If you’re the type who loves to travel, there could be a good chance that you’re thinking about jotting down your memories on a blog for the world to see. However, before you buy the domain name, get the blog prepped and start writing, there are some thing you should know ahead of time to make your travel blog as successful as possible —
1. Defining a Purpose
If you look at most travel blogs on the Internet, they tend to be all over the place. Some people start a blog to keep their friends and family in touch, while others simply start a blog to record their journey. Do you want to help others? Do you want to showcase your photography skills? Whatever your goal may be, it’s important that you define your purpose.
2. The Audience — Who’s Going to Read This?
Sooner or later, there’s a good chance that a lot of random people are going to start reading your blog. While you may initially start blogging and only your family will read it, you have to think about the audience you plan on writing for in the future. Do you just plan on writing for your family to see? Do you want to target frugal travelers, or do you want a business-oriented crowd? By defining your audience, this will make it easier to write blog posts.
3. Picking a Platform
Today, blogging is easier than ever. Since most of your popular blogging platforms, like Blogger and WordPress, don’t require any programming knowledge, you can make your blog appear as if it was ran by a large corporation that spent thousands of dollars.
Before you start writing blog posts, you’re going to want to want to decide on what platform you’re going to use. If you want the easy route, which most travel bloggers recommend, you should probably pick WordPress. However, if you don’t mind getting your hands dirty with programming, you could consider alternatives like Drupal.
4. It’s Hard Work
Starting a blog in any niche is going to take a lot of hard work. Don’t expect your blog to receive thousands of views the first week you launch it. What you’re generally going to find out that it’s going to take a lot of quality posts before the search engines start picking up your posts, sending organic traffic your way.
It’s important to remember that while search engines can send you free traffic, it’s going to be the word-of-mouth advertising that’s going to work best for your blog. With that being said, make sure that every post you put up is unique, filled with pictures and informative. If the public likes what they see, there’s a good chance they are going to share the post with their friends.
5. Don’t Forget to Promote
If you’re motivated to churn out fantastic blogs posts, that’s great; however, it isn’t going to be enough in cyberspace where you’re competing with billions of websites. Unless you plan on treating your blog like a personal diary for your family, it’s so important that you promote your stuff in a non-spammy way. Some marketing strategies can include social media, pay-per-click ads, posting on forums, guest posting for related blogs and learning the art of SEO.
Starting a successful travel blog will greatly depend on your content, passion and consistency. As long as you market and keep your blog updated filled with compelling content, there’s no reason you can’t succeed.