Bernie Van Der Linde- Bernie Van Der Linde
- How to start a Travel Blog
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In this article, we tell you everything you need to know to start and maintain a successful travel blog.
This article is a true account of our learning curve in starting from scratch a successful travel blog. We give you our honest recommendations and point out where we are still falling short of being VERY successful with our travel blog.
1. Introduction to starting a travel blog from scratch
1.1 The Rise of Travel Blogging
Travel blogs are trusted sources of information for novice travellers and even seasoned travellers. A travel blog provides inspiration and tips on how to navigate unfamiliar destinations. Moreover, travel blogging is becoming a lucrative business for people who crave flexibility in their jobs.
According to travelblogging101.com, some bloggers earn between $500 000 and $1 000 000. Although we believe travel blogging monetisation is difficult to quantify. Nevertheless, there are some highly successful travel bloggers like Nomadic Matt, The Blond Abroad, and OneStep4Ward, to name a few.
1.2 Why Start a Travel Blog?
If you enjoy travelling and writing about your experiences, starting a travel blog is the perfect way to apply your writing skills. However, many aspirant bloggers do not realise that being a successful blogger takes more than just travelling and being good at writing.
Starting and maintaining a successful travel blog is hard work and requires commitment (and patience!). You need to understand that a travel blog does not become successful overnight. You need to publish many (more than 200 good-quality articles) to be recognised by the Google algorithm as a valid source of information.
2. Defining Your Niche to start a travel blog
2.1 Identifying Your Travel Audience
The first step in starting a travel blog is to define your niche.
You need to understand that the most important thing about starting any business is that you cannot be everything to everyone. By defining your niche, you define your scope. That means you decide who will benefit from your travel blog’s information.
For example, Travel Buddies Lifestyle is a travel blog for people who enjoy luxury travelling. We share our travel experiences as 50-something women who are also best friends. Thus, our blog often points out how safe places are for mature women and how easy it is to travel to a specific destination. We also write about our experiences at luxury hotels.
Based on the purpose of our blog, we can thus assume that it will not appeal to budget travellers, families with young children (because we don’t understand their needs), solo travellers (because we always travel together), or backpackers.
Nevertheless, people seeking general travel information may find many of our blog articles helpful.
2.2 Researching Your Audience
To start a successful travel blog, you need to write travel articles that your audience can relate to. Therefore, it is important to understand where your audience is from (review your insights), what their relationship status is, and what their preferences are.
Once you understand your audience, you can define what they most probably would like to know about a destination. For example, more mature travellers will, in all likelihood, not care where the nightclubs are.
2.3 Finding Your Unique Voice
Finding your voice is probably one of the most difficult things to do and only happens over time. Our travel blog is just over two and a half years old, and we remember having an identity crisis for at least the first year.
If you look at our very first blog articles, they were mostly impersonal, very elaborate (sometimes digressing way off point) and written without good structure. One of our biggest challenges was deciding if we should write in a collaborative voice (Us and we) or individually (depending on who the author is). Since then, Petra and I have found our voice, and therefore, we now write our posts in individual voices.
By doing it this way, our travel blog articles reflect each of our lived experiences, particularly as writers living on different continents.
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3. Selecting a Blogging Platform
We researched several platforms and found WordPress to be the most suitable blogging platform for our travel blog. Besides WordPress, there is also Blogger, Ghost, Tumblr, Strikingly, Squarespace and Wix.
Because we only used WordPress from the word go, we cannot provide you with trustworthy information about these other platforms.
Our travel blog is running on WordPress.org because we wanted more flexibility in our blog to customise the look and feel, use a variety of plugins and monetise it.
WordPress.com is more suitable for bloggers who do not want to stress about things like hosting services.
Here are the reasons we picked WordPress: We believe it will be the best option for your travel blog.
WordPress pros and cons
Flexibility and Customisation
WordPress offers many themes that are particularly suitable for travel blogs.
We use the Blossom theme designed for travel bloggers. Plugins (add-on features) allow you to customise your travel blog’s look and feel and enable you to incorporate unique features into your website, but many can be pricey.
We use Elementor to build our website because it is easy to understand and gives our blog a more professional look with its many features.
WordPress has so many features that it can be overwhelming for first-time users. Prior to starting our travel blog, we had no previous knowledge of building a website. We learned everything we know today by asking questions, watching YouTube videos and joining website group chats. I (Bernie) had a slight advantage over Petra, as I have a team of specialist IT people working with me at BMT College (my main job).
SEO Friendly blogs
WordPress provides many tools and plugins to help you optimise your travel blog’s visibility. We are only making use of organic (free instead of paid) traffic. Your website needs to rank high in search engine results pages (SERPs) for you to get clicks to your website. People worldwide perform billions of searches to find information to help them solve a problem. According to Semrush, on average, 40% of searchers click on organic results.
Costs of having a travel blog
We use Blossom Travel Pro Theme, which is ideal for female travel and lifestyle bloggers. The price of this theme is 69$. You may also buy 20 of their premium themes worth $1180 for only 149$.
Although WordPress is free, you need to pay for a theme and the additional plugins you will use to make your site unique and to give you insight into the performance of the website. We will go into more detail about the best travel blog plugin in a follow-up article.
Ownership of a travel blog
This is a key aspect of any website. WordPress.org gives you full ownership of your site.
Maintenance of a WordPress travel blog
You will be responsible for maintaining your site, such as uploading new posts, designing new pages, and updating plugins, including making backups and security.
Support a WordPress blog
Several website hosting services provide support. Most themes also have a support service. Unfortunately, as you start building your website, you will find that some challenges may be unique to your site. This is also where the frustration comes in when building and maintaining a travel blog website.
Understanding Domain Names and Hosting
Starting a travel blog and deciding on the domain name and hosting providers sounds much more daunting than it really is.
We picked the .com domain for our travel blog because Petra lives in Germany, and I live in South Africa. Consequently, we needed to pick a domain name that doesn’t reflect our demographics.
When deciding on a hosting provider, consider the monthly cost, bandwidth and storage. Our travel blog is hosted by Xneelo that cost us R545 per month or 28 Euros.
4. Crafting a Compelling Brand for your travel blog
Deciding on the look and feel of your ‘brand’ (travel blog name and logo) is the creative part of starting a travel blog. Every element of your brand must represent who you are and what you wish to bring over to your potential clients (or readers). Your readers must understand what your travel blog is about by just reading your name and seeing your logo.
4.1 Designing a logo for your travel blog
Canva is making it really easy for novices to design attention-grabbing logos. With just a few small tweaks, you can create a logo that perfectly describes your vision and mission. Many websites like Canva, Fiverr.com, Looka.com or Smashinglogo.com allow you to design your free logo.
4.2 Creating a Memorable Blog Name
We often see on social media pages how often content creators change their names. It is definitely not ideal to change your brand identity regularly. To create and build a successful brand (that people will recognise and trust), you need to be consistent. Once you pick your name, that is it! You need to make it work. We are not talking about small changes to your name.
For example, when we started our travel brand, we named it Travel Buddies 6671 (for Petra’s birth date and mine). We soon realised that 6671 tells our audience nothing about us. We later dropped the 6671 and added the word ‘Lifestyle’. The word ‘Lifestyle’ allowed us to expand our brand and include travel-related articles and experiences such as food, wine, and blogging.
4.3 Developing Your Brand Identity
The best advice we can give you when you create your brand identity is to be consistent. That means using a specific font every time and being consistent with your colour scheme (for example, if you use navy blue, stick with it! Do not use light blue, indigo blue or any other strange-looking blue). Pick design elements that describe what you do. As a business professional, I cannot overemphasise the above-listed advice enough.
Do not go for ‘Liquorice All sorts’. Pick design elements that represent your brand. Ensure that your brand represents your professionalism, your fun side, your vibe, your target age group, your creativity, etc. side. If you want to work with high-end clients, then ensure your brand communicates your commitment to style and attention to detail.
5. Producing Quality Content
There is a well-known saying: quality over quantity. I disagree; when it comes to travel blogging, less is not more! I often see new bloggers procrastinating about getting an article so perfect that it takes weeks or even months to get it one article out. Do the best you can with what you have. Get your blog articles as close as possible to ready. Then publish it!
There will always be minor mistakes, no matter how often you revise your blog article, because a change in one sentence leads to a mistake in another. It is more important to be consistent and get articles out regularly (once a week) than to keep your audience waiting for more.
5.1 Planning and Creating Engaging Blog Posts
Planning is important. You need to have an idea of when you will be travelling and when you will write the articles. We sometimes find ourselves in very tight spots when we visit a destination near the end of its tourist season. It then happens that we franticly write several articles in a week to try and get the articles out before the season is over.
For example, we travelled to Greece towards the end of June and had to follow a very tight writing schedule to publish five articles with a week’s separation before the beginning of August. You need to publish articles when the time (or season) is right. Imagine: we publish a Christmas Market article in the middle of June. The Google algorithm will think it is not a good article because no one is Google the terms in the article.
Pro tip: Never hide or remove seasonal articles; you may find that an article was not particularly successful in the first year but somehow gets a lot of traction in the second year. This often happens to many of our travel articles. Moreover, you may see a drastic drop in your organic reach when you are between seasons.
5.2 Importance of High-Quality Photos
They say, ‘Photos speak a thousand words’. This saying cannot be more true when starting a travel blog. You want your audience to see that not only can you write beautiful text, but you also need to entice your followers (with good-quality photos) to visit a destination. For this reason, it is important to ‘edit’ your photos.
We use Lightroom to fix photos that skew (Petra has a massive issue with that!) and to enhance a photo without manipulating it so poorly that it is no longer a true reflection of the original. We often see photos that are so badly edited that the sky looks unrealistic, and the blue or grass looks super fake.
You may have seen some of the poorly edited photos on Instagram, particularly of Switzerland. If you have been to Switzerland, you will immediately notice that even though Switzerland is very picturesque, no place looks like a (unrealistic) scene from a Disney Movie.
5.3 Tips for Writing Captivating Travel Stories
Many books can teach you how to write great stories, but no book can teach you how to write YOUR compelling story.
We have found that the best way to write a travel blog is by sharing your experiences, as you would tell it to a friend. Point out what you enjoyed, what was different than you anticipated, and what you learned from the trip or the travel experience. Reflect on how you felt when you arrived at the location, how the people made you feel and what stood out about the people, food or destination.
Authenticity is key to writing a successful blog article. Don’t write what you think people want to hear; tell them how you experienced the culture, people and places. And the best part about telling your story is that no one can duplicate or steal your ideas.
5.4 Tools for blogging
Getting the right tools is key to having a successful blog.
- Camera: We use the Canon EOS M50 MKII and the Canon EOS M6 MKII. The Canon EOS MKII is one of the best cameras for vlogging.
- Smartphone: We always use the latest iPhones on the market, to ensure we capture excellent quality images. We use the iPhone 16 Pro Max because we need a big to edit photos and videos on the run.
- Laptop: You will also need a laptop to maintain your website. We found the MacBook Pro the best for the job when we work remotely.
- iPad: Over the years, we discovered that an iPad is more practical when we travel. However, the only negative is that the iPad does not work well with Elementor. It is not a problem when you only work in WordPress.
- Gimbals: A gimbal is a must when you want to stabilise your videos, giving it a more professional look and feel. We have gimbals for our smartphones and cameras.
- Tripod: A tripod is a necessity for shooting in low light. We have a smartphone tripod and a camera tripod. We use the smartphone tripod often when we’re travelling to capture images of the two of us.
- Drone: We purchased a DJI drone recently but are still mastering the art of flying it. Flying a drone gets more complicated when you want to record specific scenes without showing that you’re holding the remote control. Our drone has a master shot mode that enables the drone to follow you while walking, cycling or even riding in a car.
6. Building a Loyal Audience
6.1 Utilising Social Media for Promotion
We started our travel blogging journey by creating a page on Instagram. We soon realised its limitations and wanted to tell our audience in much more detail how we experienced the places we visited. Today, we only use social media platforms like Instagram and Facebook to inform our audience when we publish a new blog. In addition to this, we use our social media channels to reach out and connect with potential travel partners.
For example, when we want to write articles about a specific country or place, we will reach out to potential hoteliers or tourism boards to see if they are interested in collaborating with us. We would often send DM requesting the email address of a contact person. Social Media Platforms play an integral part in building your travel community.
6.2 Networking with Other Travel Bloggers
Building a network with other travel bloggers is critical to gaining support for your travel blog or when you need insider tips about a new destination (before you travel). Also, do not underestimate the power of supporting each other’s travel blogs. Getting backlinks (referrals from other blog pages) from other bloggers will enable Google to legitimise your travel blog. You need backlinks for Google to understand your website’s content and to rank your website as a reliable source of travel information.
But here is the pitfall: do not reach out to unrelated niches for backlinks. The process can damage your reputation with Google and other web browsers. Reach out to travel bloggers on social media pages and ask them if they are willing to exchange backlinks. Very rarely, some might ask for payment, but most of them will be happy with a barter transaction.
6.3 Engaging with Your Readers Through Comments and Feedback
Now, we have come to the most important part of building your travel community. Do not expect people to like and comment on your content if you are not willing to support their content. Social media is about being social. That means you need to support your supporters by liking a post or leaving a comment on a travel blog article and vice versa.
7. Monetising Your Travel Blog
If you skipped the above sections to get to the part about monetising your travel blog, as they say in the game of Monopoly, then Go back to the start!
If you are starting a travel blog purely to make money, think again! Monetising a travel blog is the most difficult phase of starting a travel blog. I remember when we started our Instagram page, we just wanted to get a free stay, and for that, we would give our travel collaborator a few stories and an Instagram post. Then, when we started our travel website, we just wanted people to read our blogs and find them helpful. Now, two years down the line of publishing more than 200 travel blog articles, we want (and need) to make money for the effort (and TIME) we put into our blog.
Publishing a new article every week takes time and commitment, as we stated in the introduction. If you are not willing to work for ‘free’ or a hosted stay in the beginning, do not even consider starting a blog.
7.1 Affiliate Marketing Basics
The income potential of affiliate marketing is massive, but it is not easy to get it right. Affiliate marketing involves promoting other people’s products or services on your platforms, such as a travel blog. The key aspect of being successful in affiliate marketing is that you need many visitors to your MANY websites to make money with affiliate programmes.
The second important aspect of affiliate marketing is to promote things that are within your niche. Readers will become frustrated with your site if you are promoting things that they have no interest in. They landed on your website because they love travelling. Therefore, promoting mountain bikes would be senseless for you.
The best way to find suitable affiliate programmes is to join CJ Affiliate, Arwin or Paternerize. Some affiliate programmes like Amazon can be joined directly for their website. Thus, there is no need to go through CJ, Arwin or even Partnerize.
Sponsored Guest Post
You can make a lot of money on your website if you are willing to accept guest posts. We receive about 20 requests daily for guest posts. You can charge between 50$ and 100$ to publish a guest post on your website. On the flip side, you should also consider writing for other websites, as you will gain high-quality backlinks if a reputable brand collaborates with you and you get access to higher organic reach.
We recommend visiting bloggeroutreach.com to find websites to accept guest posts. A word of warning: do not connect with spammy websites, as it can significantly hurt your reach and domain authority with search engines. We highly recommend watching Darell Wilson’s YouTube video titled: ‘What is guest posting and how I used it to increase our reach by 1100%’.
8. Staying Committed and Consistent
Balancing Travel and Blogging
Once you manage to find a balance between travelling and blogging, you will be on your way to success. You need to travel to have something to write about, but you cannot travel all the time and do not have time to write.
You need to establish for yourself where the sweet spot is. How much do you need to travel to maintain a balance and not feel overwhelmed with either of the tasks and risk getting burnt out? Because I am working full-time and travelling part-time, we found two to three long (two to three weeks per occasion) international trips annually and several local shorter ones throughout the year in our home countries. Because Petra and I live on different continents, we are able to generate much more content worldwide because we can also travel individually.
Setting Realistic Goals for Growth
We still haven’t mastered this part of blogging. Petra and I are overachievers and want to grow at the pace of lightning. However, no matter how much effort you put into your blog, it needs time to get momentum. And that is the one thing you cannot control, no matter how hard you work!
9. SEO Basics for Travel Blogs
You may be asking: “What is SEO, and why does it matter?” Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is the process of optimising a business’s website content, structure, and overall online presence” (Semrush, 2024, para.1).
SEO improves your organic (unpaid) visibility in search engine results like Google, Bing, or even Duckduckgo. It is the most difficult skill to master. We focus our attention on ranking high in Google as it is the most popular search engine. You can opt for a pay-per-click (PPC), which will ensure that your posts are displayed at the top of the search engine results.
However, many people looking for search results may avoid sponsored ads as they want credible information that may sometimes not be found in sponsored links.
How does Google decide which websites to rank higher than others? The answer is actually very easy. Google wants to satisfy searchers’ needs by providing the exact information they are searching for. Therefore, Google prioritises EEAT website. The acronym EEAT stands for experience, expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness, which are key elements to getting your website noticed.
Furthermore, websites that give researchers a good experience because they load fast and are easy to navigate will be prioritised. Semrush (2024) point out that SEO is about ticking the following boxes:
Keyword research
Your travel blog articles must include terms or words that people search for.
Content creation
You need to write about things that your target audience is interested in. This takes time because the more articles you publish, the more you will start picking up a trend of which articles are more popular than others based on the topic and information.
Link Building
We touched on this aspect earlier in this article. Link building enables your website to receive ‘authority’, thus making it trustworthy.
Technical SEO
This is about making the reading experience fun and easy to navigate and for search engines to make sense of what your website is about.
10. Conclusion
Starting a travel blog is an awesome way to generate income and be creative if you enjoy writing about your experiences. The most important thing to remember is that no matter how much effort you put into your travel blog, you need to experiment.
Only by trying different things will you find what works for you. We have learned through our journey of travel to persevere and not give up until we make it. The potential is there to be very successful, but you need to put in many hours and do MANY free stays to get the content you need to make your website successful.
Encouragement to Start Your Adventure
We look forward to hearing about your frustrations and tribulations with your travel blog. Please feel free to leave us a comment, and we will gladly advise you on any of the above topics.
Bibliography
Semrush (2024) https://www.semrush.com, accessed 12/10/2024
1 Comment
This post has been super helpful in taking my travel blog to the next level, with clear advice on defining my niche and choosing the right platform.