How to Start a Travel Blog? is one of the top things I get asked as a travel blogger. I usually write out a bit of a canned response or send a link to someone else’s article… but after over 8 years I think it’s time I actually write out step-by-step instructions on how to become a travel blogger AND make money doing so.
So, this guide is going to list out EVERYTHING I have done personally to develop my little travel blog (that I made when I moved to London after college – more on my story here) into a business that has kept me on the road this long (as well as tons of interesting travel jobs along the way). I have been through SOOOO much trial and error that I hope this will help you, well, NOT have to do that.
I’ll talk about mistakes I made, how I learned all of the million skills it takes to be a successful travel blogger, courses that I took to learn different strategies, how I implemented them, what I spent money on to get a good ROI, and what YOU can do NOW to get on track to starting a travel blog of your own. But first, I must state an important fact:
The Biggest Disclaimer on Starting a Travel Blog: IT’S NOT EASY!
If you want to be a travel blogger and make money, you have to wear about a million different hats. Well, maybe not 1 million, but AT LEAST 10. You have to be a content creator, affiliate marketer, SEO expert, web designer, photographer/videographer, journalist/author, editor, web developer, social media marketer, sales funnel creator/manager, AND MORE!! And if you don’t want to do some of these things, chances are that you will have to outsource them.
So if you think it’s all posing on boats and in front of colorful doors…. THINK AGAIN. I mean, that’s still part of travel blogging, but maybe only like .02% 😛
Taking nice photos can be a higher percentage of your job if you just want to learn how to be a travel INFLUENCER…so if you want to be a tiktoker/instagrammer, the monetization strategies are totally different and only a fraction of what travel BLOGGERS do. Most travel bloggers are also travel influencers, but not all travel influencers are also travel bloggers. Instagrammers are not bloggers… even if they claim to be!
You will spend WAY more time in glasses behind a laptop screen than you will wearing flowy dresses in front of nice waterfalls, but you have to decide if it will be worth it for you to put all the effort in starting a travel blog to make money. If you just want to start a travel blog and get free stuff, I suggest you exit out of this article immediately and SERIOUSLY check yo-self (or keep reading to find out why stuff is not actually FREE at all).
Disclaimer: This post contains affiliate links. You’ll learn what those are soon enough 😉
Travel Blogging for Beginners: What is Travel Blogging?
“Oh my gahhhhhd, you’re a TRAVEL BLOGGER? Wow, I want that job. How did you get that job?!?! You’re so LUCKY!!!”
*rolls eyes so hard I fall over backwards*
Okay, so everyone. There’s no such thing as “Travel Blogger Jobs.” And I know some people actually think that there are, because I see with my keyword research tools that over 1300 people a month type that term into Google. Guys, come ON.
Unless you get hired by some company to take travel press trips and write articles for their site about different destinations (and if you find one LMK lol), there will be no open positions as a travel blogger that you can interview for and then just get swept off your feet on a perfectly instagrammable trip around the world. If that’s what you want, you must CREATE IT yourself. There’s no luck involved… just good old-fashioned HARD AF work.
A travel blog is essentially a website that offers information about travel. They mostly offer personal tips, tricks, stories, and recommendations from the blogger from their own experiences. Travel bloggers usually pair with social media accounts and email lists to grow their audience and share their tips.
Things to Know Before Starting a Travel Blog
There are lots of things to know before starting a blog. Most of them are that it requires a ton of different skills that are hard to have at the same time as one singular human (couple bloggers, I envy you). But here are some that are the most important!
Travel Blogger Salary
Now that I have your attention: a TRAVEL BLOGGER SALARY DOESN’T EXIST EITHER!!! How much money you make as a travel blogger depends entirely on your monetization strategies and how well they work. No one is negotiating a salary with you so that you can go out and take nice photos and write articles.
You have to LEARN skills to make money as a travel blogger, implement them, and hone them as you go if you want to make tons of money. You must write articles and recommend affiliate products that make you money, and even create your own products too. It all rests on your marketing strategies and how much traffic you are able to generate, too.
You CAN make tons of money as a travel blogger, but as I have said a lot, it’s not easy. Some bloggers make 6 (or 7) figures in a year regularly. And you can do the same. And since your blog is yours, all the money is yours, too… as much as you can make.
Do I have to Travel to be a Travel Blogger?
Short answer: nope! Do people travel to your hometown/the place where you live? Can you think of a lot of great tips and articles you can write about a place you ready know very well, and have photos of? Perfect, you can make a blog about that place!
Many travel bloggers have ‘niche sites’ that offer information on one specific topic, city, or country that they know well – usually where they live or lived for a while. These are still travel blogs and often do even better than blogs that offer information on many places because they are more focused – niching down is always better.
How to Start a Travel Blog Step 1: Commitment
I added in an extra step 1 before choosing a name because I really want to hammer the nail into the coffin on this one: it’s a LOT of work to be successful as a travel blogger.
The first step in how to start a travel blog and make money is making the COMMITMENT to yourself to do the work. If you really want to do this thing, it will be quite a while before you even make your first cent. But make the commitment to yourself to stick through the tough times until you make it to the GREAT, passive income-flowing, full-time traveling, job quitting success.
How to Start a Travel Blog Step 2: Choosing a Niche
Choosing a niche can be like life or death in monetizing your blog. The more niche your blog is, the more people will come to see you as an expert in the field you have chosen. “Travel” is not niche enough. Niche blogs can be about a specific destination like Croatia or Oregon, or a specific activity like kayaking the world, wine region travel, or travel money hacks.
The more niche you can be, the quicker you will probably start making money. My blog is not really niche enough and is too broad because I have such a wide range of tastes, destinations, and hobbies. Don’t be like me – NICHE DOWN as much as possible. I hope to start a more niche blog as soon as I move somewhere for more than 6 months, lol.
How to Start a Travel Blog Step 3: Choosing a Name + Writing Style
Choosing a name for your travel blog can be daunting, because you are pretty much stuck with it once your domain is purchased – it’s kindof hard to change once you take the plunge.
There are a few different styles of travel blog names that I can think of:
- Something to do with your name. Maybe something of an alliteration with your name like “Worldwide Wendy,” “Plane Ticket Pete” or the like. Or, you can add travel-themed words to your name, such as “Nomadic Josh,” “Kim on the Road,” or “Travel Frank.” OR, you could add a travel-themed word to a nickname, job, or stereotype that you have, like “A Brit Abroad,” “Travels of a Nurse” or “A Brunette in London.” These are extremely basic but I think you get the point.
- Something to do with your niche. If you have chosen skydiving as your niche, DEFINITELY put that word in your blog name, like “Skydive Sam” or “Skydive the World.” If you have a niche word in your domain name, you will be more likely to rank on google for keywords involving that word. More on this later.
- Something travel-punny.
- Your favorite travel activity to do (this is kinda what mine is; I like to find the best adventures and sunset spots in every destination and incorporate this into my travel guides). Yours could have something do to with adventure travel, hiking, exploring, foodie travel/finding the best places to eat, sailing, going to the beach… etc.
To be honest, I might change the name of my blog if it wasn’t so damn difficult. As I have gotten older I have wanted something a little less airy-fairy (some do see Adventures & Sunsets that way) and maybe more to do with myself as a person because I am definitely a strong personality behind my blog. This brings me to my next point: your writing style.
Will you put a photo of yourself on your site and be the personality behind it, or will you write it anonymously as more of a travel tips site? Not ALL bloggers love being the face of their brand, and that’s fine! Your options are as follows:
- Personality Blogger: you are the face of your own brand. You write in your own conversational tone. You include stories and personal experiences, and photos of yourself.
- Second-Person: You write travel tips from your own experience but don’t necessarily feature yourself as the main character. More of a general tips-based site.
- Anonymous/Third Person: Your site is more focused on the niche or content than who writes it. You write from a thirs person point of view rarely drawing upon pesonal experience, but rather straightforward tips and ideas.
Mine is obviously a personality blog! I think I have an interesting enough personality and I don’t mind my face being out there. I would say most blogs are this type, but sometimes when you read a third-person style blog you don’t even realize it is a blog and not just a travel site/business. It’s all about how you strategize.
How to Start a Travel Blog Step 4: Choosing Hosting + Buying Your Domain Name
So, now you have your blog name! Now, it’s time to make that name into a DOMAIN name… as in www.yourname.com. Yay! But how to do this?!
The first thing you must do to secure your domain name is to purchase the domain on a WEB HOSTING site. Make sure your name isn’t already taken, and then make it officially yours by buying it with a web hosting plan. Web hosting is basically the corner of the internet where your website lives – where all the code and back-end things are stored are served from.
There are tons of web hosts – GoDaddy, Bluehost, and HostGator are some of the biggest ones. A lot of bloggers use Cloudways, Siteground, and LyricalHost. Your web host is usually who you will talk to when something goes awry with your site. All hosts have some form of customer support and will help you out with questions.
I moved from Bluehost to Lyrical Host this year and I couldn’t be happier with the results. Bluehost was too massive and had a general support chat that was rarely helpful… and my site was VERY slow because of them. Their plans look cheaper on the outside, but become more expensive with all the necessary add-ons.
Upon moving to Lyrical Host, I receive one-on-one helpful support and enjoy a much quicker site, plenty of storage, a free SSL (which is when your site has https:// instead of http://… you will need this).
Lyrical Host offers Wordpress Hosting as well as courses on SEO, stock images, site speed boosts, and more. Check them out below and use my code KIMMIE10 for a 10% discount on your first plan!
Installing Wordpress onto Your Travel Blog
The best way to blog, hands down, is to use WordPress.
Depending on the hosting that you choose, you will need to choose a ‘WordPress Hosting Plan’ (which is what Lyricalhost has) where you select that you will be using WordPress from the beginning, or you will need to install WordPress onto your domain once you purchase it (which is what I did when I had BlueHost).
If you did not select WordPress while purchasing your domain, you will need to log into your cPanel (where all website things are stored) and install WordPress onto it. *Honestly, just go with Lyrical Host and they help make everything easier.*
How to Start a Travel Blog Step 5: Installing Plugins and Other things You Will Need While Setting up Your Travel Blog
Once you get WordPress up and running, you will have time to familiarize yourself with what the dashboard looks like. You can add posts and pages, customize your site, add themes and plugins, add things to your sidebar, and more. Before you get going there are some things that you must check off.
PLUGINS: Plugins are pieces of software created outside of WordPress that you can install onto your WordPress site to perform a specific function. You will become very familiar with these! There are plugins for everything: Website security, social media sharing, site speed, spam, SEO, and more.
SITE BACKUP: You don’t want to even risk the possibility of losing your work, so you will need a site backup. You will need to purchase a site backup plan on hosts like Bluehost – you can select this add-on during your checkout and it will be charged yearly. OR it comes included with Lyrical Host.
Wordpress Beginner Plugins You Will Need for Your Travel Blog
Askismet Anti-Spam: There are WAY too many bots trolling the internet looking for free backlinks by commenting a bunch of BS on your articles. This plugin stops them. You will need to approve any comments that are left on your posts and can delete any spam ones.
Wordfence Security: This bad boi is VERY important! This anti-virus plugin will scan for and block login attempts to your site and keep a lookout for malware and anything bad trying to access your site. Similarly to Askismet, you will be VERY surprised when you learn just how many people want to get into your site.
Yoast SEO: One of the most important plugins for a blogger to have! This plugin is fantastic to use along with a basic SEO education to help you optimize your posts as well as possible for keywords you are targeting in your articles. I use this plugin daily to check my work.
EWWW Image Optimizer: Something I wish I knew before I started blogging is that images need to be sized appropriately BEFORE uploading them to your WordPress media library. You can do this in Lightroom or you can install an optimizer like EWWW that resizes your images appropriately upon upload. DO NOT upload massive images to your site or it will slow it down and you will be frustrated for the rest of time.
Updraft Plus: Backs up your site. You might not need this with all hosting plans but it’s good to have. You can set it to back your site up automatically or whenever you want, and have it store the data on your hosting or somewhere like Dropbox.
How to Start a Travel Blog Step 6: Designing Your Site!
Before your site goes live or you publish your first article, you will need to design your site in the first place. If you are like me you will want to slave away for hours trying to figure out how to do this all by yourself. But if you have the budget, paying someone to do this will save you SOOOO much time.
Pros and Cons: Designing your site yourself gives you full control over your site, but takes tons of time and most likely headaches and issues. Haveing someone else do it costs money, saves time, and does not allow you complete control. It’s up to you!
I currently use the theme Divi on my site which I designed myself with support from a tech I used to have. A lot of bloggers use the theme GeneratePress, which is faster, or Trellis which is a theme created by the ad network you will want to get on eventually when you have enough traffic, called Mediavine. But I recommend beginning with Divi or GeneratePress or having someone design your site.
If you want to employ someone to design your site, there are SO many options too.
Make Sure to Hone in on Your Branding
When you design your site, make sure to hone in on your personal blog brand. Choose colors or a vibe that you will go with for the foreseeable future. You can choose something pink and flowery, warm and sunny, or colorful. Choose colors that align with your personality and your likes.
This would also be the time to design a logo if you are extra serious. Most bloggers I know either asked a friend or hired someone from Fiverr to do this.
How to Start a Travel Blog Step 7: Publish Your First Article!
YAY! Now that your site is lookin’ fly, it’s time to publish your first article on WordPress. You might want to write something about yourself, an announcement of your new passion project that people will want to click on, or a story about why you are starting a blog. OR you can jump right into it with strategized SEO-optimized affiliate content. It’s up to YOU!
Now that your blog is live, it’s up to you what to do with it. But the fact that you are here to learn how to start a travel blog and make money tells me you are going to want a few more skills before diving off the deep end.
Eventually, many bloggers outsource their article writing by learning to hire professional writers. People find writers on platforms like Fiverr copywriters, WritingPaperSucks, or other dedicated writing services. But to start out, I recommend building your voice and writing your own content!
How to Start a Travel Blog Step 8: Build Your Brand and Audience
It’s obviously very important to BUILD your brand and audience once you begin your blog. If no one is seeing your content, it will be hard to land a collab or make an affiliate sale.
Social Media
If you haven’t already, snag the social media handles for your blog name. It’s best for brand continuity if ALL your handles are the exact same (something I didn’t learn in time either haha). Grab handles on Instagram, Tiktok, Twitter, Facebook, and Pinterest.
Don’t worry if you can’t build them all now, but start by making your handles and trying to become active on a few platforms to begin with. Try scheduling some posts out on different platforms once a week or month, interacting with similar accounts, and building a community.
Email List
One of the best ways to make money as a travel blogger is to build an email list of customers who love your content. These are your top fans and people who would love to buy products you recommend and read your blog posts all day long. This is the best way to contact and retain readers and convert them into potential customers.
If you are going to market to your email list (which you will if you want to make money), you should use a platform like MailerLite or ConvertKit. Mailchimp doesn’t allow affiliate marketing. I switched to ConvertKit this year and am super happy with my decision and all the capabilities it offers!
Skill You Need When Learning How to MAKE MONEY as a Travel Blogger
If you want to make money, you will need to first master some skills. I have listed these in the order of how important I believe they are and how much money they can make you in the longer term.
SEO (Serch Engine Optimization)
SEO is the single most important skill you can learn if you want to make money as a travel blogger. Search Engine Optimization means that you optimize your articles for keywords that people type into Google. In other words, you write articles that offer information on exactly what people type into Google. You answer people’s questions, solve their problems, and give them the information they were seeking when they opened Google.
People google things A LOT, and if you are able to identify terms people Google and ‘rank’ well (meaning your article will pop up in the top 10, 20 or 100 results ), you can get a LOT of traffic from this. And traffic = money when your content is optimized properly.
But how do you figure out what people are typing into Google? You use a keyword research tool. There are tools you can subscribe to that will give you data on what people are googling. I use Keysearch and have been for years – it’s more affordable and packs a lot of punch.
I have recently started using SEMrush – it’s got SO MANY more capabilities than Keysearch that I keep finding more tools every day. Check SEMRush out here – they offer a free trial so you can get to know ALL the kinds of data you can use. But you can also use other tools like ahrefs and Longtail Pro.
Resources to Learn SEO
I recommend studying up on SEO as much as you can – take online courses, sign up for webinars, and more. A lot of travel bloggers love the Make Traffic Happen SEO Course + Books – written by two travel blogger women who speak on SEO at conferences and have a Facebook group too.
“SEO The Easy Way” is a total beginner’s guide to SEO. You can buy the ebook or the complete course with video content, workbooks, and more.
“Revive Old Content” is all about upgrading old content to SEO-optimized traffic-generating content. I have read the old content one multiple times, but if just starting out, start with SEO the Easy Way.
Affiliate Marketing
Affiliate Marketing is when you recommend a product to your readers and receive a commission from every sale made using your tracked link. This is one of the main ways that travel bloggers make money!
If you have ever read a blog post that recommended a cool tour, hotel, or product and then bought the product after clicking the link in the article, chances are that the blogger got a commission from that sale. And now, you can do the same!
The biggest thing that I learned about affiliate marketing is that you most likely will not make sales if you just throw random links into your articles everywhere. You need to write content that will reach people at the last stage of their buying cycle when they are ready to buy, and oftentimes create a sales funnel that will keep people buying from you via email marketing or otherwise.
Affilaite Platforms you can use:
Skiminks is my preferred network. Unlike other networks Skimlinks does not require you to apply to programs but rather you can create links to ANY advertised that is active on Skimlinks. It also has a dashboard extension where you can create links to any participating sites (which is a lot) quickly and easily and compare them all in one dashboard. For the most part, this is easier.
CJ Affiliate (Commission Junction) is a very popular platform where you can either get ‘content-approved offers’ or must apply to each program individually. This is one of the most widely used affiliate networks, and many companies use them for affiliate programs.
TravelPayouts, Partnerize, and Refersion are also platforms that I have some affiliates on. It’s tough because each company chooses what platform they host their affiliate program on, so you might have to sign up to a new platform each time you have a new brand you want to recommend on your site. I have like 50 programs at this point.
Resources to Learn Affiliate Marketing
There’s SO MUCH to dive into here, and I am always still learning myself. But the best course I took that taught me TONS about Affiliate Marketing was by Leanne Scott as Passive Income Superstars. She makes, like, 6 figures a month in affiliate sales and she’s actually a superstar.
She has tons of courses and packages and products that help bloggers make money, from email marketing to SEO to affiliate marketing. Check her affiliate course out below and a few other email courses I found useful too.
Not ready to buy yet? No worries, check out her 5 day affiliate marketing course over email (delivered to your inbox for free) to get used to her teaching style and incredible ideas.
Brand Pitching + Collabs
NOW, you are ready to actually get some free stuff for being a travel blogger!!! Lol, jk. Nothing is free if you have to exchange hours of work and content for it. In fact, you can make MORE money from selling content (videos and photos) to brands. But before you can do that, you’ve got to learn how to reach out to brands (whether they are tour companies, hotels, hostels, travel products, rental cars, RVs, airlines, transport companies, and more) to ask for a collaboration.
A collaboration can come in many forms. In the beginning, it will come in the form of exchanging blog and/or social media content for a product, whether that is a physical product,a hotel room for a few nights, a tour, or something else.
To land your first collabs you will want to send a pitch email to the brand/company/hotel that you would like to work with. This pitch should include who you are, previous work you have done, what work you can do for them and how it will benefit them, and what they can do for you in exchange. Once they respond, you can begin negotiations. Make sure to outline your deliverables specifically before you begin the collab so there will be no questions at the end.
This could be an entire 5000-word blog post in itself so I will stop here, but I wanted to give bit of an intro to the process.
Resources to Learn how to Pitch/Work With Brands
To learn more about the world of pitching brands to land gigs as a travel blogger and get paid, check out some of the links below:
- The Art of Pitching Brands (Templates on TravelBlogSuccess)
- Step-By-Step Pitching Guide (BloggerBytes)
- Brand Pitching Templates from Jessie on a Journey
- 7 Ways Bloggers Work with Brands (VickyFlipFlop Travels)
Content Creation + Photo/Video Editing
To become more attractive to brands as a potential blogger to work with, you will want to sharpen your photography and editing skills. Once you start going on press trips, you will want to be able to leverage incredible photos and even edit video to make more money.
Resources to Learn how to Take and Edit Amazing Photos
But first, you’ll want to learn how to take and edit incredible images to SHOW brands what you can do – by posting them on your blog and social media. I recommend using Adobe Lightroom to edit photos – most bloggers use this and you’ll want it eventually no matter what. It’s really the industry standard.
Now that you have Lightroom, it’s time to figure out how to use it! Not to worry… MY OWN FIRST PRODUCT on the market is actually a Lightroom editing course that goes along with 15 presets I made. I would be honored if you wanted to try it out.
You can check out my shop page here (which I am very proud of) but as a friend, I’ll tell you that you can get 50% off on the presets AND the editing course if you subscribe to my mailing list. Subscribers get 5 presets for free (desktop and mobile) and a link to access my half-off shop for 30 minutes only. So make sure to click it when you are ready.
Another useful editor is Luminar Neo – they have amazing AI tools and keep perfecting the features like Generase that does an incredible job at removing unwanted people and objects from photos.
Backlinks + Off-Page SEO
I’m not going to get much more into SEO in this article – check out the courses I linked above on Make Traffic Happen.
I WILL however state that I wish I knew about the importance of backlinks earlier in my blogging career. Backlinks are links from other websites that link to your website. The more backlinks you have, the more ‘authority’ your website has, and the more likely Google is to rank it higher more often (along with many other factors of course).
Backlinks from higher authority sites are good. Backlinks from spammy sites are bad. Backlinks without the “rel=nofollow” tag on them give your site more ‘link juice’ from the referring site.
Try to get backlinks to your site as early as possible, and research more about it ASAP. Start with the links below:
- Beginner’s Guide to Link Building on Moz. Moz createid the ‘domain authority’ metric and is also a great resource you will learn to use.
- What Are Backlinks + Advantages on ShoutMeLoud. ShoutMeLoud has SO MUCH incredible SEO content FOR FREE. Sign up to their email list and get tips each day, and have a browse around the site.
Phew, I think that’s enough for now! Let me know if you have any other questions about how to make money as a travel blogger and I can start splitting off more specific guides. Thanks for reading and best of luck!
Passionate, full-time travel blogger with over 230k on social media and 150kMPV blog. Extraordinary photographer with two DSLR's + a drone with a love for capturing candid moments, epic drone shots, and magical compositions. I'm a natural-born content creator originally from California, but I've been on the road for 9 years living, working, traveling, blogging, and photographing my way around the world. I recommend the most amazingly adventurous and unique + boutique travel experiences/stays and helpful products to my audience and write comprehensive guides on my website that have helped millions of travelers so far. I love to inspire people to plan their dream trips, and many readers have given feedback as such. The reach on my platforms continues to soar, especially when combining cutting-edge social content with optimized articles on my high-authority website.