Travelwires.com broadens its news coverage to the rest of the world
Since I launched www.travelwires.com its core focus has been the publication of South African travel and tourism business news. From time to time I’ve published international industry news, though only on rare occasions.
This has been purposely done, since the blog’s logo carried the South African map which meant special focus was only the local industry news. However with the new look logo design the South African map will be replaced by an airline, making free for the blog to include all industry news from around the globe.
This move is also in response to the constant requests received from various industry PR companies around the glob wishing to have their press releases published on the blog. It means the blog’s international readership has not been catered for, while they were interested on reading about their company’s news on the blog.
It also means the blog will now start tapping into more international readership, which will increase our mailing list, our page impressions and thus attractive new advertisers with the spread in readership.
By no means does this means South African news will be left out of the blog, it only means the blog will now be more diluted than before and updated more frequently each day as the news become available from across the globe.
Another worrying discovery about the blog which fellow blogger Calvin Ntombela helped to highlight is the very high bounce rate, which is currently at 79% (Google Analytics Report), with means readers spend less than a second on the blog, before exiting. Since about 80% of the traffic is from search engines, more users are international readers and haven’t been getting news of their interest.
With the introduction of more international news, am hoping the bounce rate will be reduced and be able to retain all the international traffic into spending more time of the blog, by offering what they want.
I would suggest that you stay focussed and should post what you find newsworthy and not what “PR companies around the glob wishing to have … published”. These press releases can be found everywhere. Google will honor unique content (only)
Indeed, I agree with you Harald, I won’t be merely publishing any press release received, but only quality content. I do have weekly posts which are exclusive content published only on the blog, however that is not enough to grow the blog, thus the need to also use press releases.