My IM Journey

MadUdder

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Iv'e always thought this would be a great idea to share exactly what I did and how I did it with others for several reasons.

1. I can receive feedback and constructive criticism.
2. I can learn from others and their mistakes.
3. I can grow and be a success.
4. I can help others along the way.

With that being said, I am new here to BHW but love the forum and really appreciate the members and the content.

Here are my goals and here is what I am doing so far.

I wrote my book. Well, I actually rewrote the book. The current title is not yet set in stone, but its a Travel Hacking Book. I originally wrote the book about 12 years ago and recently updated it. When I orignially wrote and published the book I was making on average 1K a week selling only on Ebay. Ebay took down all ebooks in the travel section and I gave up on it. But that was a long time ago. Things have changed.

In the book, I teach people how to legally hack the travel industry, and get deep discounts on travel. There are also other cool hacks and techniques in the book and It's now with my editor.

I hope to re-publish it within a month.

Two months ago I started an Instagram account. You can follow it hear. TheOriginalTravelHacker

I currently have 29.8K Followers.

I did the following to get it started.

I first posted some inspirational quotes and realized it had nothing to do with travel hacking, but it was more or less to motivate others. I gave up on this idea and read that what I need to focus on is a theme.

So I now post destination photos and I am about to post travel gadgets and products. I already included a few travel hacks in there as well.

I did hire someone on Fiverr to manage the account and I get lots of likes and followers this way, but most of hte people who follow me are low engagement accounts. Not sure if I will continue.

I do add hashtags. Like #travelhacker, #travelhacking, #travelhack and I also include tags for the cities I mention. This seems to work as I rank very high for these phrases. Most of the time I am #1.

Since I was close to 30K followers, I reached out to several websites that sell cool and interesting travel products. within 24 hours, almost all of the sites gave me permission to use their images and I can start to push their products on my IG account. I am not looking for anything in exchange at this point as the goal is to add great content and simply grow the account. Plus, by not asking for anything in return, the hope is that the relationships I build will bear fruit later when the account gets really big.

The next step is to create a twitter account and Facebook account with the same theme and images.

When the book comes back from the editor, I'll work on the title and the cover art. Research is key so I will focus a lot of attention of both as this is really what sells a book.

I'm going to then get some reviews to add to the back from prominent sources.

I plan on selling the book on the following places.

Amazon as a paperback and ebook
numerous ebook market places.
classified sites
ebay
clickbank
jvzoo
and I'm also going to try getting the book into numerous bookstores as a physical product.

On top of all of this, I also plan on selling in retail shops in airports and in some major cities across the US.
I'm going to reach out to the following:
Luggage stores
AAA locations

Beyond this I also plan on advertising on Facebook, Google, and some travel sites.

In order to build my social media presence, I have learned that quality content counts. As does posting at the right time of day.

I have yet to purchase any guidebook or sign up for anything except the Fiverr marketing at 35/month.

I do plan on using a landing page designer to create my landing page and I also plan on helping my affiilates and resellers with content to make them successful not only with my product but any product they want to sell.

Along the way, I'll continue to share with you all what products I purchase and what works and what does not.

Split testing for ads will also be important and I plan on doing some if it.

On my landing page , I want to make sure I convert lookers into buyers and I plan on offering a money back guarantee as well as excellent customer service. I'll try to respond to any questions any buyer has and help them save hundreds if not thousands on thier next trip. The book should cover everything from hotels, to car rentals to airfare, but my personal responses will be a great bonus.

I really do care about my product and my buyers are important to me, so I want to ensure they get real value out of my book.

On top of the book, I also plan on partnering with many of the sites and companies I mention and the book will have thousands of dollars worth of coupons for my readers.

Well I think I covered it all. If you have questions about anything specific, let me know. I am excited to publish this and start writing my next book. And of course, put my marketing plan into action.

Cheers,

The Original Travel Hacker
 
here is a brief update. Last night I posted my first product on my IG account on behalf of a partner that I contacted and IG this am asked me if I wanted to convert to a business account, which I did s it gave me some credibility and it's one step closer to getting verified.
 
I'll try to post as often as I can to share my story. My book is back from my editor and I'm pleased so far with the results. I'll finish writing the book and get it ready for sale. In the mean time, I can't forget about marketing and I have to get everything in place and ready. The biggest mistake I see others make is that they forget to focus on other areas of their business and will wait for one thing to happen before moving on to the next. Even if you sell online, you have to treat your business with respect and wear many different "hats".
 
I was searching for a free tool that generates Instagram hashtags based on my Instagram theme. I found the tool and want to share it with you all. Go to the site displaypurposes.com

Iv'e recently done a lot of research on IG hashtags and the importance of using them . There are a lot of companies that offer services to add hashtags but all of them for costly and this service was free. As an experiment, I posted two photos today to my IG account. The first photo I used my old method of adding hashtags which was simply what I thought were good hashtags. 30 minutes later, I posted the 2nd photo using the hashtags from the site I mentioned and I already see a lot more engagement. I'll post again about this specific experiment in a week as the next task is to find the exact time to post images based on my feed.
 
Nice journey thread dude. Good luck.
 
Here is an update from today's experiment using the free app displaypurposes.com. I doubled my engagement from this one trick alone.

I posted two images on IG today. the first without using the app and the 2nd with the app. Adding hashtags really does work as long as you know which ones to use.

Next is determining the best time of day to post and of course, I continue using quality content with each post.
 
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