The dream for many with wanderlust is to travel and be able to make money while doing it. A travel blog is a great way to do this. Travel blogs often operate on the influencer model. What this means is that you have a website that is popular because of your tips, advice, and stories. You have a brand that people trust and that people engage with. Due to this attention, brands pay you to visit their hotels and write about it or pay you to create a custom campaign based on their outdoor products, and so on.
You can, of course, offer courses you have created, books you have written, and merchandise, including partnering with local artists of the destinations that you visit. These are just a few ways that you can monetize your blog, but before you get there, you need an audience, and therefore you need to follow this guide:
Cultivate a Unique Voice
One of the most important things that you can do for your travel blog is to find a unique voice or unique selling point. It doesn’t have to be the only niche of its kind, but a niche is a good place to get started. It could be budget travel, mindful travel, sustainable travel, spiritual travel, travel comedy, and so on. Play on your strengths and on your interests.
Improve Your Photography, Videography, and Written Skills
As a travel blogger, you will, at least, at the start, be in charge of it all. If you are serious about your efforts, then invest in learning more about photography, videography, and writing. There are many online courses you can take that will help you learn more, and if you need to buy equipment, you can save a lot by shopping second-hand. Most of all, however, it is practice that makes perfect!
Invest in a Professional Website
You need to invest in a beautiful website that is fun to engage with. You will also need to invest in a newsletter and in your social media, but as these are far easier to learn on your own as you go, you don’t need to invest monetarily in them quite as much as your website. Ideally, it should be designed by a web designer, but if not, it should, at minimum, have a beautifully customized theme.
Market your Website to Increase Reach
There is a reason why large, household name brands have massive marketing budgets and multiple campaigns every year, and that is because to survive in an attention market, you need to keep the attention on you. Every few months, on top of your organic marketing efforts, you will want to outsource to a quality internet marketing agency that can offer stunning designs that are human optimized and offer bespoke backend and trusted support for every campaign.
When your goal with a travel website is to make money off of it, then you need to invest in it the same way you would any other business. Eventually, and with luck, you will be able to start getting an income from all your hard work.
