How to start a travel blog: 5 tips and my experience

I am a full-time travel blogger. Also, I write for BBC Travel, Lonely Planet and CNN Travel. I am doing this for a year and a half now and it all started with a wordpress.com travel blog I created when I was studying in Belgium. The name was svitforyou.wordpress.com and subsequently, I bought a domain name, started using wordpress.org and now it's svitforyou.com.

Here's a short story of creating my travel blog, now let's talk about how to start your travel blog.

Tip 1: Specialize

I think that the most important thing to have in mind while starting a travel blog is what you're going to write about. If you answer the question: "What is this travel blog about?" you are guaranteed to have positive outcomes in the future. Specialization is a must for a successful travel blog, it is the feature that will make your travel blog stand out from the thousands of the others.

My example: when I created my first travel blog it was about... well, everything. I just wrote about my travels around the world with no specialization whatsoever. Just lots of different articles on the general topic of travel. And it didn't lead to any results. The real change happened when I decided to write only about Central Europe and Ukraine. After this, I started to see my audience and my topics clearly and subsequently contacted by Lonely Planet and CNN to write about Ukraine for them.

Tip 2: Choose the right publishing platform

This is one of the essential parts of starting a travel blog. The platform you choose is where the traffic will be heading to and where your income possibilities will arise.

Nowadays, there are many options to choose from but I would suggest starting with buying a domain name and creating your website using wordpress.org. It gives you the powerful blogging potential, supports all the ways of revenue accumulation including ads (that may come in the future) and gives you almost unlimited possibilities for website design. On the downside, it costs money and can be quite overwhelming for starters. Nevertheless, it doesn't cost that much as well as there are thousands of free videos and articles to help you ace it.

Other platforms to consider are the free wordpress.com and different on-site platforms like Medium or LinkedIn Pulse. I will write about them in detail in the following articles.

Tip 3: Be social

Social media is the most effective way of driving traffic to your travel blog. Driving traffic means making people come to your website and read your articles. That's why you should master the social media presence and choose the right platforms to do so. You should always keep in mind that the social media platforms differ and use them the right way for the best results.

For example, 90% of the time travel blogging for me is pure social media marketing. I post 5 times a day on Twitter, 1 time per day on Instagram (with minimum 5 Instagram Stories daily), 1 time per day on LinkedIn, Google+ and Facebook page as well as I have recently started a YouTube vlog Travel Writer's Diaries where I regularly post videos from travels. The content is different on each platform and tailored to the modus operandi of the social media it is posted on. This is what travel blogger's life looks like.

Tip 4: Be patient

Okay, I will borrow this one from one of my favorite entrepreneurs and speakers Gary Vaynerchuk. Be patient! Rome wasn't built in a day, neither will be your travel blog. In fact, travel blogging is one of the hardest online enterprises and requires posting regularly, frequent investment in travels and being online non-stop. From my own experience, I can say it can be very frustrating at times. You may have written the best travel writing piece in the universe but nobody will see it because you have 50 Facebook page subscribers (49 of which are your friends and 1 is you) and you posted it in the wrong time. Be patient! It all comes with practice, time and talent. Just don't give up in the beginning and keep going on!

Tip 5: Produce great content

Ok, you may have all the aforementioned things up and rolling. Everything seems right, you posted few articles, published a few Instagram pics and made 1 Twitter post. But there's no engagement, no likes, nobody is reacting to your content. "What happened?" you think. I will tell you what happened, you posted the bad content. Your article has so many errors it's impossible to read, you posted 3 blurred unfiltered Instagram pics in a row at 3 am and your Twitter post was a retweet of a Ron Swanson gif that has no relation to your travel blog whatsoever.

Note this one thing: good content is a king of everything! Without the high-quality content, you're better off not starting the blog at all, because it will be a waste of time and energy. So think twice about what you're posting and remember that the competition in the world of travel blogging is ferocious so you're better be the best or not do it at all.

Thank you very much for reading!

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