So, you want to know how to start a travel blog; jet setting the world and working from a beautiful beach while you rake in the cash. Call me a spoiler, I hate to snap you out of your fantasy but starting a travel blog and having a successful blog are too different things. I just finished my 100th post on this site. Admittedly it took much longer than it should have to hit 100 articles. To be fair I do not write about places that I have not visited. This slows my progress given A) I am not a full-time traveler and B) Covid has stopped all travel anyway. Still 100 posts should be done in your first year not your first three.
Starting a travel blog is easy, having a successful one is a bit more difficult. Before I discourage you too much understand that I honestly believe one can have success in travel blogging. I would not continue to write if I did not think this to be true. Not to mention there are many people who do well in this venture. Nomadic Matt, for example makes $750k/per year, (source in link) by any objective measure that is a success. Maninflight is not getting that kind of dough, in fact if I got $5/day I would be thrilled (currently). It would mean I can work harder and multiply that number.
Let’s Begin…
If you are as stubborn as me and still want to start a travel blog… I say go for it. I will give you a brief rundown on how to start a travel blog, as well as some of the tips and pitfalls I have come across. Really pay attention to the mistakes I made… learning from these will help you avoid some major frustrations. Let me begin with a quick rundown on how to start a travel blog.
How to Start a Travel Blog
I will not go into too much detail on the mechanics of how to start a travel blog. This is because starting a travel blog is like starting any blog. There are a ton of resources on the web that discuss this but I think Neil Patel does a good job explaining it here, also if you are serious about making money on a travel blog, but have no blogging experience Income School does a good job teaching you the ropes. If all else fails google “how to start a blog” and watch the millions of YouTube videos. The Income School course is expensive, but it is one of the better things I have used. Whatever you choose first I will give a rundown of what you need. You will find that it is a minimal upfront investment in terms of money, but a big investment in terms of time.
Steps to Take
- Get a Domain Name – Coming up with a domain name is not as easy as some will have you believe. You may find a lot of your ideas are taken. Keep working at it you will find one that suits your needs. There are many companies that sell domain names, I use HostGator. Make sure the name is related to travel, it helps with SEO and for people to remember. The cost is about $13, depending on what sort of deal they have. I highly recommend getting the privacy protection for an additional $15, if not you will have telemarketers calling you daily.
- Get a Hosting Company – The cost here is about $4/month, for a basic plan. Once again, I like HostGator, they have a baby plan that lets you host unlimited websites. In addition, I find their customer service team to be extremely helpful. Lastly, buying the domain name and hosting from the same company just makes things easier.
- Install Word Press – WordPress is the go-to platform for most bloggers. There are tutorials on how to install it, once added it is fairly straightforward on how to use it. When you have your WordPress blog up and running you will need a theme, there are thousands of free themes and some paid ones, Acabodo is a good paid one I use it on my other blogs.
- Get to Typing – There are two important things one needs…content and patients!
Monetization of a Travel Blog
I will quickly touch on how people make money by starting a travel blog. In reality it is not that much different than the way most other blogs make money. The number one tip I can give you to making money on a travel blog… or any blog for that matter is to concentrate on getting traffic.
You will not make a lot if people are not visiting your site. Think of it in terms of a physical store. It could be the best store in the world, selling the most amazing product, but if there is no foot traffic, it will fail. This is the way blogging is as well. If you make $20 per 1000-page views you are doing well.
Still you need something to sell, so I will touch on some of the ways travel blogs make money. Even Maninflight.com has gotten a check or two from the below sources.
A couple of Ideas…
Advertising – You may have noticed a couple of ads sprinkled here and there on this site. Google AdSense is the easiest and most popular way one can make money on a blog. When someone sees the ad for a couple of seconds you make some money, like pennies. If they click on it you can make more, anywhere from .25 cents to $1.50 (this is my experience at least) depending on the ad. Unfortunately, people do not click on ads often and AdSense does not pay well when they do. There are other companies that pay much higher such as www.media.net and Ezoic. Most of these require a certain threshold of views each month.
Affiliate Links – The payout for an affiliate is higher than advertising. Sometimes you receive money if they just click on your link, TripAdvisor does this through Commision Junction. More often than not you get paid a percentage when someone buys an item you link to.
Amazon is the most popular example of an affiliate. Unfortunately, they have been fucking unfavorable to publishers lately, drastically cutting our commissions. When starting a travel blog, there are products that one can concentrate on. It may sound obvious but look for things that travelers will actually want to use. You can link to Expedia or a good travel credit card. One thing I do is only promote items I have experience with. It might get expensive, but I do not want to direct people to something unless I have used it.
Create Your own Product – If you are reading this, you are not even close to this step, but it can be very profitable when you get to this point. Once again it is a travel product, not some random information. Having a program that is titled “how to fix your car” is probably of no interest to your readers. Nomadic Matt does a really good job with the products he sells, one of the reasons why he is so successful.
Those are some of the more basic ways to make money on your travel blog. Below I will touch on some benefits of starting a travel blog that may not deal with money.
Benefits to Starting a Travel Blog
Why would anyone want to start a travel blog? First, there is the clear reason of… you want to be that Instagram model that is living in Vietnam working three hours a day while traveling every weekend. Yes, the life of luxury sounds great. It would be amazing if simply firing up our computer in some faraway place would allow us to make a living. Unfortunately, as mentioned, it is not that easy.
Still there are other nonmonetary benefits I get from this site that might not be so obvious. Yes, money is fantastic … I mean money is wonderful, it’s the bees knees, but there are other things I like about starting a travel blog.
It Helps Others
To make money or be successful you must help others and provide useful information. Even by helping people it is not a guarantee you will make a large profit. Still, that is not always the point. People need answers to certain travel questions. Many times, the question is so small no one has written a good post about it. Such as Is Sicily Safe for Tourists. Other times there are a thousand big name posts that all say the same things. Generic TripAdvisor or Thrillist posts that are popular more so because they are large websites rather than helpful.
I would like to think that most posts on this site add value, maybe give the reader something a little less generic. That is what you should strive for when starting a travel blog, something useful. Even If I do not provide anything wholly new, I know I am not as boring as the USA today travel section. At least I can give you a good way to waste time when you should be working.
It Documents My Trips
Some of the trips I took were over 5-years ago. Rereading about one of my own travel experiences helps me remember it in a way that even a picture cannot. Although I try not to read my first few articles (they were terrible), when I do, they serve as a reminder of better days.
People I forgot I met or things I did not remember eating come back to the forefront of my mind. In addition, writing about an experience cements it into my memory even if I do not reread my own work. All we have are memories after it is all said and done, it is nice to know I can go back and reread about my experiences in the various destinations I have been to and relive those memories.
It Makes Me A Better Traveler
It is easy to shut down one’s mind when travelling. We are on vacation after all. You can either travel passively or you can fully experience the area you are in. Since I know I will be writing about the places I visit I pay attention more than I would have. I look for things that I may not otherwise see, and my mind is more active.
Writing a travel blog also makes you want to experience a place as much as possible. I can either take that hike to the top of the mountain and write about it or I can stay in my hotel room. Well If I am taking this site seriously, I need to experience everything I can when traveling. Knowing someone else may be reading about my trip helps convince me to get more out of any destination.
It Sharpens my Skills
Starting a travel blog has made me better in certain other areas. First, it has made me a better writer (you should have seen the shite I first put out). Writing is a skill that can be transferred to a lot of different areas in one’s life. The ability to put words down in a cohesive matter will open some doors for you.
It also forced me to get better at creating websites. The only way to truly learn to do something is by repeatedly doing it. Trial and error go a long way in improving a skill. By no means am I perfect, but I am competent at creating websites after working on this one.
Other skills such as photography and recording videos are greatly enhanced by actively working on a travel blog. Good pictures are important, I would like to believe mine add to my posts. Knowing people will be seeing my photos forced me to take better pictures.
And Yes… Financial Freedom
Of course, I would love it if I were one of those jetsetters writing from my hammock in Chile. There are certainly ways to make money by writing a travel blog. Yet most people will fail at the goal of creating income from their website. Some sites that I found to be fairly good with decent content still never seem to get off the ground.
Still many writers do get a full-time income. There are sites that make tens of thousands of dollars a month by helping others plan their vacations or just writing about their experiences. Yes, there is a huge range in the success between sites. If you figure out the formula, you never have to go into corporate life again.
Even if you do not make a fulltime income, you could aim for $500 – $1000 a month. This will help you pay for all this travel and give you a little security if something happens to your regular income. Even that small amount of money is not easy, there is a huge learning curve, but once you get there it can be generated for life.
Risks when Starting a Travel Blog
Above are the benefits of starting a travel blog, but things are not always so rosy. A lot can happen to make you question why you started this journey in the first place. Any worthwhile endeavor has obstacles. Some of them are foreseen like the costs of getting a blog up and running. Others not so much, like a worldwide pandemic that destroys the travel industry and possibly humanity. Let me point out some of the not so great things about starting a travel blog.
Nobody Reads Your Work
Imagine you visit Peru, explore it, try as many great places to eat as possible and now you want to talk about how delicious Guinea pigs taste. “I am going to start a travel blog” you shout. You write your little fingers to the bone, check your analytics and you have 0-page views for the week, then month. Few things are more frustrating than spending hours writing something and no one reading it.
This is probably what makes most people quit. It can be discouraging having little or no success when writing. Friends or spouses may lose faith in you and you feel like a failure. The truth is it is not easy to get traffic when the site is new (or old for that matter). It takes time for any blog to succeed, especially if you are not advertising. Even with time, there are a lot of things that can hold back your site. The fact of the matter is Google is still a bloggers master, if you do not fall on page one on Google it makes no difference what kind of hot sauce was served with the Guinea Pig mentioned earlier… the site will not be found.
Travel Blogging is Saturated with Some Big Names
Start a blog about medieval pens and you will not get much competition. Travel is a whole different story. Everyone and their brother has started a blog about travel and even many of the smaller keywords have been gobbled up by the giant news agencies.
This does not mean their sites are better written or more original. Many times, I suspect the author has not even visited the countries they are writing about. I would rather read the experiences of a smaller sites author than some pompous CNN writer telling me to visit the colosseum in Rome after reading it on Wikipedia. Still they are the sites that get all that sweet, sweet SEO love. While these smaller sites have to get more creative for other search terms.
Someone Can Mess with Your Site
I had a computer virus hit my site so bad that it almost ended Maninflight.com. It was right at the beginning of this year (because of course it was), I went to log on and there was a warning label saying my site was infected with a non-covid virus. Then one of the sites I used to fix this issue changed my permalinks (basically the address of each page). This killed all the links to my site, causing me to drop off in Google rankings even after the site was up and running. I quickly went from 200-page views a day to 0. If I am being honest, I still have yet to recover.
Google themselves will also hurt your site; they will do an “update” here and there which can knock your best performing articles off the top ten. When something is no longer on the first page of Google it will get almost no traffic from this source.
A F#CKING Virus Will Destroy the World
I do not know if you know this, but a travel blogger should be traveling. Well, except if you write for a big paper then you might not have to leave your hometown, just whip open another website and copy. 2020 made it difficult for a travel blogger to get any type of traction. There are two reasons for this.
First, as mentioned you must travel. It has been a year since I have been anywhere out of the country. This virus has taken a lot of trips from me, such as Disney, South Africa, and another run at Italy. This makes it more difficult to write up to date articles. How many “traveling during Covid” posts does someone want to read anyway? I do have a backlog of areas I have been to; but who knows how much they have changed? New destinations make it easier to keep things fresh.
Secondly, few people are searching for travel related material. Why would anyone ask about the cost of Santorini if the island is closed? This hurts your current volume, but it also hurts your progression. I do not know if no one is visiting my site because they could care less about the topic or because the virus has made a post irrelevant. This year will end, but who knows what future disasters await!
Those are just some of the things that will frustrate any new travel blog owner. There are what seems to be a never-ending list of obstacles between you and success. Still, there are plenty of things you can do that will help tilt the odds in your favor and avoid any disasters.
Tips When Starting a Travel Blog
I believe this list is the bare minimum required to be successful when starting a travel blog. If you can’t do the below, then maybe this is not for you. Of course, these tips are not all inclusive, but they will give you a good start and some things to keep in mind.
Travel Often (and Well)
Probably seems obvious that if you are starting a travel blog you should be traveling. You are going to want to give your readers a firsthand experience of where they are headed, not some rehashed review of some other site. In order to do this one must travel as often as possible. It is also important you pay attention while you are away. Write down (or take a mental note) of things you find interesting or helpful. You would be surprised as to what can add to a post.
Your locations do not have to be some far away destination. In fact, a lot of times the more popular places are so overwritten that you will not find much traction on Google anyway. Smaller spots or cities can give you just as many readers as a bigger destination.
By traveling well, I mean experience something different. Going to Vegas is fine, but everyone has been to Vegas. Sitting on a beach all day is great, but it does not make for a intriguing story. If you are starting a travel blog, try to mix it up, add some adventure to your travels.
Also remember you have been places before you started the site. Draw from those memories and find interesting things to discuss. Start going through your pictures and think up some good topics.
Give it Time
You will write a post, then another and continue for weeks (if not months) with no traffic. This is just the reality of the situation. It takes time to build an audience. It also takes time for Google to rank your site. A good travel blog is not built overnight. It will take months before you see any results.
This is with a constant writing schedule. If you are not a patient person or need money tomorrow then forget it, this is not the route to take. You will also have to deal with the uncomfortable truth that some posts will almost never get read. Some articles fail no matter how much time you give it. Be patient, keep at it, that is the only way to succeed.
Get Good Security
The biggest setback of this travel blog was the computer virus that hit my site. It destroyed my page views and this site has still failed to recover. Now I am not sure how much of that has to do with the Google updates or the virus that shall not be named, but I know my traffic was never the same after the attack.
Do not overlook security when starting a blog. It is a gut-wrenching experience when you realize months if not years’ worth of work has been compromised. You can use the free plugin Word fence, which works fine or pay a monthly fee for something like Sitelock. Personally, I think until you start making money use the free version but use something.
Also, you can get an external company to back up your site. A site called ManageWP is very inexpensive and will help you avoid disaster. I believe the cost is something like $2/month for a full back up. You can also use a more expensive option like WP-Tech support, which will back your site up and fix any issues you may encounter. It is not cheap, but they will help you in a jiffy, saving you hours of time on YouTube trying to resolve a problem. The point I want to drive home is do not skimp on security or backups.
Write Often
Admittedly, I have not always taken my own advice, but if you want to gain some traction you need to write a lot, especially in the beginning. Once a month just does not cut it. Bigger sites get more attention from Google, and as a travel blogger you are already a step behind. In a perfect world I would put out two posts a week.
I recommend setting a schedule, a time where you write, and no one bothers you. You will be surprised how much you can get done with as little as an hour a day. You can hire someone to write your blog for you, but I do not recommend this, at least at first. I am all about honesty and as mentioned I want to be the one who has lived what I am writing about.
Some Tips to get Ranked on Google
As mentioned, Google is king when it comes to blogging. No one is using BING to search for things, so it is important to learn the basics of SEO geared toward Google. The topic of SEO is a little too in-depth to tell you here, but I will give you some advice, especially if you are first starting out.
My first nugget of wisdom is to write about what people want to know, the topics they will search. No one is going to be looking for “Jens Trip to Rome”, it just is not a searchable phrase. Trip reports are fine for TripAdvisor travel forums but not blog posts. Trust me I learned this the hard way. You need to think like a person traveling and looking for advice.
Secondly, especially to start, write about smaller topics. As mentioned, the travel arena is bloated, there are a hundred million travel blogs out there. When first starting a travel blog you will not rank for “Things to do in Paris”, unless your dad works for Google.
My Experience Starting a Travel Blog
I have always loved traveling and I have always wanted the ability to make money from my computer, so travel blogging just seemed natural. It turned out it is more than a little difficult to do than anticipated. There are plenty of days where I think, why are you doing this?
The cyberattack that hit my site almost broke my resolve to continue. In addition, although not expensive starting a travel blog has some costs. After years of doing this I probably broke even on this site, which is terrible considering how many hours I have put in.
Still, I will not give it up. Even if I continue to get a low level of readers, I enjoy traveling, I enjoy writing and helping people travel. I like to tell my stories and prospective, so I will keep on plugging away.
Should you start a travel blog? That depends on your motives, skills, and determination. It is not easy; most people do not succeed. Still there are plenty that do. Just understand it will be a lot of work and count on some frustration.
