Cruise Blog: High Quality in a Niche
It might be too early to call it a success story after just being live for less than three months, but there are some experiences I’d like to share. And I might add, this is not my first blog, so I was able to avoid some of the newbie mistakes from the beginning.
We’ve kind of got a jump start for our new cruise blog in German language (www.cruisetricks.de). My wife won a competition of Royal Caribbean Cruise Line becoming the “Reporter at Sea” on the brand new cruise ship Oasis of the Seas, just last November. This gave us some popularity but more important, it gave us incredibly much exclusive niche content as we’ve been the first German bloggers ever on this new cruise ship class and we’ve been even a few days ahead of TV and newspaper journalists.
jump start with massive high-quality content
Now we had more pictures and information than we could handle, so we had a fantastic start posting about this cruise ship in every detail over many weeks. And Google started to list our stories on the first page – not for the top keywords like “cruise”, but for nice two- and three-word phrases. Traffic increase was steady over the first few weeks. But then we recognized the traffic increase slowed down as more and more other websites had information and pictures available about the Oasis of the Seas. And also we foresaw that our available pool of content was not lasting for ever.
That’s were we changed a few things and started something new: First of all, of course, we broadened the topics of our postings, writing much more about general cruise related stuff instead of just Oasis of the Seas stories.
news for traffic – but do it right!
But the main issue was: Just the two of us blogging couldn’t continue posting long stories every other day. But as soon as we reduced the frequency of postings, traffic stopped going up and on some days even went down. So first of all, we started to add news to the blog site. The idea was to have new content every day, but not spend hours every day to produce it. To make it short: It works great! After we’ve signed up for the press releases of the cruise companies and subscribed to relevant RSS feeds, information was pouring in and writing short news stories out of this is easy – but brings in the traffic on days where there is no long, content-rich new posting on the blog. It also helps optimizing for long-tail search traffic from Google. That is because we don’t copy-and-paste the press releases (duplicate content), but write our own news stories from the information we get. This is more work, but it pays off quickly.
permanentely attractive content
Second thing to fix was the bounce rate that started to increase. Two things are making the difference now. First, we started adding additional stuff to the blog that drags attention and makes users clicking instead of leaving:
- We added desktop wallpaper pictures as free downloads, with pictures from cruise ships.
- We added a free, comprehensive PDF eBook, the “Oasis of the Seas Cabin and Suites Guide” (we even translated this to English).
- From the beginning we had interactive flash panaromana pictures from the Oasis of the Seas, which are the most viewed pages of the blog from the beginning; it’s unique and hard to reproduce for competitors. Very successful content, though lot of work to produce them, too.
news and special content added to the regular blog posting
Not an overly huge success, but decent, and the bounce rate went down again. Well, not directly, actually. But after we made some changes in the website’s design and moved the news as well as the wallpaper downloads right in the main section of the blog, directly below the Top-Story blog posting, it works great now (see picture; sorry for the nasty green color of the marks).
We’ve got some more ideas, similar to the wallpaper idea, that should make the blog more attractive for this specific audience of cruise ship fans. Basically the idea is to have permanentely interesting content besides the news-oriented content in the blog postings and the news.
the challenge: so much to do, so little time
And that’s actually also our next goal now. To make the blog traffic much more independent from the number of postings and news pieces per week, i.e. adding content that will be appreciated by the audience permanentely; how-to guides; link lists; we’ve added a list of cruise ship webcams, for instance; tutorials like “how to get your cruise cheaper”; stuff like this.
We’re not running out of ideas for our cruise blog; the issue is more a lack of manpower to quickly do all the stuff we’d like to do. But still, if you have any further ideas to keep this working with just me full-time and my wife part-time blogging, please let us know.
thanks for the beatfull
Thanks for this blogging idea. I shall use it on my blog about musical instruments and see how it goes.
Do have a nice day blogging about cruises.
Thanks for this advice. I am in the same boat. After setting up my blog, I ran out of ideas and of course traffic dropped. Now I am looking for ideas to write about. I think I can use some of your tactics.
I totally agree with you the challenge: so much to do, so little time. Hope to read your further posting about this topic about consistent traffic with less contents posting.
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Adding more forms of interactive is always a good idea. It gives readers more to see and do when they visit your blog.
The more time they spend on it, the more chance they have of subscribing to your RSS feed or signing up for a free report.
Tony
Cool post…I have a high bounce rate I think because my poems are short & don’t take long to read…But I will try added other things to it as well…Thanx…Kenney
http://kenneyyoung.com
Thanks for the story…
Cool ideas. It is amazing what bloggers can come up with and the effort
they put into blogging.
One thing I realized is to never underestimate an idea that might seem
foolish or not worthwhile. Many a time I was surprised by a post or
change I thought will not have any major impact.
Just keep in mind: People are individuals with unique minds. It might
not work for one, but for someone else it does. Try to find something
that the majority fancies.
Cheers,
James
Minnie-Online.co.za
Some useful tips as I too have a problem with bounce rate and need to provide some stickiness to my Site
Great article. Wonderful ideas on how to make others news your own. I had never thought of that one. Might have to give it a try. Everyone knows it is content that draws people to become followers, but there are few out there that will give more ideas than find things in your niche. thanks!
Do you give reference when writing to the origional source?
Content and bounce rate is a difficult one. What percentage should that bounce rate be? What is your ultimate goal for it?
http://patchworkposse.com/blog
nothing more, i just want to follow comments, and didn’t check it.
Wow. You’ve already got a PR3 on a three month old blog? That is very impressive. The look and feel of the layout is very nice too. Where did you purchase the design?
Thanks for these blogging ideas. I have some blogs that get automated posts daily and they have grown on their own to PR0 and PR1 but I don’t do anything to them and consequently, they don’t really make any revenue. I’ll try to institute some of the ideas you’ve outlined and see if I can create a little passive income.
Time is truly the obstacle. Even writing editorials about press releases and other blogs, it can take an hour easily out of your day. I was expecting to see you use plugins that would give similar stories, or something to keep the reader engaged. But, at least you have something that works. You have an advantage because you likely have some news sites pointing links to you. That helps with the PR3. I need to redesign my blog, but I’m just too busy.
Keep at it, even if you only post one small thing a day, you are still adding to your content and every bit helps.
The thing is to keep going, don’t give up
The Adsense Idiot
We all face the same problem, so many tasks for one person. If you are building business, sooner or later, you have to start outsourcing some work.
Thanks for sharing your ideas.
My site has high bounce rate too and I can’t seem to understand why. I’ll give your idea a try.
Beautiful site you have there … if you don’t mind giving you a suggestion .. why not add an opt-in page before giving the free PDF guide download… that way you can build a list of emails and follow up with them in the near future?
:O)
Will it run well?
@Kenny: I just found a new way to lower the bounce rate that might help in your case, too: I’m now connecting related stories to a series. There are several WP plugins doing this automatically (I’m using ‘Organize Series’). The advantage is: If someone finds ONE of your postings via Google, he most likely will read at least one additional part of a series, hence the bounce rate goes down. But eventually, in my personal opinion, only very good content AND management of the right keywords for each article will keep bounce rates down; i.e. if people are satisfiey with what they find in your blog (plus additional links that keep them on your site once they’re there. Therefore, you also want to put at least one link to one of your earlier postings in each news piece.
@becky: I do refecence the news sources only in two cases: a) if the news source is a press release of a company, hence telling the reader where my information comes from or b) if another news source, e.g. another blog, has added something unique and noteworthy to the story.
@AreaRugSale: I was thinking about collecting e-mail addresses but skipped the idea eventually as my primary intent was to get as much links as possible and didn’t want to scare away even a single customer. Besides that, at least for now I don’t have the time to maintain a newletter anyway
So yes, of course your’re right, that’s a great idea and I will do in the future; for now I had other priorities 
Franz
thanks for this… i think i will follow your tip especially on giving away free stuffs thanks…