‘Traveling – It Leaves You Speechless, Then Turns You into a Storyteller’ – Ibn Battuta. Yes, travelling can make you a storyteller. Visiting so many places, seeing so many incredible sites, being witness to history and culture changes a person.
It also makes you want to share your stories and your experiences of traveling far and near. When you travel you realize how small and insignificant we really are in the face of nature’s wonders and architectural marvels. Travelling widens our knowledge, deepens our understanding of people and their culture, age-old traditions and so much more.
There are uncountable blogs and vlogs on the Internet run and hosted by travelers of all kinds. In fact, if you start searching, you may quite rightly feel dizzy and frankly overwhelmed with the amount of information you will find. But if you look deeply, you will hardly find anything substantial. There is undoubtedly a lot of clutter but very little of value. There is a lack of quality blogs on travelling – a gap that you can fill with your storytelling.
So, how do you start telling your stories? More precisely, how do you start a travel blog?
Basically, there are two broad things you need to take care of. The technical aspect and secondly, how to be creative with the blog. For technical assistance, you will find ample help online. However, few things that you must mandatorily do before you start blogging are –
- Register a unique domain name,
- Host it on a hosting server,
- Install WordPress (or any other CMS tool),
- Install Plugins and Themes to beautify and make the blog appealing and attractive,
- Create a Home Page and subsequent pages for blog entries
Once your blog is up and running, you need to worry about what you will write and how you will share your story. Remember, a good design and a robust website will only do their job when you have quality content to back it up with. Today, we shall be talking about how you should start a travel blog or rather how you should write for your blog.
You Must Work Hard
Travelling is hardly a job for you. In fact you would love and enjoy every minute of the time you spend outdoors, exploring new places. It isn’t work to you. It is fun. If you earn while you travel, that’s wonderful! But when it comes to blogging, it may not be all fun and no work. In fact it is likely to be all work and little fun – at least initially. One of the golden rules of successful blogging is to do so regularly and update frequently. You must have a new blog up at least once a week, if not more. Your blog cannot have sporadic entries as and when you travel, or when you want. That won’t make your blog reader-friendly and people won’t come back to read again and again. Before you start, have a few ideas on top of your hand that will help you write for a few weeks.
Be Ready to Promote
You would agree when we say that there are thousands of travel bloggers out there in the digital world. Not everyone is famous. In fact only few are worth their money. If you want to become one of the top travel bloggers, you have to promote your blog. It isn’t as easy as posting on your social media profiles. Digital marketing plays a key role in successfully turning an average travel blog into an excellent one. You may need to hire the services of a digital marketing company to improve the reach and visibility of your blog.
Monetizing The Travel Blog
If you want to earn money while blogging, you will have to tread a delicate path. Readers do not like to be fooled into buying some products or services, especially if they didn’t sign up for such things. However there are numerous ways to monetize the blog – from placing banner ads to linking sponsored posts. There are many such passive streams of earning money through your blog that you can explore. However the important thing is to be true to who you are and the stories you tell. Do not make it another platform for businesses to sell their products and services.
Mistakes are Part of the Deal
You are a traveler, a nomadic at heart. You have stories that you want to share but you may not be a storyteller. That’s okay. You will make mistakes and it’s part of how you will grow with your blog. The important thing to remember is that you must stay true to yourself and what you want to write. Travel writing is an expansive area – from writing about places, to tips on traveling to depicting cultures and narrating historical facts – you can use your blog to say a lot of things. In the beginning, you may not be sure what will hit a chord with the readers. As you write and share, you will be able to gauge audience reaction. That’s how you will learn. So, make mistakes and grow with your blog!
Have any questions about how to start a profitable travel blog? What about other suggestions? Feel free to Contact Us