Writing your own Travel Blog

Writing your own travel blog is a great way of expressing yourself, sharing your travel thoughts, tips and photos, and given enough time and work you can also make money from travel blogging.

I'm a professional travel writer and blogger, and here are my tips and ideas to help and inspire you to start your own travel blog or website.

For many working as a travel writer is the best job in the travel industry. With a few guide book publishers having such dominance in the market, and so many travel writers wanting to work for them, one needs to be ahead of the game to get work.

More and more people are using the Internet to research and book their holidays and travel arrangements. This gives greater potential for the success of travel websites and travel blogs.

What is a blog?

A blog is a website that is presented in a diary like format. This website is a blog. The main page lists recent blog entries, with the most recent at the top. Most blogs are updated daily. The homepage shows the most recent blogs so that regularly visitors to the blog can see any new postings.

Blogs, and more recently other types of websites, use tags. Tags allow you to group blog entries or pages. When reading a blog entry you can easily find and read other related entries.

How to create a blog

There are several great blogging tools available. They are easy to use, and the best are free!

Lets look at the most popular blogging tools

• WordPress - WordPress is the most popular blogging tool used on the Internet. It is free, easy to use and because of the vast number of people using WordPress there are thousands of plug-ins that allow you to add extra functionality to you blog. WordPress is also well supported by its community of users, so you should be able to find technical help if you have problems. WordPress comes in two flavors. You can get a free blog at WordPress.com, where your blog is hosted for you, for free. The second option requires you to download and setup your own version of WordPress with your own PHP hosting plan. This requires an amount of technical knowhow, patience and a willingness to learn. However, the second option gives you much more control over your blog, and is essential if you are serious about making a successful blog.
• Blogger - Blogger is perhaps the easiest of the blogging tools available. It is free, and provided by Google. Blogger is much simpler than WordPress, but very easy to understand and start using. Blogger will host your blog for you, using a domain such as travels.blogspot.com, or you can buy your own domain name and hosting , and publish your blog to that. As this service is owner by Google I suspect a great number of features will be added to this service in time.

If you want the simplest solution, or find WordPress to much to take in then sign up for a Blogger account.

What to write about?

Choosing what to write about will depend on the purpose of your blog. If you are writing about you personal travel experiences to share with others, then you write about that. If you are writing a blog to inspire other people about travel, with possible destinations then you need to research and write about these destinations.

If you are primarily looking to make money with your travel blog or website then you need to do a great deal of research. To make money you need visitors to your website. To get visitors you need to offer something that they want.
You need to identify what demand there is amongst readers, what travel blogs and websites exist, and what information and services these websites and blogs are already delivering. I use a simple rule to achieve success which I think will help you. "Either do something unique that people want, or do something that already exists, but do it better." If you emulate existing websites or blogs you need to produce better information than them, or you will not get noticed. If you do something unique, and promote it so that people know about it, you will be successful.

How to get visitors to your blog

One of my favorite parts of working online is reading about how many people visit my websites. It is a wonderful feeling to know that people are reading your work. If you are looking to make money online then remember; visitors = money. More visitors = more money.

There are a number of ways of getting visitors to your travel website or blog.

• Search engines - Definitely one of the best ways of building new visitors to your blog. Google is the biggest and most popular. If your blog appears well in Google's search engine results, you will get lots of visitors.
• Word of mouth - Just like life outside of the internet, word of mouth is the best way of promoting a website. If people are talking about your website, people will visit. If people like your website they will keep coming back, and repeat visitors are one of the keys to a successful website. Websites like eBay and Google built their success by word of mouth, and not by advertising. They use short and memorable names which are easier to remember.
• Advertising - Whilst advertising costs money, good advertising can give good results very quickly. Equally, poor advertising will cost you a lot of money and give you few visitors. Unless you have previous experience of online advertising, either consult an expert, or leave advertising out of your plan for now.
• Blog and website comments - Most popular websites and blogs have comments sections, where you can leave your comments about a page or blog. You can often leave your website or blog address when you leave a comment. If you leave a good and insightful comment, a lot of people will visit your website. It is simple, and it works. If you choose your comments, and where you leave you comments carefully, and you can build trust in people and good numbers of visitors.
• Other websites or blogs - Having a link to your blog on an already established blog can bring you visitors. If you know someone with a blog or website then ask them to link to yours.
• Guest blogs - guest blogging is where you write a good entry for someone else's blog, typically a blog that is established and gas good visitor numbers. You add a link to your blog in the entry that you have written for the other blog. The blog owner benefits from you writing a good article for them, you benefit from links to your blog from the blog where you have written. You will also gain respect and authority as a blogger and writer, which is essential for long term success. Blog owners are choosy about who they let write for them. Before offering to guest blog ensure you have written many good articles on your blog. Then email blog owners offering to write on their blogs. If you are already at this stage, then contact me and offer to write a guest blog for me!

How to make money from your travel blog

Making money from a travel blog is just like making money from any other blog or website. You need lots of visitors to make money. There are no rules, but a guide is: for every 1,000 visitors to your blog, you can make US$5 - US$10. Getting 1,000 visitors to a blog is not at all easy. If you spend 30 - 60 minutes on your blog everyday, within one year you can expect to get 1,000 visitors per day. Earning $10 per day for a years work doesn't sound like a lot does it? Well it isn't. But an experienced web entrepreneur can make $50 a day from the same 1,000 visitors. How? Because experience will teach you about your visitors behavior, what programs there are to make money online, and which ones actually work.

So, imagine you have got to the $50 a day stage. That's $350 per week, or $1,500 per month. That's a nice residue income. If you don't write any new entires to your blog for a month, you will still continue to earn the same amount of money. If you don't update your blog for two or three months, then your visitors and earnings will start to fall. The key is to keep writing great blogs and articles on your blog.

Whilst $1,500 is not enough to live comfortably in the US or UK, it is enough to live in India or Thailand very well. It is also enough money to continue traveling in most countries in the world.

If you are professional travel writer you can legitimately deduct most of your travel expenses from your income, and pay less income tax. If you spend the entire year out of your domicile country, in some circumstances you are not eligible to pay income tax at all.

Travel blogs worth looking at

Are you interested in travel blogging? Don't jump into it lightly. It is not easy, it takes a great deal of research, time, work and patience. But, hard word and great ideas do bring success. Here are some examples of popular, established travel blogs:

• Ed's Gone South - travel blog and information in South America and other places.
• Hobo Traveler - Andy's been traveling for 10 years, and now lives on the profits.