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Cruise Blog: High Quality in a Niche
By SEO Advisor | February 20, 2010
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.
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