How To Grow A Travel Audience In 2024

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Ben Aston: Welcome to the Indie Media Club podcast. I'm Ben Aston, Founder of the Indie Media Club. We're on a mission to help independent, bootstrapped media entrepreneurs succeed, to help people who create, promote, and monetize through content—do it better. Check out indiemedia.club to find out more.

So today I'm joined by Kyle Kroeger and he's an analyst turned media CEO. He's the Founder and CEO of Black Bear Media. They're a boutique online publisher that own and operate websites in travel, sustainability, and personal finance. And what started as a small families travel story and blog compounded into 12 plus perspectives on ViaTravelers.com. And now in 2023, they rank for over half a million keywords, have more than 15 million visits generating in excess of half a million in revenue.

So how do you do that? Well, keep listening to today's podcast to learn how to grow a travel audience in 2024. We're talking about next year. Yes. 

Hello, Kyle! Thanks for joining us today. 

Kyle Kroeger: Yeah. Thanks for having me on Ben. Hopefully I have the crystal ball, but might be a experiment, but we'll see. 

Ben Aston: Yeah. So quickly take us back to the beginning. Tell us, how did you get into this thing? How do you go from an analyst to media CEO? How does that happen? 

Kyle Kroeger: I spent a lot of time in the offices working in finance, right? And love the collegial nature of all of that. And, but I also knew that I wanted, I grew up in an entrepreneural family, both my parents were entrepreneurs.

I always knew that like I wanted to build something. And I also had this kind of spirit of being a digital nomad, digital slow mad, I guess we are kind of are right now, but that was a big part of just becoming yet free and independent of owning your own lifestyle. And so what became a digital camera when I was traveling eventually became like a GoPro and a video and drone.

And I just really unlocked like this new passion that I was willing to just embrace full force. And I just followed that journey and I was enjoying it so much that just made too much sense to, yeah, just not keep going. So, followed that path. 

Ben Aston: So quit the day job and decided to travel or at least write about travel full time. Were you, in the moment that you made that decision, were you generating revenue or were you pre-revenue generation? 

Kyle Kroeger: Yeah, I had sort of self taught myself SEO. Great. Like a lot of other people have done, but maybe not self taught, but I just started loving it. The maybe like the numbers based in a way, I love that numbers based approach and I really turned like dabbled with niche sites and stuff and scale them up, sold them. And so I had that like model of scaling them up a bit and so I replicated that and, but I wanted to foster something that was very long term and I knew that travel was something that's like for me, it's not going away like anytime soon. 

And so that was something that I could follow a long term path and long story short, yeah, I had basically a journal and log from all my vacations that, and I just took note of basically everything that I did and visited and started writing about it and trying to build like a base and then felt right to transition.

Ben Aston: So yeah, tell us a bit about what ViaTravelers is all about. How would you describe it? 

Kyle Kroeger: I describe it as first it started with me, as my personal experiences and, everything. And I think that doesn't do a fair justice for everyone that's a reader because my lens is so much different for travel.

I can't continue to just pitch on one angle of travel. I believe like travel is one of the only things that can stimulate all senses. And the underlying goal that we have is immersive travel, which is basically meaning like, how can we play into all of that, right, in those senses - audio, visual, far from it. But yeah, so that was something that is was big and so like ViaTravelers I describe it as different perspectives of different people from around the world. So we have writers and time zones all over and want to share all of different cultural perspectives around the world. 

Ben Aston: Awesome. And in terms of you we're talking today about building and growing an audience and for you, as you were thinking about that, I guess, persona of someone who's interested then in authentic travel experiences, I guess, to what extent did that drive your, the kind of overall strategy of ViaTravelers in terms of, was it your hypothesis, for example, that people who want these immersive, one kind of immersive travel experiences, authentic travel experiences have a higher propensity to pay, therefore they're a great target audience to go for? Or was it more that it just reflected your own personal interests? 

Kyle Kroeger: It started with personal interests and like my perspective and then trying to branch it out. And I, I thought like, and we're going to have a persona to be honest, I'm really bad at building like personas and that's like my big weakness and branding and stuff like that.

I wanted to build like a base of stuff from personal experience. And so that was like three years ago and the whole E-E-A-T thing, like the E part was like the start of it. And so, yeah, that was part of like the log. But now that we had a, have a base and some data to go off of, we're really starting to understand what do people want?

And I can speak to a millennial audience of maximizing your experience without spending tons of money or going on just one vacation every year. Like, let's do multiple and let's go far. And so, yeah, I love that kind of mantra and we want to play into that as much as possible. And we built a team of writers that kind of say, follow that same mantra.

Ben Aston: Cool. And in terms of building them, that audience of people who value going far with a little and how did you cultivate and grow that audience up to now? And how do you think you're going to change the way that you do that moving forwards?

Kyle Kroeger: We did it in the past by basic, yeah, I mean, a traditional SEO strategy of finding different things in topics that we like truly need to know personally. Also big on evergreen travel topics, like travel hacking ways to maximize your dollar to, to see more.

And so really built that foundation and we want to dive deeper into that. But going forward, I think audience building really is about, like our goal for the next year is, I don't care about what any other algorithm is doing. I need to talk to my people and I need to talk to them directly. It doesn't even matter if it's one person or if it's some person in person offline marketing, I need to figure out how we can make travel easier for people and help people travel smarter.

So that's our big thing we're trying to solve. 

Ben Aston: So, SEO formed a bit of a foundation of building an audience for you to generate web traffic. How intentional have you been in growing and building your audience across other channels and platforms like YouTube and Insta as well? 

Kyle Kroeger: To be honest, that's another pain point, and I knew it all along.

Kind of a failure in a way, it was like, focusing on writing for one entity and I won't big G, right. And spending so much time, it's almost like spending a bunch of time on Instagram and going all in on that and like only doing that. We spend a lot of time like, okay, this is what is working and if it's not broken, don't fix it.

And so, but we're a little bit naive of not spending enough time of being like, showcasing in other ways. I would say our second biggest channel is newsletter. A lot of, I interact personally with the emails, very personal touch. I mean, we provide a lot of value, but one thing I wanted to need to do is leverage some of those other channels more.

We've taken so many photos, so many videos, huge media bank. It's time to tap into that and showcase what we've actually done. 

Ben Aston: Yeah, and so you're driving traffic, you're building your audience, your owned audience through your email list. And as you grew that email list, what was the reason you gave people to subscribe?

What was the promise you were offering people? Was it a lead magnet or was it just, Hey, stay up to date. What was the driver that helped build the audience there? 

Kyle Kroeger: Yeah, being that we started with experience first, right? Like we didn't have a defined cluster too much of being, cause like based on where I went, it was like, it could be California and then it could be London.

Right? So those are very two big clusters and so it's spread out. And so that's a challenge with travel is that, you need a lead magnet for so many different prongs to fit that intent. We do have a few bifurcated intent oriented lead magnets by location, like packing lists, travel guides. 

On the travel hacking side we have different like calculators and tools people can use as well as like a general travel newsletter. So try to bifurcate it out. But as you bifurcate it out, that ends up compounding the amount of kind of work it is to manage the newsletter, right? 

Ben Aston: Yeah. I'm curious as well, I mean, you just identified it. The traveler who might be interested in North American travel or South American travel might be a different audience for European or African, Asian travel. So as you built your audience across different geographies, yeah, how did you manage that challenge of, Hey, well, this is about global travel, but we've got people. 

Our audiences probably has a propensity to travel to different places, but maybe not across the entire world because of the budget limitations or time limitations that they might have. So how intentional have you been at trying to build these clusters around certain areas or just kind of more shotgun?

Kyle Kroeger: Initially it was shotgun. Now it's been a lot more precise, right? A lot of imagery and content around Amsterdam and the Netherlands resonates with me and like I own that cluster. And I'm trying to solve for different things that I can offer that I know people like it's my backyard.

So I should know what people need to know. And so really building into that and then owning that. And even just one of those, in my opinion, and what we've seen so far. If you do one of those right, get that foundation down and then now move to the other spots. So it's very replicable. In a way, it's what you need to find to fill the problem. But once you really own that little mold, you can replicate it in a different place. 

Ben Aston: Yeah. And in terms of, in terms of your email list that you have now, do you mind sharing how big is your list that's driving all of that? You know, 15 million visits is a ton. How much of that comes from email versus SEO?

Kyle Kroeger: Yeah, it's still only around 10%. I mean, we've doubled our email list this year. So we've spent a lot of time doing that, focused on harvesting an audience and asking them what they want. And that's been a real more recent sort of thing that we've been really focusing on is, like what do you need?

And then we will do whatever it takes to solve that, written form, whatever that is. And so, yeah, it's still a small part, but bit by bit, it's not going to happen overnight. Just like SEO, as long as we can really focus in on it, I think the long game is what's going to matter the most. 

Ben Aston: Yeah. And in terms of that long game, as you're assessing the health of your media business, what are the metrics that are important to you?

Kyle Kroeger: Yeah, metrics. I think like time to produce content, but maintaining quality. Right? So I think one thing that I would be curious if to know if other publishers think about this way. But I have content that's just like in the, this like purgatory middle and it's just sitting, like that's dollars that's being just opportunity costs. 

And so we need to have a nice efficient flow. If we know it needs edits and we know we need to prove it in some way, like it needs that direction. So time to produce content, repurposing content. I think like keep your eyes on like revenue per 1000 visits. So fully stack all of the different revenue streams per page.

And then, and even on that, on top of that, put a dollar on your opt ins for that page too. And so do a full stack based on per thousand. So those are some core that I look at. And then obviously like bounce rate and time on page and really focusing on the page experience. 

Ben Aston: I mean, let's talk about monetization. You talked about stacking monetization channels. So yeah, how do you stack monetization on your side?

Kyle Kroeger: Yeah, it's display ads. We have a lot of informative content as well. So destination, like inspiration that we know that trying to monetize would be, or like with affiliates would be kind of forcing it.

So we do have higher skew to display, call it 66%, so two thirds, one third. With two thirds being display, one third being affiliate. We've done some sponsored stuff. We could do more for sure. I think that's a, we haven't done enough of direct like direct placement and things like that. So, but that's a small percentage, like 5% maybe that would squeeze into that two thirds, one third.

And so that's how we stack it now. For the future, I would say might look different. That's part of the goal. So owning our products, owning our revenue stream is a huge goal of ours. 

Ben Aston: And so what, yeah, tell me about owning your product. What does that mean to you? Is that a membership product or what's that look like?

Kyle Kroeger: Yeah, I like, I call it value added content in a way where we can leverage our existing content or external data sources, combine it with our existing content to provide like a tool or a solution, like software light, like not a SaaS, but something that's like a tool or a tool kit that offers like a package of things or a resource base, knowledge base, whatever you want to call it.

So yeah, it's some form of membership community base. I also would love, we took 50,000 photos of the last three years. I keep saying, I think there's gotta be like 12 in there that could make a coffee table book people would want to like look at. So I don't know. So I keep wrestling with some of that. And I think we know travel enough to find something that's a tangible product that would help. 

Ben Aston: Yeah. And so as you're thinking about, obviously, so you're primarily monetizing through display, secondarily through affiliate. So in order to drive your monetization, obviously eyeballs are really important and secondarily, the funnel for product. 

And so as you're thinking about building an audience and creating or generating loyalists and lovers of the brand, how do you decide, yeah, what that content in terms of the content strategy, what content to create? Like in terms of building out the content to support the affiliate funnel or creating another page that's a little bit more long tail on a keyword, because you know that that could generate more page views.

How do you balance the two monetization streams that you have and how that impacts the content strategy? 

Kyle Kroeger: Yeah, I think right now we've been, we put that somewhat lower and feel a higher priority to filling content gaps. If we know that like, oh, look, we haven't even had an accommodation guide for this city, but we've covered almost every single other angle.

It's like, we got to just bite the bullet because we know this is going to be helpful and we know this is going to be good content that plays into all of the other stuff that we've produced. So some of that's and then we balance the prioritization of being like, okay, well, where's content gaps let's stack, like let's place, let's get the stuff in order and in process that does have a little bit more of a conversion angle, we'd probably say. 

But start there in terms of, but with our audience, like we, in terms of what they need, we haven't been doing this enough and we just started doing it. It's just ask them. And so we got a great response from just asking them being like, how can we be helpful, more helpful? We're in all of these locations. What do we need to do to get you what you need and got a great response. And so now we're going to solve backwards for them.

Ben Aston: What did asking them look like? Was that an email or poll? How did you do that? 

Kyle Kroeger: Yeah, it was a Google Form. So simple Google Form and had some like buzz kind of buzz wordy travel, like rather than somewhat likely make it more geared towards different prongs of travel, whether that's budget, like extending your experiences as well as like wild card where they could input anything.

And yeah, it got some great responses. I have to go through that actually this week and our number one goal is solving for the masses of, and even if it's a small sample size, one thing I want to do this year is do more with less. So small sample size, if I can get a small tribe of a few thousand people that want to buy a product, let's do that.

Those are my tribe, let's just write that and we can slowly compound that over time. But even if we just find our number ones, let's just, well, I'll ride with the number ones all day long. 

Ben Aston: Yeah. And so as you created this survey to understand who your audience is in terms of current state, and then you're obviously using that to inform the highly engaged audience that yeah, might buy a product or is going to keep coming back to the site.

Has that changed your understanding of what does your tribe, what do you think your tribe looks like and how do you think that kind of compares to the competition out there? Obviously you're fighting for eyeballs and clicks from other travel sites. So as you're shaping that kind of ideal customer profile, what does, yeah, what's that beginning to look like and how much are you evaluating what the competition is doing to try and find that white space of who your tribe audiences is going to be?

Kyle Kroeger: Yeah, I've been doing a lot of homework on that is I want to find it, I want to build into an untapped area that we know really well. So some of the responses we've gotten a lot on just like things that resonate with us personally as a team. Things like, I'm cost conscious about where I travel, but I like to splurge.

And that's something that like I do all the time. I'm like, I'll cut out the things that are like semi important and be very aware of that. But then the things I love to do when I get to a place like no limit, right? And enjoy that and maximize as much as possible. And so focus on that and parlaying that though into something that will analyze competitors and there's a lot of big sites out there in that space that, they cover just a lot of generic stuff. 

And honestly, I don't think it's that helpful. Yeah, you could get me going on this, but right, like in the whole experience thing, it's like, take a photo. Like that's actually the person has been there, like the author has been there. And some of these sites, like they're like, some of them are even using Unsplash and still performing.

So it baffles me, but we'll find our angle and our way through it. I think there's a couple of spots that are unfulfilled in my opinion. 

Ben Aston: Yeah. And so as you, obviously Google's telling us that these first person view perspectives are super important. And how do you see works and what doesn't work in travel content? Have you seen that actually work for you that your original photos and your original content are outperforming the generic stock stuff? Or do you actually, yeah...

Kyle Kroeger: Yeah. No, no. And that's why I always say the 50,000 photos thing, because yeah, I guess maybe not yet, but I've done it all. Like I image objects, Kiba with all the XAF data and metadata showcasing, like, Hey, I was actually like, I'm in the museum and this is literally my photo.

And I even, map it to like my Adobe profile and everything. And my Flickr and all of that, and our images don't rank and you'll get like something you can download off Shutterstock that's ranking Google image search in the top three or whatever. So that part baffles me. Maybe it'll come around.

I don't know, but more to my part of like, I would rather share that then though with my audience in like our newsletter. Like here's a picture of me, like standing at the Rijksmuseum. I have seen some new competition that have done some cool things about having like face. I'm not good with having my face in there.

So that's probably a deficiency, but having like your face in the location, really documented in, in all of the old tags and descriptions. 

Ben Aston: Yeah, and going back to building your audience, one of the things you said was, Oh yeah, we should have probably should have thought about building our list sooner and being more intentional about that and building on other channels and not just Google.

Can you share what your biggest screw up in that process was? Or what would you do differently in 2024 in terms of building that audience and owning that audience versus what you've been doing for the past few years? 

Kyle Kroeger: Yeah, I think it's playing in too much to one entity. I kind of alluded to it earlier.

It's just like, we spent so much time reading every single thing, creating comprehensive checklists, doing exactly what I was told and like putting stuff in our images, creating our images. Products, like we get products and do reviews and like we have unboxing videos, like testing them and everything invested a lot in that.

So I wish, yeah, probably last year of this time, we would have been doing what we're doing now. And one thing I think that a lot of publishers always defer to as when they say kind of other channels that always means like social or whatnot. I think other channels of commerce or digital products is very effective. And I want to really crack it and test it because now you have so many different commerce platforms out there that you can also, you can have it on your own site, but also multiple other commerce platforms.

Those are customers that buy from you organically there that become email and can become long term readers, and you can compound that with freely like opt ins as well. So I think that's more effective where, cause it's directly tied to revenue. 

Ben Aston: Yeah, that sounds very sensible. Tell me a bit about your team. I know you have a team of writers that are creating this content. But in terms of how you structure the team as it does a writers and then actually getting content on the page or on the channel. What does that look like? What's your team breakdown? 

Kyle Kroeger: Yeah, we have three editors. So we have managing editor and then two editors, one focus on new content and works directly with new content writers.

And then we have a revamp renovations team that has an editor and it's probably a split of six writers on the new content side and six on the revamp side, sometimes people go switch between. And then we have different operations folks like quality control checks as well as outreach. And then we do have a project manager as well that manages the operations team.

Ben Aston: So yeah, so how big is your team right now and how much content are you publishing a month on average? 

Kyle Kroeger: We're doing about two new articles a day and one revamp being reformatted back on the site per day. So that's the runway. We're still trying to keep that up. I think we're maybe paring a little back, that might change, but trying to find ways where we can keep that up.

Current team size, 16, 18, I want to say. It always depends with writers because some of the writers like couple pieces of a month and then some are like full in on our content cycle. 

Ben Aston: And so, and do you calculate and plan ROI on a per piece of content? Or how do you think about what to produce and whether or not you should or not?

Kyle Kroeger: I have no like specific tracking sheet I should and like should know. I do use some tools of knowing our numbers, but I don't have a curve being like, okay, this has been published for this amount of time. ROI is this. We do do like specific tracking, but a check of the good ones, and then try to iterate, again, and replicate that same kind of template and always be improving like the layout of the page to succeed.

As a finance person, you think that I would have that nailed down, but maybe I have some PTSD. 

Ben Aston: And tell me a bit about your stack. What are you publishing on? And what are some of the tools you use through that content planning, publishing process? 

Kyle Kroeger: Yeah, so I use, yeah, WordPress and then I'll have, you know, I have other sites beyond viatravelers.com. And so I do have Headless in a way that manages all of the sites into one consolidated platform, which is main WP. It's an open source that aggregates all of the sites into one. You can manage all the posts or any admin things. Use make.com for like automation and process flows. ClickUp for project management.

Affilimate has been great for affiliate performance optimization at the page level. And also even page experience to see like heat maps of where people are dropping off, where people are clicking. That's been very helpful. And then obviously some GPT for like, of course, and integrate that into make in our project management to streamline any ideation that we can.

Ben Aston: Cool. Well, let's close out with a lightning round, some quick fire questions. Tell me what is the best advice you think you've ever received? 

Kyle Kroeger: Just start. That's been a big thing with me lately is just start. Yeah, it's two words. Very simple. Like yeah, you can never get anything, never get done if you don't start so just start.

Ben Aston: Tell me which of your personal habits do you think has contributed most to your success that you've seen?

Kyle Kroeger: Yeah, it's a double edged sword, but it's relentlessness, I guess. They're like, yeah, persistence. Yeah. Won't stop until it's figured out. 

Ben Aston: That's cool. And tell me, I mean, we've talked about different tools that you use, but is there an internet resource or tool that you particularly love and that you just highly recommend?

Kyle Kroeger: Yeah. I mean, Make has been a whole new thing for me. I don't know. I just, I might spend too much time on it on start creating stuff I don't need, necessarily need. So I didn't take a step back from it. So, but Make, if you're not familiar, it's like Zapier and all that. So just no code kind of automation and bringing all the tools together.

It's big for an entrepreneur and really understanding that because when you have eight email accounts and four Slacks and all of this stuff, it's, that becomes overbearing. 

Ben Aston: Yeah. Tell me what book you'd recommend and why. 

Kyle Kroeger: In a similar vein, I think the reason why I went to, started getting on the Make thing is because I did read this, it's sort of like a directory book in a way. Automate the Boring Stuff with Python.

So, yeah, I always loved processes and being efficient, and that opened the door to me of being like, oh, wait, there's actual tools on your computer that you should be using to make your life better. 

Ben Aston: Awesome. Now you've talked a bit about, I mean, the best advice you received and just start and be relentless and that's being what's propelled you to where you've got to today, but for someone at the start of their digital media journey, particularly with regards to audience building, what's one piece of advice that you'd give?

Kyle Kroeger: Yeah. Survey a hundred people. Yeah, get to know people within that problem right away, and also just go forward in terms of creating something, who cares about like SEO. But if you think that it's going, that audience is going to grow in the future, figure out that problem and create content around it and ride that growth wave of just that small sub angle that is a problem.

Just that small sub angle. You can ride if, yeah, that's all you need. And you figure out that and that it's a lot easier. 

Ben Aston: Yeah, I think that's super sound advice because, yeah, as the world of SERP changes and generic content becomes completely commoditized as ChatGPT can spin out generic content all day long, being really clear about who we're writing for and who our audience are is I think the most important thing. Because the reality is, is that these kind of generic sites that are producing content for everyone and no one at the same time, I think are going to fade into the background and what we'll see is the emergence of hyper niche publishers and content that targets to a really clear audience.

And when you have an audience, there's all kinds of ways that you can monetize that. Whether that is through display, or affiliate, or product, as you've been talking about today. So, super helpful advice. Thanks for that. 

Now, Kyle, just as we finish, tell people yeah, where can people find out more about you and what you're up to?

Kyle Kroeger: Yeah, you can obviously follow us on LinkedIn, Kyle Kroeger, you can check me out. We'd love to connect. ViaTravelers.com is an opt in for our newsletter. We'd love to interact with you if anyone likes to travel as much as we do. So I'm on there and then also you'll see me on socials every once in a while @viatravelers for all the social media accounts. Yeah, Instagram, Facebook, all of the good stuff. So there you can see my stuff in real time.

Ben Aston: Awesome. And Kyle offered, very kindly, if anyone is ever going to Amsterdam, ping Kyle and he'll take you on a tour. But you have to use the magic password "Indie Media Club", um, so Kyle knows you're a listener. Thank you so much for joining us today, it's been great having you with us.

Kyle Kroeger: Yeah, thanks for having me on Ben, this was fun. 

Ben Aston: And if you like what you heard today, please subscribe and stay in touch on indiemedia.club. And please, leave us a review on iTunes too. But until next time, thanks for listening.