Travel blogging primarily involves touring to various destinations around the world, then keeping an up-to-date online journal of these travels for readers to envy, share and add to their bucket list. To become a professional travel blogger and to earn a living from doing what you enjoy can be quite difficult. There is a multitude of travel bloggers out there, but very few of them are experts at what they do. This may be an indication of how challenging travel blogging actually is. Competition is a bit high, so standing out takes a lot of work and effort on your behalf. Despite the challenges of standing out, you can definitely become an expert travel blogger through devotion and persistence. Let’s look at what it takes to find success in this field.
Audience
A lot of people’s primary question is ‘how to make money’, but that’s not what you should be asking at all. In blogging, the thing that’s most important is blogger’s relationship with their audience – the active readers who generate a blog’s traffic
People on the internet aka your potentials readers are tired of crappy content overflowing the world wide web. It’s so much easier to write a bunch of nonsense and present it as a good quality content with the help of pretty pictures and catchy headlines that have nothing to do with what people are actually looking for when they type something into google. They’re looking for answers to their questions, ways to solve their problems and find the information they actually need. The most important thing for every blogger is to provide their readers with valuable content. Not too long ago people realized they can make money on the internet, and suddenly everyone stopped caring about quality and started focusing on quantity. So don’t be one of those bloggers who only care about money and remember why you started blogging in the first place. The Internet is primarily about sharing and community, not about money, and you should always remember that.
Content
What’s the use of having a massive audience and not having quality content to deliver to them? You will be losing your audience twice as fast as you gained it. Generating good quality content ensures you remain relevant to your audience and sleep well at night knowing that you’re a decent person. Do your research extensively to determine what people are searching for the most when it comes to traveling. Are people asking the same questions under your every blog post? Well, it seems like you can get an idea for your next post just from that. Take time to communicate with them and you will soon find yourself with a big following as people will appreciate you taking the time to respond.
The way you structure and presentation of your content is equally as important as the content itself. Take the time to make your thoughts and words make sense, people appreciate that. You can always tell when someone doesn’t care about what they put on their blog. Paying close attention to overall formatting, headings, bullet lists, high-quality pictures, links to other people’s relevant content to compliment yours, grammar, punctuation and much more – all of goes into a good quality content.
Also Read: A Guide to Starting Your Travel Blog
Be Adventurous
To have things to write about, you can’t just go somewhere and lay on the beach drinking margaritas. Your readers can do it themselves. Go places, research, describe your experiences on your blog. Be a friend who shows exciting new places to people. Tell a story. Make them want to pack their bags and immediately go on an adventure.
Good SEO
SEO is the process of tweaking the contents of your website to have a higher ranking in search engines like Google giving people better exposure to your work. You can be the best travel blogger on this planet, give amazing advice, have the most beautiful pictures from the most exotic places in the world, but without SEO people will never learn about you since, as it was mentioned before, there is a huge competition on the internet these days.
You can learn SEO basics yourself as there are multiple sources available, or outsource this task to professionals, but you should definitely never neglect it.
Guest Posting
Guest posting plays a huge role when it comes to building your blog or a personal brand. Find good quality blogs in your niche and write for them. The content you submit should be even better than the one you put on your own blog since your audience knows you and your abilities, but when you guest post on a different website, you need to show the people who are not familiar with your work that you have valuable content to share. When choosing which blog to guest post on, take into consideration which option will give the best return on investment of your time. Likewise, it is important to choose a blog relevant to the content you are blogging about, in this case, traveling.
Read! Read! Read!
You need to read before you can write. No one will tolerate a content written by a third grader. Actually, that is what all bloggers need to do. Read. A lot. By reading you start to adapt different styles of writing, improve your grammar and punctuation, learn new words and phrases you can then incorporate into your writing and exercise your imagination. Read not just books, but other blogs to help you understand what’s relevant at the moment and get ideas for your future posts. It works wonders.
Money
At last, let’s talk money. We’re all human beings and need to survive in this cruel world. Having financial stability is important. It makes you more flexible in your decisions, gives you opportunities and experiences you otherwise wouldn’t have. Now, travel bloggers are different from the regular ones. You actually need money to go places to then write about them in your blog.
When you have a loyal audience of people who are engaged in your content and receive valuable information from you for a long time, you can start working with brands and make money from what you do. But it’s always important to work with people that you know will provide your readers with high-quality goods and services, so be careful when choosing brand deals and sponsors. As a travel blogger, look into brand deals with airlines and hotels since it will make your life so much easier.
Gaining popularity as an expert traveler blogger is a journey that takes time. You cannot become an expert at anything overnight. It requires patience, tolerance to failure and lots of persistence as well. If you follow this path, then be ready to exercise the suggested traits. It’s normal to fail a number of times before success comes your way.
