Is travelling your passion? Then why not turn your passion into a means to earn six figures a year? How? Well let me explain. Why not start blogging? Blogging about your passion will not only get you lots of happiness but it will also help you earn a big amount to further fulfil your passion and dreams. Start a travel blog, become a professional blogger and improve your travel blog.
What is a professional travel blogger?
Anyone can start a blog and become a “blogger”. However, those who blog about niche topics and earn a good portion (or all) of their income from travel blogging may be considered as professional bloggers.
Here are few tips on how to become a professional travel blogger. These are purely my suggestions and certainly not the only roadmap to building a successful travel blog. You may also try other tips that may work for you.
1. Start a travel blog
Blogging has become a cake walk now a days. There are loads of free blogging platforms available like Blogger, WordPress, Tumblr etc. But as a digital marketer by profession, I would suggest you to go for a custom domain. Here are the steps to start a travel blog:
a. Pick a good travel blog name
b. Choose hosting for your blog
c. Install free WordPress software
d. Learn how to use WordPress
e. Get a professional blog theme
f. Download some useful plugins
g. Start posting interesting content with lots of images
2. Build an audience
Traffic to your blog is the only key to earn big. And to get consistent and good traffic to your blog, you need to build an audience first. You will only start earning when you have a decent audience for your blog. Here are few tips on building an audience:
a. Create useful content.
b. Do some research to find out what people are looking for. You may visit Quora and Reddit to find out what travel related questions people are asking on online platforms.
c. Provide something of value to your readers.
d. Choose a niche and stick to it. This will earn you niche but regular readers.
e. Choose unique topics and write about interesting stuff. Your blog should not appear like a personal journal. Posting about your beach party with friends in Goa will not get you much readers. Instead if you post about adventure sports in Goa like Scuba diving, sailing, hot air ballooning or rafting, the interest ratio will be much higher.
f. Start guest posting on popular blogs. This will give you visibility.
3. Create Social Media presence
Create your presence on social media. Be active and responsive on these platforms. Facebook, Twitter, Instagram are some good platforms to start with.
4. Start a video channel on YouTube
Videos attract much more audience than simple text. Start your own channel on YouTube and publish videos of new places.
5. Don’t Forget SEO
SEO is one of the main factors that gets you higher traffic for your website. SEO is abbreviation of Search engine optimization. It is the technique of tweaking your content to optimize it for high rankings on search engine result pages Google search.
Blogging and SEO are and always will be linked.
SEO is a highly technical field and needs skilled personnel to handle the task. You may hire a good travel SEO company who can provide results from their professional travel SEO services. Search for a good SEO expert to optimize your blog. You may also outsource the task to an offshore partner. That way you will have ample time to follow your passion and do your niche job. When working with freelance SEO experts, you may be required to put a lot of time on SEO. But an outsource SEO company has pool of SEO experts and have access to other departments like content, design etc. To get you good results.
6. Email Marketing
Start a newsletter and start email marketing. Building an email subscriber list is one of the most important things for any blog. The people who subscribe to your email list are your true fans & dedicated readers.
Moreover emails provide a much more personal experience to the readers. It also performs better than most social media at driving quality traffic to your site.
Here are a few tips on building an email subscribers list:
- Offer something of value like free travel photography book, free travel guide to new locations etc.
- Offer giveaways on the blog in exchange for readers signing up to the email newsletter. You may use Rafflecopter for the same.
7. Personal branding
Personal branding is very important to get loyal followers. You may do it yourself or ask your SEO outsourcing partner to look after this department.
8. Networking with other bloggers and your followers
Building a community always helps. It gets you closer to your audience and in turn they become loyal followers of your blog.
Bottom line:
Professional travel blogging is difficult. It needs determination, consistency and persistence. You may follow the above tips to start your professional travel blogging. However, these are just the tip of the iceberg. You will learn more techniques when you start your journey of blogging.