Travel Blogging Could Be Your Next Great Idea – What’s It All About?

The summer is most certainly upon us, and not only in the calendar sense. During the days leading up to this article, I’ve experienced all of the joys of incredibly hot weather, which led me in the only reasonable direction it ever could: daydreaming of traveling to somewhere I could swim and cool down. Naturally, I took to all sorts of travel blogs and websites to help me find out the next destination I’m going to visit, and even though I won’t tell you where it is I can assure you that I’d be lost without all those great travel bloggers.

My situation is probably one of the main reasons as to why people read travel blogs. A lot of holiday planning is done in advance, of course, but most of those people who actually research their vacation destinations tend to end up on at least one travel blog, to get an unbiased, expert opinion about something they hold dear. And that’s not just information – people make a decent living writing these blogs. Expertvagabond, a famous travel blogger, gets more than 15,000 unique views on his blog daily – that’s a serious number by any means.

To unravel the mysteries of travel blogging, and to start the summer off with something fresh and travel-related, we’ve decided to dive straight into the world of travel bloggers in our freshest new series of articles.

To understand what led these kinds of blogs to the place they’re in now, we need to first ask ourselves:

What IS A Travel Blog, Anyway?

Well, as the name suggests pretty clearly, a travel blog is a personal website curated by a single person or a group that focuses on traveling and experiences the authors encounter while on their travels. The travel blog phenomenon relies on the stories people have to say about the places they’ve been to, making their writing authentic and fresh for every place they visit. That’s one of the things that makes these kinds of blogs so popular.

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Of course, the main difference from “classic” blogs or other personal websites is the topic at hand, as the travel bloggers tend to mostly write about their life during a certain adventure or a holiday, as opposed to other bloggers who keep a journal of their lives online. You could say that a “regular” blog also incorporates travel blog ideas when its owner goes on vacation, but the travel blog distills those into a more focused niche, that makes it more enjoyable to read to the people interested in the topic.

Picking A Niche Is The Most Important Part Of Blogging

Travel blogs are, essentially, niche blogs. The idea behind selecting a niche is that if you narrow the audience down considerably, you’ll have a more devoted following because there simply isn’t enough people specializing in the same thing.

For example, if you want to write about traveling you can go and make a blog that will cover a number of travel topics – prices, advice and all sorts of things. But bear in mind that there’s a lot of blogs that do exactly that and you’ll be a small fish in a very large pond. You should try and find your own niche instead, like so many travel bloggers did before. There are incredible niche travel blogs out there, like Hand Luggage Only, a blog about traveling light, Tony The Traveler, a blog about a blind person’s adventures and our very own Sanja Gardašević and her blog Wanderingpaws.ME, where she describes the adventures she and her dog have. All of these are excellent niche topics, and all of them get the attention they deserve.

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You see, there are a few important advantages of niches:

• You aren’t “spread too thin” because you try to cover a lot of topics
• It’s easier to find clients and audiences
• It’s easier to become an expert and be known in the niche of your choice
• There’s less competition

Of course, with travel blogs becoming popular, there are a number of travel niches, too, like affordable luxury travel niches and similar ideas. You only need to find out what you need and want!

Why Should You Blog While Traveling

Now that you know the importance of the niche and the basics behind travel blogs, you need to find out why you should be interested in this blogging niche, or rather why millions of people love this style of blogging.

To put it bluntly, travel blogs are a pretty big deal. Taking into account that more than 90% of people trust word-of-mouth recommendations from the people they trust, you can see that the travel bloggers who earn the trust of their audiences can profit immensely. Bloggers are the journalists of the new century, and the bloggers who are writing about their travels rack up thousands of views daily, with both tourist boards, companies and travel agencies supporting them.

Sounds like a good life, doesn’t it?

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To give you an example of a brand investing heavily into the travel blog scene, we need to look no further than Travel.ME, a website that’s actually a travel blog aggregator, supported by Tuv, one of the world’s largest tourism companies. The impact of this style is so large that a corporation as powerful as Tuv has devoted resources to making their own blogging force collaborate and make a great-looking and feeling website that will make you jealous of the people on it.

There are some other added benefits of travel blogging that you might not realise at first.

• You have a diary of your trips if you blog, and you can always return to your site and read all about your adventures – even if you forget a detail or two from your trips. You can even use your blog to tell family members your experiences so that you don’t have to tell the same story over and over again, we all know how frustrating that might be.
• You can make traveling a decent side job, because blogging lets you earn money through your site and that money can be spent on more traveling to get more money to do more traveling…
• You can get sponsored from big brands to go to places and do things, like Natalie Tran did when she visited Paris for Lonely Planet. That’s pretty cool – and free!

So what’s the catch?

Actually, there is no catch, per se. The biggest reason why most people aren’t writing travel blogs is that they don’t really travel that much, of course. There’s also a financial stress of actually trying to make a living off of a website, and you really need to have a special kind of job if you’re going to be working from across the world every other week. That is, of course, if you aren’t blogging for a living. The stress is also something you can’t ignore, and the culture shocks and everything involved with long travels can take their toll on you if you’re not careful.

Don’t Forget The Social – But The Website Is Your Home

The biggest thing both in media and communication in the world is definitely the rise of social media and the subsequent shift to it. For travel bloggers, social media like Instagram and Snapchat brought immense versatility, with some bloggers relying heavily on the usage of Instagram and Snapchat stories to show the world they’re traveling. Of course, this compliments the statistic of more than half of all tourists using social media while traveling, and it’s only logical that you should invest both into your website and your social channels.

Some of the most famous Instagram travel bloggers like Lauren Bullen and Jack Morris have millions of followers who anxiously await their next posts and videos, and there’s absolutely no reason as to why you couldn’t be like them in a few years. Jack is currently in Montenegro, so you can even start from your own country if you don’t yet have the money to visit some far off places. 

The best way to supercharge your social media while blogging is to think about the little things:

• Share your blog posts on your social media channels as soon as you write them, and then share them again if an opportunity is right
• Make the coolest photos available on Instagram, considering that now you can put more photos in one post
• Use stories
• Pinterest is your friend, without a doubt.
• Make your website friendly to new readers

Speaking of websites, they’re truly the biggest deal in blogging, of course. A good domain (like .ME) and a good, smooth website can make all of the difference for an aspiring travel blogger. Add to that the possibility of making cool website names like explorewith.ME, and you got yourself a winner. It’s a big world out there, and if you’re aching to give it a look, taste, and feel, you should really consider writing about it – people will love reading it, without a doubt.

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