Travel Site Hakolal Shares How to Promote a Travel Business
By some counts, there are upwards of 500 million blogs on the internet right now, and of those, a healthy portion are travel blogs. But whittle it down to the number of travel blogs that make money, and that number shrinks. A lot. It’s so challenging to make money publishing a travel blog that an entire new subculture of blogs has cropped up: blogs about how to make money blogging. You’re reading one right now, which means you’re probably trying to figure out how to better promote your own travel blogging business.
In a recent webinar, Tiqets spoke with Ohad Shaked, who founded the travel blogging site Hakolal with his wife, Adva. Hakolal is written for an Israeli audience that loves to travel to other countries. While it began as a Barcelona-focused publication, Hakolal now offers in-depth, expert information about traveling to London, Prague, Amsterdam, Paris, and various cities in Spain, Italy, and even the Far East. For Israeli travelers, it’s a one-stop shop for travel planning where they can build a vacation and get great discounts.
When he first began to promote his travel business, Shaked was not just another amateur blogger with a yen for writing. He was already an established and successful professional with a background in technology marketing and academia. By 2020, Hakolal had achieved some noteworthy numbers:
- 1.1M users
- 1.8M sessions
- 3.4 pages per session
- And most importantly, 35,000 ticket reservations for attractions, shows, and events
“These numbers were just the beginning for Hakolal,” says Shaked. While he started the blog because of a passion, he’s also a businessman at heart, so running a blog that didn’t make a profit didn’t make much sense. In the webinar (which you can watch on demand here), Shaked outlined the path he took to create a successful money-making operation and how he promotes the travel blog as a business. Over the years, he’s developed a travel content and business model that really works – a model you are about to find out all about.
Tapping into the customer journey to promote a travel business
Someone writes about a magical travel experience, and a consumer takes out their credit card to book it. Is that how it happens? Well, no.
For all but the most impulsive of travelers, there’s usually a research process. In fact, the “customer journey lifecycle,” as they call it, is a series of steps that looks more or less like this:
1. The first step is awareness: simply making people aware of an opportunity to visit a place. There are a lot of ways people find out about things they can do and buy: radio and TV programs and ads, magazines, PR placements, and, of course, the almighty Google search (perhaps how you even found this article).
2. At some point, awareness turns into consideration: Not only do readers know about a potential travel experience, they’re strongly considering signing up for it.
3. Consideration turns into acquisition when the person decides to buy a ticket, book a trip, or otherwise commit to the experience.
4. Then, they receive the product or service.
5. And if they like it, the ideal next step is loyalty to an experience, travel brand, museum or attraction… or blog.
This is the process that leads a person who stumbles across your travel blog to not just read it but use it to purchase tickets, and to come back again and again. If loyalty is achieved, the graph above, which looks like a straight line, actually becomes a circle, as your faithful blog fans come back to the awareness stage every time they want to find out about something new they can do in the world.
This customer journey happens before their literal journey, and by understanding it — and your role in it — Shaked believes you can create content that marries insight into travel with keen attention paid to how customers make their purchasing decisions. Grasping this cycle is how to master the art of growing your travel business.
The place for travel bloggers in the customer lifecycle
For travel blog writers, awareness and consideration are the key parts of the buying cycle – the area they can really influence. And in the consideration stage, particularly, they have an opportunity to soar.
The travel blogger doesn’t just let the reader know the Eiffel Tower exists; the blogger expounds the virtues of visiting it at night and lets the reader know the best times of year, week, and day to visit without running into crowds. The blogger also lets the reader in on that little-known café just down the street where you can get the flakiest, most buttery croissant of your life, and, by the way, the smartest way to get to the Eiffel Tower from where you’re staying.
As a travel blogger, you have an opportunity to write with relevance and authenticity so that users will not only care what you think, but trust you. The more you can predict and address their questions, fears, and motives, the more you earn their trust. Ultimately, this helps them make decisions about where to go and what to do.
And once they’ve arrived at that point – the acquisition phase of their journey – the smart travel blog is ready to convert the reader into a buying customer.
Bridging the gap between consideration and acquisition
If someone stalls out in the awareness and consideration stages, they never buy. For a travel blogger, actively leading the reader to the stage of purchase is one of the best ways to profit from the blog. To do this, Hakolal partners with Tiqets, which allows Shaked to sell tickets to experiences and attractions right from his website.
In this way, Hakolal empowers travel-hungry readers to “be their own travel agent,” capable of booking tickets and arranging itineraries at the touch of a button. As Shaked puts it, “If you want to sell tickets and earn money, you need to help your audience understand their choices.” His travel blog clearly lays out the choices for readers, makes recommendations, and enables them to easily buy tickets.
This is how Shaked describes the experience the reader gets as a result of such a ticketing partnership: “First, they’ll come to your platform because you give them value. Then, they’ll see you as an authority and listen to what you say. And when these things come together, you’ll sell tickets.” Selling tickets is how to turn a passion project into a viable business.
How to promote your own travel business
Learning how to grow your travel blogging business will be your own unique journey, but by keeping in mind the model Shaked shares, hopefully, that journey will be more of a straight line.