Step by Step Guide To Start a Travel Blog

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So, you want to start a travel blog? Or any blog rather.

If anyone makes blogging look easy, let me say it at the very onset, it is not.

Not only does each article require extensive planning, multiple iterations (mine’s 30+ on average) and designing accompanying graphics, blogging is not something you can set up once and then just ignore for the rest of time. (Find all the tools I recommend and what they do here)

Not if you are serious about making it into something tangible. It’s the constant background noise that just doesn’t drown even if you consciously try to.

Some days, I wake up thinking of a genius idea of how to present or promote my content, and by the end of the week, I realise it just won’t work. No one can ever make you a Professional Blogger. I keep hearing of some special blogging courses which promise yo

u XYZ, but in my opinion, there is no custom made formula that can ensure your guaranteed success.

Just like going to a great business school, didn’t by default make me a great manager, the same way enrolling into a $1000 course, is not going to make you a blogging millionaire overnight. Everything needs time. And effort.

Read Also: Can You Make Money From A Travel Blog? How I Made $426 In Three Months

We live in the age of information overload. Whatever you are looking for is out there. If you haven’t found it yet, it’s probably because it either doesn’t exist or you haven’t mastered your digital search skills yet.

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I write this step-by-step guide to start a travel and lifestyle blog with the aim of helping beginners or desperate bloggers who are in need of some creative structured ideas.

Step 1: Get a domain name.

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A “domain” is essentially the digital address of your website. I will not go into the detail of what kind of a domain you should or should not buy as it will ultimately depend on what kind of audience you would like to build.

I personally think a .COM domain is the easiest and best way to begin especially if you plan to have a worldwide audience, which I guess if you aim to write about travel or lifestyle, you will.

Picking a blog name can be the hardest thing ever, as when you think about it many names have already been done to death. Words such as ‘nomadic, adventurous, wanderer, wanderlust, backpacker, world traveler, boho, vagabond, blond, expat, foreign’ have already thousands, if not millions of iterations. Find something unique that not only explains what your blog is about but also doesn’t pigeon hole you. It’s completely alright to go from a big blog covering a wide variety of topics to a narrow one. Doing the opposite however is an uphill battle. If you pick a name such as “Musings of a teenager”, what happens when you’re not one?

Many people love to pick a blog name after their own name, but in my opinion, I know like 2 blogs which are famous just by their actual full names.

You have to realize that to build a global audience, if your name has roots in Hindi or Italian or French, unless you plan to write your blog only in that language, that is the only time it makes sense to pick such a name.

If you plan to start a travel blog, unless you have a famous second name that the world identifies with, or you’re already famous, I’d say do not pick your own name.

You could however definitely include a part of your name with something catchy and easy to remember. It also helps to have an easy blog name to remember.

If you tell me to read a blog named- Extravagant Vagabond Adventures, I can promise you I will forget this 100% by the next day.

You want to create something that is you, easy and catchy to remember and that is broad enough to experiment with your niche.

Finally, where can you buy a domain? You can buy it at Go Daddy where a huge chunk of people do. However, in the step 2, I’ll explain why it’s so much better to just buy a domain with the platform you want to host on your blog on. Hang on.

Step 2: Buy a Host for Your Blog and Install WordPress

Now that you have a digital address, you need to rent a space to hold it online. This space is called a “host”. I would strongly recommend buying a domain along with the platform where you plan to host.

The reason why you want to “self-host” instead of having a blog on WordPress.com is to be able to MONETIZE your blog.

If you start with a free or a paid plan being hosted on WordPress.com you’ll certainly not be able to customise or make money on your blog. Not to mention this is the MOST expensive way to start a blog based business.

I have used and recommend for starters:

HostGator

If you’re looking to test the waters for cheap but still have excellent service, then you need to self-host using Hostgator.

You can buy a domain and a hosting plan on HostGator, install wordpress.org (industry standard) and go full-steam ahead.

Here’s how you can do this:

Step 1: Choose a plan

I’d suggest go with the “Hatchling” plan if you are new to the world of blogging and do not want to spend a lot on getting a web host.

>>>You can use my link here to get up to 55% OFF on your total amount.

Step 2: Register a new domain or transfer an existing one.

In my own experience, it is way easier if you buy the domain also at your host, rather than having to transfer at a later stage.

I bought mine at WordPress as I hosted my website with them for the first one year, and I really wish at this point I’d gone the Host+ Domain route to avoid having to change all my name server details, making redirects and files while migrating hosts.

Step 3: Finally, review your plan and go get em!

You’ve made it through the basic steps. Now all that awaits between you and your new online business, is finalising your payment details and plan.

I recommend getting the 36 months plan as that way you lock in the cheapest price. If you add more websites you can always upgrade to a more expensive option, but renewals can be EXPENSIVE.

Make sure you lock in the cheapest price, when you think of the lifecycle of a blog, 36 months is very reasonable!

Click Here To Get A Host Now For A Massive Discount

Step 3: Install a Unique and Customizable Theme for Your Blog

While you can totally get a free theme available to you with whichever platform you go for above, I highly recommend investing in a good theme from the start.

Even if you write the best content in the world but your blog is hard to navigate or just downright ugly, no one will spend time reading it.

You got to make sure you create something you are proud of and is great to look at.

Not all of us have the luxury of knowing how to design from scratch or have the money to hire a custom designer to create a special theme for you.

Thankfully, most purchased themes come with either a Live Preview option or a Visual Composer which helps you see changes in real time and implement them with one click.

For the beginning, you can purchase a basic theme which you can modify in hundreds if not thousands of different ways to create your own signature look.

I am using the Soledad theme from Envato Market. The theme also came with a 6 month free support to help me if anything were to go wrong while installing it.

You do not have to use the same theme, but can rather spend time browsing and checking out what fits your budget and blog aesthetics best.

Step 4: Get Writing and Publish your Blog

Once your domain+ platform+ theme are set up, all that’s really left is for your to write.

I think it’s good to write 10-15 articles first, make sure you get a second opinion on them and then go ahead and publish them all together.

An empty site looks like there’s not a lot of thought put into it. It also doesn’t give visitors enough reason to stick around. I’d say write until you become confident that a) people would like to read what you wrote, b) you would like people to read what you wrote.

One without the other is not really a good formula for success.

Remember, your first 10-15 articles are not going to be your proudest in an otherwise long blogging career. But the magic of owning your own website, is this thing called editing.

You can always go back and update your initial posts, set them to private or even delete them altogether if it no longer appeals to your blog content.

Step 5: Create Social Media Accounts for Brand Building

Now you’ve picked a name, purchased a domain, a platform to host it on, and even published a few great posts. What next?

No amount of amazing content is worth it’s while if no one ever finds it. We’ll get into SEO and other such blogging jargon at an advanced stage.

For the beginning, it’s crucial that you work with what you know how to work with. This means that you use the channels where your audience is most likely to find you, follow you and provide feedback.

The social media channels that you would pick would hugely vary of course based on your final niche, but starting with a few places where almost everyone is present such as Facebook, Instagram and Pinterest is highly advisable.

For me, I personally cannot juggle accounts in six platforms, and would not recommend you to do this unless you plan to blog full-time.

I’d rather focus my energy on creating content that’s high quality and focus on a few social media platforms that I understand how to use best. (Related: How To Get Your First 1000 Pinterest Followers)

I really only started to use Pinterest like a month ago, but the kind of visibility you can generate there is viral. It’s so much easier to get other people to find you where everyone else is as visually and creatively driven as you are.

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To make your content truly viral, automate your pins for weeks or months at a time, and generate subsequent blog traffic, get Tailwind. I spend one hour each week and that’s all I spend on my Pinterest strategy and I have 50k+ unique monthly viewers.

Click Here to Get Your First Month of Tailwind Plus Free

Facebook, on the other hand is a great tool to make your posts viral, get comments and engage your audience directly based on the content that you generate.
Instagram, is honestly my least favourite tool, and while this may have worked for bloggers that started 5 years ago, I think in today’s day and age with the constantly changing algorithm, it would not be a smart move to solely rely on this to drive traffic to your blog.

If you’d like to just be an Instagram influencer, and only create content to post on that application, do go full steam ahead.

But if your aim is to eventually have a full-blown website that represents you, then well you need to keep your eggs in various baskets.

After some trial and errors, you will find which channels work best for your content and audience.

Step 6: Promote and Track With Google Analytics

At the very beginning, it’s probably only going to be your friends and family that will read your blog. Be patient and keep promoting your content. How well you wrote something does not matter if no one saw it.

We live in an age of social proof and the more eyeballs your content get, the better your blogging game will eventually get.

Some of my loyal followers often provide me with valuable feedback, appreciation and even criticism which helps me understand my audience so much better.

There are times when I get emails from readers that I cannot in this lifetime hope to answer accurately, but it’s truly fascinating how fast people actually can come to love or hate your content, provided your are visible in the right places.

Another drawback of using WordPress for the first one year, is that I could not integrate my account to Google Analytics. I was, for the lack of a better phrase, being cheap and lazy.

Now that I’m not, and have had access to my Google Analytics data, my mind has exploded with the amount of information I can gather on my readers. Not in a creepy way, but data that helps you promote what people most want to read, and in places where they most want to read it.

Once you become good at observing trends in this data you really can tailor your content to the right audience. You do not need to be good at math or some kind of data nerd to do this. Anyone can understand this over time, and if you use this well so can you to strengthen and build on your audience continuously.

Step 7: Partner with Affiliate Networks

After a point, you will undoubtedly begin to think- “hey, how can I eventually generate an income from this blog?”

Even if you don’t plan to become a full-time blogger, this question will inevitably cross your mind. It crossed my mind exactly at the beginning of 2018 and after having spent over a quarter of 2018 re-designing and upgrading my blog, I have found a few networks that I totally love.

Since, you’re probably just beginning to grasp your head around this, I’ll only share the ones that I feel are most relevant to travel and lifestyle. I’m aware that niches such as fashion and beauty have other networks that may or may not work with you. I however, do not talk about that a lot and hence feel it’s unrelated to what I really want to use my blog for.

Raed Also: 23 Affiliate Programs To Monetize Your Travel Blog

First of all, an affiliate network is where advertisers gather to partner with people like you (bloggers) who have a platform where their products can sell.

In many ways, you become the medium for the advertiser to sell their product or service.

An affiliate network is essentially an aggregator that hosts both advertisers and publishers and makes money from a small percentage of the commission that you get from generating sales from your blog.

The reason I like this method, is because this is something that you build for the long-run.

Many bloggers would like to explore free press trips or sponsored content, but for the sake of my lifestyle, I like to work on passive things that will continue to yield me profit in the long run and that I do not need to change or update each time I do something different.

If you feel that you’d like to explore alternate means of generating income, do go ahead.

With that said, here’s my top 3 affiliate networks, which if you have a decent looking blog with at-least a few thousand views a month, you should easily get approval for. If you get rejected, do not be dis-heartened. Just come back again after your content and audience has significantly grown.

• • Amazon Affiliates: Based on the country where your audience is and where you plan to file your taxes, you can enrol in as many country based programs as you want to. You can also select geo-targeting as you write content for audience from across the world and can pick different products to show case for difference audience. This is definitely the easiest program to start with, although for me, I haven’t focused a lot on this channel as I like to recommend specific brands which I often cannot find on Amazon. Also, commissions are low in the beginning, but once your sales pick up, so will your commissions.
  • CJ Affiliate- My favourite platform so far, especially for European and American audience, I love everything about this platform. It’s easy to use, has fast reporting mechanisms and thousands of publishers to chose from. It’s also at the moment the most profitable network for me.

Step 8: Partner with Advertising Networks

This is a step that is conditional to the kind of traffic you end up generating on your blog. Once you cross 250 views a day, I would say you can start preparing to monetize your website based on a variety of ad networks that fit best with your content.

Some networks will outright reject you and some will even ban you for an indefinite period (happens quite often with Google Adsense and happened to me too). However, it is a future income stream you could/should experience.

Even if you only earn money to have one coffee a month from blog advertising, you will be better equipped to deal with ads once your website grows big and having learnt what works best for your blog at the beginning always helps!

Warning: Do not blast your website with a million advertisements as making that extra $0.01 is not worth spoiling the reader’s experience and potentially losing them forever. Things such as pop-ups work but are also incredibly annoying. Do use advertising but be smart and strategic about the places you use it on your blog.

Here’s the most popular ones for travel and lifestyle bloggers in my opinion:

• Google Adsense
• Media Net
• InfoLinks

READ ALSO: Can You Make Money From A Travel Blog? How I Made $426 In Three Months

Step 9: Partner with other Bloggers

I started to do this way too late in my blogging journey, but if I could do it from the very beginning I would. Why, you ask?

• To get high quality back links to your website which helps you with how well Google ranks your blog
• To strengthen the quality of your domain over time which again helps you to be found much easier on web
• To get visibility where your audience is most likely to be at- other travel and lifestyle blogs
• To build a community of bloggers that will help you in the long run grow and even plan/collaborate together

READ ALSO: How To Make Money Online; 5 Incredibly Simple Ways To Make Extra Money

Step 10: Create an Email Subscriber List

Again, something I wish I started to do from Day 1 itself. Everything you own via a second platform is not technically yours. Why?

• Google keeps changing its ranking algorithm making it impossible for you to be certain about how you will generate traffic or revenues from your blog. Ads served by Google or any other search platform, are therefore, in my opinion, the most unpredictable long-term revenue source.
• Facebook and Instagram are infamous for shutting down brand pages or accounts overnight for sometimes not particularly big reasons. This could happen to you, and then what?
• Your email list is the most dedicated, loyal and consistent set of followers you have no matter how many followers you have on social media. The strength of your blog whilst dependent on your social media following, the money you make from your blog will, however, be highly dependent on the email list that you and you alone own.
• People guard their emails fiercely, mostly due to the danger of being spammed. If they subscribe to you because they believe in the content you have to offer, you essentially have a life-long customer that may in future have a much larger value than he or she has today.

For creating an email list and even hosting basic campaigns, head here=> MailChimp. It’s free until 2000 subscribers, so that’s a good benchmark for you to judge the success of your blog and eventually move to a paid program once you’ve crossed the threshold. A paid program on the other hand, will give you significantly more options to use email marketing campaigns and is a small price to pay to build a list you will own for a long time!

Want to learn how to get free traffic from Pinterest? This checklist can help!

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QUICK RECAP:

Domain=>Host=>Theme=>Publish=>Social Media=>Analytics=>Affiliates=>Advertising=>Blogging Partners=>Email List

Phew! That was long. Before you go, I’d just like to reinforce:

General Tips before you Start a Travel Blog

• There is a huge misconception that bloggers and influencers are the same people. In my short and limited experience, I think there is a huge difference. You can be one without the other or you can be both. What I do think is important is to focus on what you are truly passionate about. If you do not think you have a talent for writing, you will have a hard time making it huge as a blogger. If you’re not good at photography, it will be hard as hell to become an Instagram Influencer, unless your influence comes from somewhere else (such as being a celebrity or a famous person) or buying a good editor’s presets. If you’re not good at creating videos, you will find it hard to get discovered and become famous on Youtube. This does not mean you need to be born with some special talent to be a blogger or a social media influencer. It just means that you have to learn to pick your battle and stick to what you can do best. Maybe you can do it all, and for that I salute you. But when you’re just starting out, it helps to focus on what you think you can be best at.
• Content is going to make or break you. If you do not consistently publish good content, why would anyone want to come back and read anything on your blog? It’s not just important to make everything look pretty and nice, it’s equally if not more important to write the best content you can. It’s also important to write on what people actually want to read, so doing some research on that would help you too. On the web space, unfortunately people do judge by the cover, so if your first or second impression is not worth looking at again, you’ll lose that visitor faster than you can type two sentences.
• If you’re looking for overnight success, do not start a travel blog. You’re better off having a private journal instead. Like I said before, patience, hard work, strategy and developing your own hacks will lead you to consistent progress. I am still on a development journey and whilst I am no where close to being professional, I have learnt so much since I started just by doing and failing or doing and succeeding.
• Do not be cheap like me and invest right from the beginning. $5-10 a month is really not that much for a platform that could potentially help you discover who you are in a completely different way. You get exactly what you pay for, and you cannot do great things with your blog if you’re limited by a free platform in the first place. Get a good domain name, a good hosting plan and a good theme. Half your initial battle would already be won.

Planning to start a travel blog? Find a domain name and a server on Hostgator today!

Have an existing blog in need of powerful growth? Check out these services I use and love:

• Tailwind: Pinterest and Instagram scheduling tool.
• Teachable: Create courses online and add to your blogging income.
• ThemeIsle: Premium WordPress themes.
• Grammarly: Automated in-browser Proofreading.
• OptinMonster: Convert and monetize your website traffic.
• LinkTrackr: Affiliate Link Tracking.
• PicMonkey: Photo-editing, Logos and Social Media Graphics.

If you’re looking to grow your blog, you may also want to read:

• Can You Make Money From A Travel Blog? How I Made $426 In Three Months
• How To Get Your First 1000 Pinterest Followers
• Blog Marketing Hacks That Took Me From 2000 to 20000 Page Views in 1 Month
• 4 Free SEO Check Tools For Bloggers
• What is Quora & How to Use It (To Grow Your Brand; Blog Traffic)
• 4 Beginner SEO Tips Guaranteed To Improve Your Search Engine Rankings
• 5 Content Syndication Platforms Every Blogger Needs To Grow Their Audience On
• The Ultimate Pinterest SEO and Rich Pins Guide
• How To Use Pinterest Hashtags The Non-Spammy Way
• Indian Girling is 1 – How This Blog Went From Zero to $800 Per Month