Blogging Basics: Building Your Blog, Growing Your Audience, Gaining Traffic

It seems ridiculous to me now that I am a veteran blogger. Twelve years has passed by so quickly since Don’t Stop Living began shyly back in August 2007. It started as a way of moving my written diary (on paper) from my trips to the online diary. I had no idea that it would turn into an obsession, a passion, a business. All for better or for worse though as it has been a tough and rocky road.

I also never expected from one main blog, Don’t Stop Living  that I could start one, let alone other main blogs. Alongside this project, I also write about Poland at Northern Irishman in Poland, about my Northern Ireland flag at TNIF.com and about global general travel on Crossing World Borders. So how do you start it all? How do you create a blog or a website? Here are some tips to get you started…

Choose a niche

So, you want to start a blog. What is your niche, what is your target market. Travel is a niche for sure, but it’s a huge niche, so go deeper. Budget travel. Coffee travel. Boat travel. Skateboard travel. Expensive travel. Adventure travel. Egypt travel. Cairo travel. And then go even deeper. My niche is so deep, I don’t really care any more, but I did start as a budget tourist who loves sightseeing, visiting bars, watching football and writing about lesser known places. I hated articles on Paris, Bangedcock and Rome. So I didn’t write such articles. In my early days, I was writing about places like Poatina, Babruysk and Xinying. It is now to find a place where NO TOURIST has been, hence why I backpacked to Adammia and Austenasia in 2015.

So my niche became wacaday republics (Karakalpakstan!), micronations (Adammia), peculiar places (World’s biggest toilet), disputed regions (Artsakh), enclaves (Kaliningrad), censored and restricted zones (Chernobyl Exclusion Zone), unknown countries (Transnistria), fantasy lands (Narnia) and remote islands (Sark)! I buzz off this type of travel.

Choose a URL / domain name

The URL / domain / website address is important. Don’t be going for anything related to a single country unless you are focusing on that country. So go for .net or .com. Do not go for .cz (Cheatzerland), .dk (Denmark), .co (Colombia) etc. as Google will expect your website to be related to that country. I briefly considered dontstopliving.ni but since .ni is Nicaragua instead of my beloved Northern Ireland, I opted for .net . The reason being that .com was taken. My blog was always going to be called “Don’t Stop Living”. I never had another phrase or title for it and I never needed one. It’s me. Life is an adventure. Don’t Stop Living. Enjoy every day. So it was easy to choose my url and domain name. Also – don’t go for something with a number in it, or that is already popular. Something like spanishtourist.com is too common. Think outside the box, be creative. And for those who know the story, Don’t Stop Living was NOT my phrase. I stole it when I was backpacking in Toronto in 2001 and those words were grafittied onto a High School Wall in red capital letters! Though the logo, header and design of DSL changed about 10 times in 12 years…and I am still unhappy with the current design (but not the logo which is stuck now and I love).

Create Social Media Accounts

It still shocks me how some people want to be successful bloggers but yet they don’t even want to join Social Media. Sorry then – blogging isn’t for you. We are public!! We share our honest and real lives with the world and I love doing it. I joined as many social media sites as I could, I set up pages, uploaded my photos and synchronised them all as Jonny Blair, Northern Irish tourist, Don’t Stop Living. Obvious social media are my Facebook page, my Instagram profile, my YouTube uploads and my Twitter feed.

But I even joined Pinterest, Reddit and Stumble Upon. If any new Social medias come up, I join them. Also as well as joining them, be active on them and interactive.

Build Domain Authority