The world has so much to show, the desert, the oceans, the mountains, the forest. All the biomes in the world have their purpose and beauty. Setting sail to one of these locations is probably a common dream of many. Who doesn’t like a change of pace in their daily routine? Some read about such places to know more, some enjoy these amazing places then return to their normal lifestyle. There is another type who wants to make traveling their professional career. A smart way to make it a profession is to become a successful travel blogger.
Blogging is a demanding business as you have to be active, diligent, and consistent almost as much as a businessman. When travel blogging is considered the same situation becomes even more of a difficult task.
It is a difficult road, yet it is possible to become a successful travel blogger. If you are planning on starting your own travel blog, you have landed on the right page.
You can start your travel blogging journey easily, but the challenge is to keep it going. But rest assured, with the tips mentioned here, it will be much easier for you to start your travel blog and keep it going and to become a successful travel blogger.
All the tips mentioned here are proven and tested with many beginner bloggers who focused on the travel niche. All the tips are worth going for, and you can take the tip and use them in your blogging journey.
1. Start as Soon as Possible
Some of you might be thinking of becoming a travel blogger, and that is indeed a good thought. The problem arises when that same thought lingers in your mind for days, weeks, months. The idea loses its impact and you either get over it or regret upon the time which was lost.
Everything you do requires time and efforts, some may need less time and some a lot. It takes more time to learn about car engines than about a lamp. The complexity of a task defines the efforts required, the effort and time convert into an experience.
Experience is a factor that makes or breaks a blog. When someone new tries blogging, he may fall multiple times because of lack of experience. He may make mistakes along the way and learn from them, experiment again and again just to complete a project. All these things don’t go to waste. The learning phase is an important one. Just like any senior tier job requires candidates with some years of experience in that field.
This does not mean you will keep on preparing for your journey all the time. Start as soon as possible just to get the hang of it and keep going at it.
Your niche does not have to be a fancy place. It can be whatever you want it to be. Many people hesitate to put up travel blogs because they start to compare their content with other established bloggers in the industry.
This is not how to travel blogging works.
Famous places do get more attention, but still, there is a demand for uncommon and neighboring places. So be confident about your content and find your own unique voice.
Remember that you are here to learn and grow, so don’t hesitate to dive right into it.
Start your blog and start pushing content which you find worth sharing on your blog. You may find at times that you can improve your content, and that is what you should do whenever you get a chance.
Even when writing, you do not come up with a great draft in the first go. You type whatever is in your hear in the first go, and then you start refining it.
So, the first thing you should do for your blog is simply launching it!
2. Pick the Right Niche
Focus on what you want to show to your audience. A travel blogger with a niche of luxurious hotels or fancy places will only attract a specific type of audience. You must figure out what you want with your blog and how you want to connect with your audience.
Write content which comes naturally to you or in other words, write something which you enjoy. That way, you can structure your blogs with a personal touch. You can make your readers imagine the journey the way you want it to be imprinted in their minds.
If you are very enthusiastic about road trips and vehicles, you could try out a car or bike travel blog. Many people love to travel, but only some can afford trips. Therefore, you could help them with a low budget travel plan, and thus, your website can focus on this niche. Similarly, geographically limited people could get your help in finding domestic places. For instance, Asia travel plan, Europe travel plan could be your target domain.
Moreover, you could be specific like showing mountain or sea around the world. “Top 5 Mountains to Visit if you are in China” is a valid and quite alluring title for readers.
When coming up with a niche, think of what a reader could be looking for. To clarify, decide according to the reader’s needs rather than any of your random journeys around the world.
Targeted content equals the right audience and good traffic.
Also Read: How to Choose a Profitable Blog Niche?
3. Write with a Purpose to Inform and Entertain
Good content always attracts readers, so the next thing is what you are providing to your audience. Many bloggers keep on pushing out content, but the written content is usually not liked by many.
Professional travel blogging does not involve your short weekend trip to a close-by city with nothing valuable. However, good details about the place like the city’s hotspots could encourage the readers to read it. Readers want to consume information, data, tips, stories.
A guide on what to pack for your Europe trip or hiking trip, a list of places to visit in a city, a shopping guide in Moscow, tips on which mode of travel to use in a country, the culture of a country, behaviour of the citizens, all these give some information or content to the readers. They could use that knowledge in their plan, or they may love to read about those places in general. So keep in mind what kind of content you are creating for your readers.
4. Promote Your Blog
Don’t let your blogs rest like old books on the shelf. Let them out and let people know they exist. Any successful travel blogger knows that just writing an amazing blog is of no use if there is no one to read it. Therefore, make it a habit to promote your blog.
Many times the audience needs a gentle reminder about your blogs. Therefore, you can let them know and have a certain number of readers almost all the time you publish. This is also a great way to bring in more readers to your site. The more it is shared, the more it is helpful.
Travel bloggers have much more leverage as they have tons of images to share on social media. Words combined with the image of beautiful scenery or thrilling adventure sports could have an imprint on the public.
Pinterest is a well known social media platform for posting all sorts of images and videos. As a result, it has become a lot beneficial for travel bloggers. Sharing images or videos with a subject of traveling will help others find your posts who have the same interest. It is the best place to find the right audience.
Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, Youtube all the platforms have a huge number of users who could convert into your blog audience.
Also Read: How to Effectively Promote Your Blog on Social Media
5. Guest Posting
You should try to get in touch with some of the experts who have the same niche as yours. You could complement their work and could try to pitch a blog idea to them. If they like the idea, you could be partners, and you could become a guest blogger on their site.
This is a great way to promote your blog and share a new perspective and style to the readers of the other website.
Reach out to the other bloggers multiple times to spread the word of your blog. Sometimes the audience sticks to its own country’s bloggers, and when you request these bloggers, and they accept to post your content, then you could have a new audience to entertain.
Also, when you guest post on a website, you get a backlink to your website as well. This helps in the Search engine optimization, which in turn helps in ranking your blog on search results, which brings us to the next point.
6. Focus on SEO
SEO or Search Engine Optimization is a factor that can have a huge impact on the success of your travel blog. The goal is to make it super simple for the search engine like google and bing to find your blog with the help of the tweaks you do to your blog.
Every professional blogger focuses on keywords while writing his blog, his motive is to get his site ranked on those keywords. The blog revolves around this concept, and thus, he gets traffic on his blog site.
Headings h1, h2, h3, etc., are also essential in structuring a blog, this way, the blog becomes relevant to search engines.
You can use a tool like Yoast SEO to optimize your site, it helps you manage the part of blogging which you may be a novice in.
Do not worry about this a lot in the begging as any beginner blogger can get stuck with SEO and loose track and essence of why they started a blog in the first place. So, while SEO is necessary, try not to grow it on you. You can always try your hands-on SEO but keep it subtle and do not let the technicalities of it overwhelm you.
7. Interact With Your Audience
A travel blogger has to take care of his audience and keep in touch with his audience. Talking to your audience at regular intervals always makes them feel valued. It is not only to make your readers happy as with the interaction you could get to know what the readers are thinking about your writing.
They could tell you what more they want from your travel blogs like a tip, guide or any info which they might require. Your audience helps you focus on elements that you may forget or do not even think of including.
Best of all, your audience helps you in making a community around your blog where everyone can interact with one another and share their thoughts. Having a healthy community will always remind you of your purpose, which should be to help the people with your writing.
8. Consistent Publishing
You must be very diligent and punctual in your blog publishing as it helps your readers to keep track of your posts. If there is a pattern to your publishing, it will be adopted by your readers in no time.
Many bloggers write for a month or two and just give up. This is not a quick road to success. You must be consistent and persistent, and that attitude should last for quite a while to see the actual results.
Don’t make a posting schedule which is very difficult and hard to maintain, instead focus on how much you can deliver and work on filling that blog with as much valuable info as possible. Also, avoid publishing in bulk when the inspiration strikes. This is not how to attract regular readers.
When you follow a weekly TV series, you know what to expect and when to expect it, and this creates a light keenness among the viewers. The same way you must show your readers that you have a routine and schedule which they usually follow without even being told.
9. Make Your Style
It is quite common to start blogging by getting inspired by someone, this is a great step to take, but sometimes it so happens that we tend to start doing exactly what our idol does. This is a big red flag as people will easily and quickly point out this to you if this goes on for a while.
You want to write about traveling because you like to travel, and every person has a very different perspective, and style of traveling and even the concept of enjoyment is different for each person. Some may like to enjoy a thrilling activity, and some may enjoy the calmness of a beach. Your ideology and way of thinking should be clear to the readers. You cannot write about a calm place with a sharp and loud tone, the same way you cannot describe a sky-diving experience with a low and boring tone.
Be honest with yourself.
You have decided the location and planned the whole trip now it is up to you to describe the place with the use of words filled with your personality.
This is your story, and people are waiting to hear it.
10. Promote Through Email List
Emails are a great way to connect directly with your followers. Most travel bloggers provide ebooks, travel photos collection, and some offer giveaways for followers when they subscribe to their newsletter.
Offer something valuable to the readers, and you will have a list of true fans of your travel blogs. They are more likely to check your email regularly and follow your activity through your emails as they opted to subscribe with their own will, and this has more impact than a social media promotion to them.
Email marketing has shown a great return on investment of $38 for every $1 you put in it. This has, therefore been one of the most effective promoting methods for many businesses and bloggers.
An email list is a huge asset to you.
11. Connect with Major Media Companies
Waiting for your blog to become popular has never worked correctly. You must research your local media outlets and check if they have a section of traveling. If they do have that, you can contact the writers through Twitter, Instagram. You can make a good, compelling content that you can then pitch to the writers, and if selected, you could have one of the best opportunities to spread your written content.
Getting exposure through a media outlet is a great way to bring traffic to your travel blog and get recognized for your work as these media companies already have a huge audience.
12. Hire Experts for Help
Your job is to travel and collect all sorts of data and info for your readers like the culture, cost of travel, mode of transport, types of food, etc. This requires you to be vigilant and always thinking of ways to make your content interesting. This means you cannot focus on every aspect of maintaining your blogging business. A professional travel blogger knows that everything must be top-tier, and he alone cannot achieve this.
To tackle this and have a smooth running blog, you must let other experts deal with their respective fields. Hire an accountant for managing your finances and books, hire an editor to check your content, a graphic designer can help you get good images for your blog or posts on social media.
Let the people who have experience and knowledge to handle the rest so you can focus on what you are good at that is traveling and documenting it.
13. Generate Income Through Different Methods
A successful travel blogger means that you can earn a good sum through your travel blogs. This means you need to be a professional travel blogger and not just any person writing about his hobby. This will be your job, your work-place, and to achieve this, you must understand and adopt the different means of earning your income.
Affiliated links are one of the most popular earning methods in travel blogging. When you travel, you usually need a lot of pieces of equipment and products to make your stay easy and productive. These products could generate income for you when you put up a referral link to the product in your blog, and someone clicks on it and purchases that product.
The product can be anything from a camera to sunscreen, it just has to be something which you have used and liked; otherwise you would be lying to your audience, which is an ill practice.
You can register with Google AdSense and generate income from the ads shown in your travel blog. Google AdSense works in a way that targets your type of advertisements, and readers will usually connect with such ads as they are relevant to them.
Sometimes a company contacts you for a sponsorship deal to promote their product. This will easily help you out in generating a good income for yourself. You just need to talk about the perks of the product and describe it to your readers in a way that helps you in your travels. It is considered the right practice to disclose to your readers if a product is a sponsored one.
Also Read: How to Make Money From Blogging?
14. Invest in your Blog
A successful travel blog requires funds to work properly, it is the essence of the blog as we all know traveling is not always cheap. This is the part where you invest or even reinvest your earnings into your blog and yourself so that you can make more content for your blog.
You must learn about all the correct practices, followed by professional travel bloggers. So to learn these, buying ebooks or a course is considered a good investment on your part.
Anything which could help you in traveling, maintaining your blog, learning new elements, SEO optimization is a good investment.
Also, for a good and functioning blog, you need a good layout, which presents your idea and emotion exactly the way you want. For this, you can use the Blog Designer plugin for WordPress, which allows you to customize the WordPress website by using amazingly pre-designed layouts. You can customize these layouts further and make your travel blog look exactly the way you want. You can check out the demos here.
Paid advertisement is also a good way to grow your blog. When your blog does good in income go to the next phase, invest in paid advertisements.
Be Diligent and Determined
Hopefully, you understood that travel blogging is not a job with just enjoying a vacation and traveling. It is a job that requires constant attention and hard work to help the readers get what they searched for.
Always come up with ideas which a person would want to know about. Consequently, you will land right in front of the readers when they search for their queries.
Have something valuable for the audience to read. Therefore, your content must contain important information which could help the readers. For instance, details about the place mixed with stories, events will make the readers eager to read your travel blog.
Be consistent and determined to make your blog popular, and with constant efforts, you could earn a good living out of your travel blog.
Work like a professional focus on all these tips to become a successful travel blogger.
If you have not started your Travel Blog yet, you can read next how to start your WordPress blog.
If you have already started your travel blog, and want to grow it to the next level, you can learn how to make your blog posts interesting.
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