Are you interested in starting a travel blog? While searching the web, you might have found numerous sites run by happy individuals who spend their days travelling to exotic locations and diving into fascinating adventures. You think: why can’t I do that? Well, you can, and it’s actually remarkably easy to get started. Of course, finding an audience and ensuring that your travel blog is a success will be more of a challenge. There is certainly a difference between doing this as a fun hobby or pastime and establishing it as a mini online business. What we’re going to talk about today is how to win at the latter with a great travel blog that will provide a solid return on your investment.
Get On Social Media
A lot of people think that the first step to travel blogging is setting up the actual blog itself. This isn’t true. The first step should be to get active on social media. Now, you won’t yet have a blog to promote here, but that’s okay. You just need to make sure that you are posting regularly on Twitter and Facebook and resharing existing content that is going to be related to your future audience. Share posts and articles from travel blogs that are already successful and profitable like http://www.danflyingsolo.com/ or https://mylifesamovie.com/.
Try to pick the blogs that are most similar to the type of site you want to run, matching the tone, voice and type of content. When you have done this, you will start to connect with individuals who are interested in the type of blog you are going to set up. You don’t need to create fresh social profiles to do this either.
Instead, you can build off the personal profiles that you already have. Remember, friends, family members and coworkers can all become the first readers of your blog with just a little push in the right direction.
You may not have content from your blog to share just yet, but you can post holiday snaps, breathtaking views and more to get them used to following your travel story.
Setting Up A Travel Blog
Next, it’s time to set up a blog that you can build your content on. There are plenty of free blog builders online including Blogger and WordPress. There’s no reason to hunt for a designer who can create your blog from scratch and waste a fortune. Instead, choose a free builder where you can actually get started in minutes. After an hour of using WordPress, you’ll probably be ready to publish your very first article. Builders like WordPress are highly user-friendly and easy to navigate even if you are completely new to the blogging world.
The first step is choosing a template. This is going to shape the overall design and aesthetic of your blog. There are plenty of free ones that you can consider which will look fantastic. You might be worried about the blog looking like plenty of others online. However, once you start to customize, you’ll easily be able to find a unique style.
https://en-gb.wordpress.org/themes/browse/popular/
When you have selected your template, you’ll need to choose a title for your blog. This will be the title of your homepage and the URL for your WordPress site. It’s worth mentioning if you’re serious about travel blogging, then you should host your site. Hosting provides various benefits including a strong URL for SEO purposes and more control over how much content you can add. Remember, site performance will impact whether your blog ranks and hosting your site can help. Hosting is cost friendly and can be as cheap as a few dollars a month.
Kill It With Content
https://www.danflyingsolo.com/
Once you have set up the basics of your travel blog, you need to begin adding content. You should make sure that you have a few different pages to make it easy for readers to find exactly what they are looking for. The general rule is that a user should never be more than three clicks from what they are searching for on your site. This can be trickier with a blog, particularly when you reach the point where you have hundreds of posts. Make sure the search bar on your site design is clear and easy to find. You can even use this for analytics, discovering what type of content users are searching for and adding it. This is a great way to boost your audience and create loyal readers.
After you have worked on the layout of your site, you can begin creating articles and other pieces of content. When you create content, make sure that it is targeted, rich with information and diverse. A major mistake new travel bloggers often fall for is adding countless 500-word articles. Instead, you should be varying it up with 500 words, 1000, 1500 and 2000. As well as helping your SEO, this will ensure that you can give users the high-quality content they are searching for.
However, these pieces shouldn’t be just walls of text. You need pictures, videos and even infographics to keep things interesting for your audience. The trick is hitting a solid quality level with every post and not just writing 2000 words of fluff around the targeted keywords.
You might not always have an exciting trip to write about. But you can still fill your blog with content such as how to guides, tips for travel, your ten favorite places and various other possibilities.
Build Up Your Audience
Now that you have the content, you want to make sure that you are growing your audience base as much as possible. Do make sure you utilize social media with a two-way connection. Users should be able to find links to your social media profiles on your blog and links back from your social media. This will help you grow your audience, allowing more users to discover you.
Remember, a key social media for travel bloggers is Instagram. With Instagram you can post colourful, vibrant images that users will love to look at and share, once again growing your base. How do you create shares? Well, unique content is a great choice but hashtags will also help and could increase the level of shares massively.
Aside from this, you can think about guest posting too. Guest posting on another blog is a great way to find more users who are more than likely going to be interested in your content. If you write a great article on another site that already has a strong following, this will almost certainly push them towards your page.
Of course, if you want the best way to grow your audience online, look no further than SEO. You do need to invest in SEO when you build up your travel blog and particularly when you start to think about monetization. Content is a good way to do this but you will also need to target keywords that users are searching for when they create the content you produce. Backlinking, and link building are two other options to consider if you don’t want to use the help of a professional SEO team.
Monetize
Finally, it’s time to think about how to monetize your blog. There are a few different ways to do this. For instance, if you’re just looking for money to fund the blog itself try asking readers to ‘buy you a cup of coffee.’ This can be as simple as a lin a Paypal donation page and a quick way for readers to invest in content they love.
If you want to go further than this, you need to think about things like affiliate marketing. With affiliate marketing, you can get paid by companies with sponsored content on your site. This could be anything from a product to a service, and it can be very subtle. It could just be an outbound link in a piece of content that is actually about something completely different. For instance, you might mention taking a particular brand of luggage when preparing for your next vacation. Or it can be more direct like a full product review. You can use sites to set you up with these type of contracts or add a ‘work with me’ page to your blog and wait for the offers to roll right in.
We hope this helps you set up a fantastic travel blog that brings you great levels of success in the future.
