Are You Creating Helpful Content, Entertaining, or Copying?

One big slap in the face that many entrepreneurs get too late is they find out that this great idea they’ve invested so much time and money in is one that makes people yawn. Nobody cares enough to spend their hard-earned money on it. Many bloggers put three years of work into a travel blog and find out that most of what they wrote isn’t resonating with an audience: it’s not helpful content for a defined audience.

Often it turns out that the brilliant idea the entrepreneur came up with is not really solving a problem–except for the one in the founder’s own mind. In the case of bloggers (or podcasters, or YouTubers), they’re really just spouting off and talking to an empty room. Or they’re just spitting out whatever Ahefs tells them to write and they end up just copying everyone else.

Many travel bloggers find out the hard way that they should have done more research or created different kinds of content. They’re disappointed with both the earnings and the attention.

After all, attention is a different kind of currency, one that has a finite supply. If there are 10,000 travel sites and blogs out there competing for the attention of people who love to travel, it’s a resource that may be even more scarce than money to spend. If you are not solving their problem, you are trying extra hard to get them to spend that attention.

Articles and books about proving the validity of a start-up can be applied to any business, not just a tech business, so go read some. Validating the potential of your audience is something you should keep in mind if you’re thinking about starting or going all-in on a blog. Without validation that people need or want what you are writing about, a huge investment in time may be wasted. Maybe three years or more of your time, actually. So do your homework up front.

Are Your Posts Helpful Content That Only You Can Produce?

The most recent update from Google as I write this was the “Helpful Content Update,” which in theory was supposed to reward what’s helpful and penalize what’s not. It created huge upheaval and wrenching traffic drops for some.

As often happens, what Google says and what it actually does in practice are two very different things. A lot of what bubbled up to the top is not very helpful and I’ve been using Duck Duck Go even more than before. Forums and big corporate sites did well, while a lot of true experts in their fields did not do as well.

History says they’ll tweak and get better at it over time though and regardless, what we’re seeing now is that sites crammed with ads, pop-ups, and auto-play videos seem to be getting hit the worst, especially if everything they publish is some optimized version of 20 other articles that are very similar. Sites that are basically nothing but ad vehicles, with a lot of extraneous text that’s not useful, are going to have trouble thriving if they’re not providing a good user experience.

EEAT is going to be increasingly important: experience, expertise, authority, and trust. At a minimum, you’ll need to show you have those, so as I always advise, focus on an area where you can become an expert. Don’t go in 10 different directions unless you’re going to run 10 different blogs by hiring a lot of freelancers.

Then for every blog post, what problem are you solving? What need or want are you meeting? What tribe will gather and return, signing up for your newsletter? What are you doing for your readers that nobody else can do like you?

Is This Blog All About You, the Ad Revenue…or Them?

Is your travel blog helping a specific tribe, people with specific needs, or people interested in a specific destination?

If looked at another way, if your site went down, would there be an information void in a specific subject? Or would nobody miss it because there are plenty of similar alternatives to turn to?

I once had a consulting call with a travel writer who had at least a dozen ideas too many and I was trying to get her focused on one to start with that really had potential to build an audience. “But I want to be able to get set up with free stays when I travel,” she said, “So I feel like I should work on a general family travel blog to do that.”

Wrong answer. If the goal is just getting perks and not serving a tribe, then the site is doomed from the start.

Helping people figure out what to do in Pittsburgh solves a problem. So does a site about free diving and scuba diving. Guiding horse lovers on their equestrian vacation does too. So does a site on how to study or work abroad. Audience found, questions answered, traffic secured.

If all you blog about every few days is where you went this week and what you ate there, packaged as a listicle looking a whole like 20 other listicles, you are not really providing useful information that anyone needs. You’re not a problem solver, but an entertainer, a model, or a copycat.

We Need Entertainers, but Not as Much as Problem Solvers

If you accept that you really want to be an entertainer and can make it work, okay. There are some very successful bloggers (and even more YouTubers, TikTokers, and Instagrammers) who operate as a cult of personality, letting people who can’t leave their cubicle live vicariously through them in words, photos, and video. We’ve featured several of them here on this travel writing blog.

In the offline world, we tune in to see Travel Channel personalities talk about their take on a place and we watch them react to what’s going on around them in a very edited fashion. It’s good entertainment.

Understand, however, that most of those successful people have a long head start on you and that for every one of them that has found the magic formula (through a lot of hard work and educational errors), there are hundreds laid to waste by the blogging or social media or video roadside, with not enough people devoting that valuable currency—their attention. Without that attention, there’s no hope of revenue.

Most of the people I know of who dropped out of the blogging world during the pandemic fit this profile. They posed in front of things on Instagram and talked companies into paying them for that or they featured themselves a lot in videos and built up a big following. When international travel dropped off a cliff, they were left with a decimated attention level and nobody still willing to pay them to be a performer.

It is much much harder to build a readership or sell a book by saying, “Look at me!” than it is to do so by saying, “Here’s how I can help you with your problem.” (Side note: if you’re a freelancer, how can you solve the editor’s problems? She’s your customer.)

By now you’ve probably thought about plenty of exceptions. “What about Travel + Leisure magazine, or Afar?” you may say. First of all, those do solve the problems of a specific tribe of travelers who want to know where people like them are going and what those people like them will do once they get there. They serve the purpose of providing a shortcut to status. Go here, do this, you’ll be part of the right tribe. Plus they do provide some advice here and there in the front of the magazine and online.

Also though, and this still relates back to those cult of personality blogs, these are escape vehicles, dream mechanisms. I’ve seen Travel + Leisure on the coffee tables or in the bathroom baskets of people I know have not left the country in two or three years. When these subscribers want to mentally check out and imagine themselves in a beautiful place somewhere warm, they pick up that magazine (while sitting on a toilet or a couch). The two places I’ve seen the most people reading print travel magazines are 1) in a doctor’s office while waiting to be called and 2) while walking on a treadmill at the gym.

T+L surely knows this, which is why the photos take up more space than the text. It’s hard to dream on a gym treadmill if you have to actually read the whole time. It’s also why T+L, Conde Nast Traveler, and publications like them spend so much time and money on “Hot List” and “It List” kinds of cover stories. If you’re part of the tribe that cares about what’s new and hot, you can’t not buy and read that issue. For the people who must know these things, problem solved. Filter supplied.

Those readers are a tiny percentage of the traveling public, however. So can you carve out a space that’s for a specific niche and not the masses?

The Craving for Expert Advice

Here’s a fun experiment. Go to a place that still sells magazines, like Barnes & Noble or a sizeable newsstand in an airport. Count the niche magazines that help people do something better: look better, parent better, spend more wisely, gain knowledge, lose weight, or improve their lives. Make note of how many there are.

Then count the ones that are pure entertainment or news, with no advice to offer you.

The ratio is huge—generally 40 to one with a small selection, 50 to one if it’s a big selection.

You can then extrapolate that ratio to the Android app store, to the non-fiction book sales on Amazon, and yes, to what Google shows in search results. The ratio is even wider. Google’s sole purpose is to answer your questions–not to show you how to be entertained. Their idea of “helpful content” is what answers a specific question. Preferably early in the article, not at the 2,500-word mark.

We spend our time with things that help us get wealthier, make us more popular, connect us with people we care about. Utility wins. If you can’t help people help themselves, you’re an entertainer, which is a much tougher job to make a living at than being a person who improves lives.

Seeking Validation From an Audience

“Hey Tim, what about your Perceptive Travel online magazine? It’s a narrative travel site that does not solve any problems.”

Fair enough, one of my oldest online projects is not a service publication. You could argue that it’s just providing entertainment and enlightenment like narrative books do. But it’s not purely that. It was launched in 2006 as an antidote to all the shallow travel mag fluff out there, all the surface-level glorified press releases posing as travel stories and the silly top-10 lists that were jumping from the magazine world to the Internet. If anything, the situation is far worse now.

So Perceptive Travel does solve a problem for those who want to read unique, in-depth travel stories not chosen according to what big advertisers care about. It gives readers faith, it makes them feel smarter, more refined, and yes, maybe a little superior. It gives them what they can’t find elsewhere.

That’s a small segment of travelers, I’ll be the first to admit, and to be honest, Google says it likes that kind of content but it seldom ranks it well. A story about Chaco Canyon will never rank as well as stupid listicles about what to do around Chaco Canyon because Google doesn’t consider the former to really be “helpful content” and it has a bias toward the commercial advertisers. So Expedia, TripAdvisor, Viator and the like will be mixed in with listicle articles and there’s your first page of results.

So the traffic for that publication has never been huge and never will be. But for those it appeals to, we’re the clear #1 option. If nobody reacted or cared when I launched it back in 2006, I wouldn’t still be running it. People did read it and care, so here we are. Validation from customers means “please continue.”

A good thought experiment before you launch a new blog–or any online business for that matter–is to ask, “Why should anyone care about this? What problem am I helping people with?” If that’s not clear, then ask, “Am I at least appealing to a specific tribe?”

Can you frame a description of your book, website, or blog in a way that shows how it solves a problem? A few examples of mine:

• “The World’s Cheapest Destinations book helps long-term travelers and those on a limited vacation budget travel well for less money by choosing interesting destinations that are substantially less expensive than home.” (Ditto for the blog.)
• “TravelWriting2.com helps all types of travel writers be more successful by sharing stories and advice from freelancers, bloggers, and editors.”
• “The Insider Gear Deals e-mail newsletter helps subscribers spend less on luggage, apparel, and gadgets. It’s a one-page overview of deep discounts, coupon codes, and limited-time sales on travel and outdoor gear. This eliminates the need for them to hunt around online or subscribe to dozens of other e-mail newsletters to find the best sales.”
• The Nomadico newsletter presents four quick bites of news and recommendations for working travelers each Thursday.

If you can easily do a description like this, you’re probably on to something. You’re writing to serve the readers’ needs, not just to hear yourself talk. You’re creating helpful content, not just putting up something that you hope will make you money and then stuffing as many ads in as possible.

If you get validation that it’s working, forge on.

If not, you have two choices. You can pivot to a different subject or audience (usually going narrower instead of broader). Or you need to embrace the idea that you really want to be an entertainer, which requires a whole different skill set and business plan. You probably need to set up a frenetic social media posting schedule and go hard on getting YouTube or TikTok subscribers, for instance, rather than focusing on SEO and building an e-mail list.

Don’t get me wrong, we need entertainers too. They help us forget about our problems and our boring lives. We enjoy being entertained and seek out people who are good at making us feel good. We follow people who can brighten our day and make us laugh.

But we don’t need travel blog entertainers as much as we need our Netflix, our Spotify, our Comedy Central, and the games on our phones. Hey, there’s only so much spare time in a day. And we’ve got lots of problems that need to be solved…