriber box at the bottom of posts, put it on the homepage slider, install a pop up and customize it. Make it stand out and grab the reader’s attention. Also try to write something a bit different than just “sign up to get updates.” Give them more, make it more personal, make it fun!
You guys were initially just blogging about travel in CR. What made you decide to travel to other parts of the world?
We’ve always wanted to travel around the world and Asia was the perfect place to go for our next destination as we both have family and roots there. We both needed to experience something completely different together since we’d been in Costa Rica for two years and Yeison had never been to Asia before. Not that we don’t love Costa Rica but it was time for us to go and explore something new.
Yeison and Samantha are the multi-cultural couple behind the travel blog Mytanfeet. Though focused pre-dominantly on Costa Rica, they are on a quest to travel the world finding exciting adventures in every place they go. You can follow their journey on Facebook or Instagram.