I used to read a lot of blogs.  I still do.  I thought starting my own blog would be easy.  Especially since I had years worth of some sort of practice, via posting trip reports on various Las Vegas message boards.  Writing comes naturally to me and my reports often received high praise.

In addition to that, I figured I could upload those trip reports for easy content during times I was not traveling.  This would leave me one step ahead of the pack since I already have a TON of content all ready to go!  All I would have to do is run a quick spell check to capitalize everything I didn’t capitalize the first time I wrote it.  Then a simple copy and paste and VOILA!

Well I was wrong.

It is not until the first time you look at your first blank page on WordPress that you realize that there is so much more to do than simply writing.  There is formatting.  On message boards, this is already set up for you, just click a button.  On a blog though, you need to install plug ins and figure out how to work them.

You need to upload pictures.  You need to re-edit those pictures.  What may have seemed perfectly fine to post on a message board, now needs to be cropped to look slightly more professional (allow me to state, none of my pictures look professional – I am not delusional)  Then there is the renaming of pictures.  Why do that?  Because I have a blog.  Whereas I used to be able to just make a folder on my computer titled “elco” and save pictures with names like “view” and “bed” and “room”, I am now off Las Vegas message boards and out in the real world.  If you want to catch someone looking for a picture of “El Cortez room Las Vegas” then you need to title that picture “El Cortez room Las Vegas”

Which leads me to SEO.  Search Engine Optimization.  If  you do not have a blog, you may not know this exists.  I certainly did not.  So what is it?  It is a way of slightly altering what you are writing, so that your content can be easily found when people do online searches for it.

I am fortunate that this comes naturally to me.  I grasp the concept.  But having it come easy still meant that I would have to rewrite my posts to apply it.

For example, when posting on a Las Vegas message board, posting to Las Vegas addicts, you can say “Hopped on the Deuce to the Elco for msstp ddb”  Everyone will know what you are talking about.

But in the blogging world, you are making two huge mistakes.

1.  No one outside of the gambling world knows what that means.  If you draw someone in who found your website looking for content on let’s say – Bulgaria – they may like your writing style and poke around your blog.  They will read that sentence, have no idea what the hell it means, and back out.   So I had to retype out the thousands of sentences like that, so it would now read “Hopped on the Deuce bus to the El Cortez.  There, I played some Multi Strke Super Times Pay Double Double Bonus video poker”.   Now someone who doesn’t know anything about gambling is STILL not going to know what the hell that means.  But by typing it out, they can identify that it is a game.  Video poker even.  So despite not caring about the specific game you play, they at least know what you are talking about.  NO ONE IS GOING TO READ YOUR BLOG IF THEY DON’T KNOW WHAT YOU ARE TALKING ABOUT.

2.  People who are true lovers of Las Vegas and gambling are not going to find your blog either if you have sentences like “Hopped on the Deuce to the Elco for msstp ddb”  Think about it.  If you were going to Vegas and you wanted to know about the Deuce, or the El Cortez or where to find msstp ddb in Las Vegas, what are you going to search for?  “Deuce bus Las Vegas”  “El Cortez video poker”  “Where can I find Multi Strike Super Times Pay in Las Vegas”   Redoing that sentence to “Hopped on the Deuce bus to the El Cortez.  There, I played some Multi Strke Super Times Pay Double Double Bonus video poker”  does that.

Also unlike the dozens of trip reports I have posted, no one is reading an entire trip in one sitting.   I used to post all the days in one thread.  No one is reading any blog as a thread.  You need to treat each day as a single post.  This means starting every post with the hotel name.  Writing just “Woke up, went downstairs for breakfast in the coffee shop, had the best service ever!” does nothing to tell your reader where the hell you had the best service ever.  Someone searching for “best coffee shop service in Las Vegas” is going to find your blog and still have no idea where this best service was because you did not include the hotel name anywhere in the one single post they found when searching for information.

Another thing I learned:  The dreaded “solo female traveler” title.  When I used to read blogs that were labeled “solo female traveler” I will admit, I found it silly.   I am of the belief that women can do anything men can do.  Therefore, there is no reason to focus on the “female” part.  If I want to find information on going somewhere solo, the word “female” should never apply because there is no reason to differentiate between male and female, right?

WRONG.

Just because I believe that men and women are equal, does not mean that everyone else shares that belief.  There are so many women out there who are less confident than I, more timid, more scared of the world.  They want to go out there, but they are looking for reassurance that it is safe to do so as a solo female.  These are the women who listen to ignorant people when they say “that place isn’t safe for a woman to travel alone”  So what do these women do searches for?  That’s right.  “Is it safe for a solo female to travel to…”  A term that used to make me want to scream “WHAT DOES BEING FEMALE HAVE TO DO WITH ANYTHING”, now brings a smile to my face when I see someone found my blog by doing a search for solo female travel.

You know what else I learned by having a blog?  BOUNCE RATE.  Ugh the death of me.  Bounce rate is a judge of how engaging your content is.  Someone will do a search  and find your blog because it contains the key words they were searching for.  But if it is not the information they are looking for, they will bounce immediately.

One of the most popular posts on my blog is That Time I Found a Ball Gag in My Las Vegas Hotel Room.  Think about that for a moment.  It is a fun, catchy title, it grabs your attention, it looks like it is going to be a really great story.  Right?

Here is the thing.  No one in the mood to read a fun, great story is searching for “That Time I Found a Ball Gag in My Las Vegas Hotel Room” are they?

NO.

Do you know who is searching for posts about ball gags?  PEOPLE LOOKING FOR INFORMATION ON BALL GAGS.  Look at this:

62.99% of my search traffic is from people looking for information on ball gags.  So while it may seem that this is a great post title for traffic, it is actually horrible for my bounce rate.  People search for ball gags, find a quirky Las Vegas trip report and they bounce.

So there you go.  My cute, quirky, attention-getting post title is actually doing me more harm than good.

On a side note, someone who knows about ball gags would do well to start a niche blog about them.   You would do really well based on the above search results.  I have considered adding a post actually about ball gags just to appease the people who search for this information.

I have a long list of things I want to do with my blog.  It is not as easy as I thought.  I honestly envisioned I would write and write and write and post and post and post.  My original intention of what to do with the HUNDREDS of Las Vegas trip reports I have stored was to post two a week for two years.  That is how long it would take to get them all up.  I thought I would do it in my downtime between traveling.  But it didn’t work that way.  All the editing and adding SEO terms is really boring.  I spent about three hours last night going through one report adding “bus” after every time I wrote “Deuce” and “108” and “202”, changing acronyms to whole words, adding the word “slot” after every slot machine game I played.  It was boring.  This is why it is taking me so long to get this pre-written banked content up.

I also do not want to have a Las Vegas blog.  I want to be a travel blog.  But the Vegas content gets me twice as much traffic as anything else I post about.  Why?  Because I am a Las Vegas expert.  I cover everything.  I am not a world travel expert. I suck at it.  I get lost, I cannot read a map, I don’t include any historical information because I do not know any historical information.  I am your stereotypical dumb American.  I know nothing.  I am more of a personality piece type of writer.  But in order to be successful as a personality piece type of writer, you need to have something to draw people in so they can see your personality.

How can I do this?  By showing off the little travel skills I do have.  Like how to do research.  How to find bus and train schedules.  One of the things that would frustrate me pre-blog would be when I would search for information and find only “took the bus to Serbia”   That’s great.  WHAT BUS DID YOU TAKE AT WHAT TIME AND FROM WHERE?  It is so hard to find transit information for parts of the world.  Eastern Europe especially.  So I swore I would try to include that in all of my posts.

I also want to start writing more about budget.  I want to show people how affordable all of this is with specific numbers.  This was my initial plan.  My “Who I Am” page promises readers that I would post about budget.  But when I left for Europe shortly after, I lost my pen to a screaming kid on a plane.  I could not take notes on every penny I spent if I could not write it down.  I have now learned to PACK MORE THAN ONE PEN YOU IDIOT.

I have such a long way to go.  I want to go back to my first few months of posting and redo all of them to apply the SEO tactics I have learned since posting them.  I want to fix all the hyperlinks that look like visual vomit because I didn’t know how to make hyperlinks (PLUG INS PEOPLE, PLUG INS)  I want to get all my Las Vegas content properly edited so they are ready to go if I have “dead air” between trips.  This is all so time consuming.  It is also taking time away from me writing new posts.

I am also learning that the diary-type posting style I have perfected over the years is not really the best blog style.   If I visit three major tourist attractions in one day, that could be three different posts.  Thereby giving me more posts per trip, so I can get more readers who are interested in that specific destination, to come back for each new post about it.

I am hopeful that by this time next year, I have all the backlog of work done and am able to focus solely on new content.

What’s next for my blog?  Asia.  I will be gallivanting around this fine continent for a month in May/June.  I am so looking forward to being able to write about brand new content.  In the meantime, I still have a ton of older, mostly Vegas stuff to fill the time between now and then.  I am also going to take advantage of living in NEW YORK CITY and write more about that.  That was a plan I had a year ago and still have not put into motion.  Mostly because it is completely overwhelming to go out and search for new content, when I have so much old content sitting around waiting to be edited.

Hopefully if you read all of this, that means you like me.  If you like me, maybe you will stick around as I grow as a blogger. I would really like that.