Blog Post

How to Become a Successful Travel Blogger

Travel blogging is a crowded field — and it gets more crowded by the day. After all, the idea of “getting paid to travel the world” seems like an amazing thing to try to do. You get to visit wonderful places around the world on someone else’s dime! It’s a dream job, right?

Well, first, running a blog is really hard and time-consuming. Putting posts up is not going to result in money falling like rain (though judging by some of the people I’ve seen on paid trips, it can amount to a drizzle). You have to work for it. It takes persistence. Unless you hit the Internet “viral” lottery, you should expect to plug away for a least a year with minimal success.

Think of travel blogging like the restaurant business: Just because there are a lot of restaurants doesn’t mean that that they are all good or that you shouldn’t open one of your own! Instead, people who open a restaurant or desire to be a world-class chef look around and say, “I can do this better.” That’s the mindset you should have about your travel blog.

Just because you travel and write doesn’t mean you can write well or can become a good travel writer. Go back to my early posts from 2008 — they are horrible. I mean god-awful. There is a big difference between the content I produced then and the content I produce now. Sucking — at first — is part of the journey. You aren’t going to be great out of the gate.

If you are going to write about yourself, do so sparingly or relate it to the bigger picture of travel on the road. Don’t write about your new shoes, what food you ate, your thoughts on whatever, or the mundane details about your life. Few people really care about that. We read writers because they connect with us on an emotional level, tell good stories, and allow us to visualize ourselves in the places they talk about it.

Rome wasn’t built in a day — and your blog won’t build itself overnight either. Maintain realistic expectations about your blog. Don’t expect anything but hard work for the first year. Don’t rush. Build something that will last. The light is always at the end of the tunnel, but too many people give up right before the end. Keep going. You’ll make it!

Creating a travel blog is a time-consuming process. Writing about your trip to Paris is only a small part of the story. Successful blogs focus on content and are customer-centered and reader-centered. It’s easy to reach small or mid-tier status but if you want to stand out, focus on reader-centric content, being niche, creating products, and sticking to best practices.