Love to travel and want to share your experiences with the whole world? Or do you think your calling is to work in travel? Then a travel blog can be a way for you to earn a living and monetize it. In this article, we tell you how to start a travel blog. Read on and take notes.
Having a travel blog is more than just visiting museums, hiking, sitting on the beach with coconut water, and writing about it. The time investment is high, and goes far beyond traveling and writing, as it may seem at first glance.
To be considered as something professional, even if you don’t intend to make it your main source of income, you have to see it as a business. And every business involves many things besides the product or service you deliver, such as marketing, accounting, logistics, for example.
Therefore, it is necessary not only to enjoy traveling and writing but also to learn new things and explore an area that is still relatively new and uncertain.
But, complex parts are not all there is to a travel blog. With it, you can share with people amazing experiences they didn’t even know were possible. You can plant the seed of a trip that will completely change a person’s life.
So if you want to know how to start a travel blog, read on.
How to start a travel blog
The tech part
Let’s start with the operational and essential part. First of all, you need to:
- Name your project and buy a domain with your blog name. To buy a domain, there are several possible sites, such as GoDaddy and Hostgator.
- Remember: when it comes to choosing a name, you should find something short, easy to remember, easy to pronounce, and easy to spell. And easy to associate with what you write.
- Buy a hosting service so that your domain can be hosted and online. After that, your project will already be online.
- Opt for WordPress as a platform to manage your blog, so you won’t need to understand a bit of code, just produce content.
- For those who are starting: there is a free version of WordPress.com, which is hosted on their servers, but has several feature and customization limitations.
- Before you start writing posts or pages, set up the default URL to start your project.
That’s it! You already have the structure!
Who will read it?
Part two is to think about your audience. Before you go writing about your experiences, you need to consider who your readership is.
You can focus on a specific niche or speak generally. For example: travel with children or without children? For singles or couples? Luxury or adventure destinations? Do you want to focus on the history of the places or practical and objective tips?
This vision can be matured with time. But it’s nice to start with a north, even to begin the first strategic decisions, such as the tone of voice in the writing and what you will write in each post.
Content Production
We come, finally, to the heart of your blog: the content. It is a fundamental part and must be done in the best way possible.
The production of content has several phases before and after writing. Besides traveling, you have to do a lot of research, consume information of all kinds, and take notes. Not to mention all the work that goes into selecting and editing photos among those thousands that you surely took during your trip.
After writing, you still need to format the text, insert links to other sites and previous posts, insert photos, check information, revise the text, set up categories and tags, and work on SEO.
SEO is an important part. You need to optimize your blog and content pages for search engines to find your content. After all, Google searches are responsible for most of the traffic on almost every blog.
Remember, also, to write a good page explaining the purpose and profile of the site and telling a little about yourself, if the idea is to have a more personal blog.
Developing strategies
Every business needs a strategy. And if you want to have a professional blog, the sooner you start looking at it as a business, the better.
But it is important to set goals to focus your efforts on what is most likely to help your blog improve.
This has everything to do with observing the behavior of your audience, doing research, reading about the market, networking, proposing or negotiating partnerships, and keeping up with the statistics of the site and social networks.
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Did you like our tips? Are you excited to start your travel blog and change people’s lives? Comment below!