5 Steps to Becoming a Travel Blogger

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Blogging has not only become a lucrative business but a desirable industry. As a blogger’s following grows they become increasingly influential and will attract attention from renowned brands, eager to tap into their audience. Travel blogging gives aspiring globetrotters the opportunity to document their trips, whilst getting paid, which sounds like a dream career. But, in such a saturated market, it can be difficult to break the ice, so we’ve rounded up our five tips to give you an idea of where to start:

Find Your Niche

There are thousands of travel blogs circulating the web and as one blog admits failure, another one emerges from the shadows.  The best blogs are those that have perfected a niche, such as food, or culture. Due to the way search engines work, having a niche idea will help you to attract a specific audience, who are genuinely interested in your content and what you have to say. By becoming an authority in a specific niche, an interested audience is more likely to support your content long-term, especially if you become the best resource for that information.

Have Passion for what you do

They say that you’ll never work a day in your life if you love what you do. So why not write content about your passions? There is a huge difference between blogs that are written for the love of it and those who are only ‘in it for the money’. It doesn’t have to be travel, it could be fashion, food, cars, or even business. A good idea is to start as you mean to go on, by introducing new themes after you’ve built up a following, you risk splitting your audience. If you do want to branch out, get your audience’s input first!

Start at a loss

Blogging is a unique business and usually starts out as a hobby. The way you attract ‘customers’ is totally different from normal businesses, like retail. If you want to see a dramatic uplift in your following, you’ll need to invest in blogging as a business, not just a hobby. Take SEO and PPC into consideration, use social media to promote your content and invest in your lifestyle. Travel blogging is all about displaying a desirable lifestyle, which can be pricey! Once you have Built up your audience, you’ll find that you’re exposed to more revenue streams.

Invest in your website

Although it can initially seem like a money pit to pay for a high-quality blog design and valuable domain, investing in this early on will make your blog much more effective in the future. Changing URLs can be tiresome, as you’ll either have to pay for the original domain to redirects to your new one or simply suffer a loss of any links or authority that you seccured– both of which can significantly damage your SEO efforts in the long term.

Collaboration is key

A well-established blog will get plenty of offers for advertising and paid content, but there’s no harm in asking other companies for deals and promotional offers to help establish yourself. For example, a foreign retail company might be willing to cover your flight to and from their local area in return for promotion – not only does this make your content more interesting, but it massively reduces the personal costs of your content creation. Certain sites might also send free gear and tools to review in exchange for a link to their store page – again, this is a great way to get a hold of some (often expensive) equipment that you’ll be able to use on future holidays and trips. Others, such as global car hire sites like Compare and Choose, might even be able to support you during a holiday almost anywhere in the world.

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