Last week during the E-Tourism Africa Summit in Midrand, I was fortunate to interact with fellow travel blogger Johan Knols from PlanYourSafari.com. Today Johan shares with us his journey into blogging and his chosen industry niche…
Briefly introduce yourself and where are you based?
My name is Johan Knols, former safari company owner and Honorary Wildlife Officer for the Department of Wildlife and National Parks in Botswana. Since the beginning of 2007 I am now based in my home country of The Netherlands.
Tell us about your blog, what inspired it and how long have you been blogging?
I have now been blogging for the last 10 months. My inspiration came for the fact that I have been working in the safari industry for nearly 15 years and that I want to provide as much advice and tips to safari lovers as possible.
What inspired the domain name?
PlanYourSafari was chosen with the idea in mind that if (future) travellers have a more inside knowledge, that it will be easier for them to start making a choice of what they want out of a safari and that they will know what kind of an accommodation to choose.
Before blogging what were you doing?
As stated, I lived for almost 15 years in Africa, where I worked the first year in the hunting industry and afterwards did lodge management in Tanzania and Botswana, before starting my own mobile safari company in which I did most of the guiding.
Are you blogging full-time or part-time and how many hours per day do you spend on your blog?
I am blogging fulltime. And I am busy with the blog for at least 4 hours a day. Now I am getting offers through the blog that also start taking up time and I have to make sure to keep up the blog-speed.
How is your blog monetized and how much do you make per month?
Eventually I want to make money out of my blog, although this is not the first priority. I have a bit of income through the advertisement and I offer a service whereby safari companies can start blogging under the umbrella of PlanYourSafari. This is a paid service with great opportunities for smaller safari companies.
What is your content generation strategy and do you keep to it?
I write a lot from personal experience. Besides that I visit a lot of other blogs, read a lot about blogging in general, visit forums and receive a lot of ideas through all my friends in Africa on Facebook and Twitter.
Since blogging, what is the biggest mistake you’ve ever made and what did you learn from it?
I once had to change the template (look and feel) of my blog which resulted in the fact that I lost most of the images in the blog posts. Later I had to re-insert them all by hand again.
What methods do you use to generate traffic for your blog?
I am very busy on Twitter and traffic via links on Twitter has taken over the traffic from FaceBook. Every blogpost that I write I put on Twitter and FaceBook and it is a great way of free advertisement. I also visit other (travel) blogs where I leave comments and get involved in discussion. This also generates traffic. Last but not least, the URL of my blog appears on other forums and websites which is a nice traffic generator as well.
Is your blog authored by yourself only or multiple bloggers and why?
Most of the articles are written by me, although there are posts from an additional 8-10 other people that work in the safari industry. The request to be able to hand in blog posts is growing. I do however make sure that my blog is not going to be used just for PR and Marketing reasons.
Given an opportunity to sell your blog now, what would you charge for it?
Wrong question. The blog is not for sale since I still want to grow it a lot more, although there are days where I receive 200 visitors on the site.
What is your opinion on domain name and blog flipping, do you participate in that space?
I can even learn something from you. I have never heard about blog flipping. The name makes it sound doggy to me (but I might be wrong!)
Within the next 12 months, what are your goals for the blog?
Grow the blog, get more advertisers and more companies that want to use PlanYourSafari as their umbrella to start blogging in order to generate more traffic to their respective websites.
What have been the highlight(s) in your blogging career?
Receiving an invitation to speak at the E-Tourism Africa Summit in Johannesburg recently. I gave a 30 minutes presentation on blogging next to hot-shots from Google, Quirk Marketing, Tripadvisor and the CEO of Wayn.
Tell us about your workstation, is it within your bedroom/dedicated home-office/office park?
I embrace the new way of working. I have a small corner in my apartment that I turned into an office and it is from here where all the articles are uploaded onto the web. It is great not having to deal with traffic jams and not having a boss.
What gadget or software makes your blogging a pleasure?
I use a WordPress template and it is a pleasure to work with it. Since the majority of bloggers use WordPress, there is a great community out there that can help if I encounter a problem.
Blogging is a lonely profession, how do you keep yourself motivated?
Since I am blogging as a business, the motivation is there every day. And although I am working from home, it is seldom that I switch on my laptop after 08.00 in the morning. Yes, I agree that blogging is a lonely profession. I do however have a lot of friends and drinking a beer with them early evening gives me the social contacts that I am missing during the day. The loneliness makes sure that I can work very effective and get a lot done without being distracted.
For more blogging interviews read my sister blog www.alreadyinspired.com where I profile bloggers from across the world.
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