Lifestyle blogging is a great option for travel enthusiast and is an important and emerging form of communication. Bloggers are sharing information on specific travel topics and setting themselves apart as experts every day. In doing so, they create an atmosphere of information and experience sharing that benefits anyone searching for a wide variety of topics.
Here are five tips to get your travel blog going or to boost an existing blog:
Keep an Open Mind
While you may enjoy focusing on a specific genre of travel writing (local cuisine, museums, or extreme activities), keep your eyes and mind open to new ideas, new friends, new foods, new animals, new flora, and a plethora of other ‘new-to-you’ things that you may not even know were ‘out there’.
Having a particular focus is a great place to start each and every journey, however, as events unfold, be flexible enough to embrace each thing that comes your way. Perhaps you will be in just the right place to capture the moment when something newsworthy happens and you can give your perspective as a reporter-on-site. Staying alert to the local culture and events around you can offer an amazing variety of topics to blog about.
Make Time to Work on the Blog
It will take clear and focused intention to keep your blog going. It will require a serious time commitment to edit the photos and video you capture, to write about the adventures you are experiencing, and to promote the blog. Social media posting, boosting, and audience building will take work and finesse. Social media posting, boosting, and audience building will take work and finesse. This is how the professional design companies do the job!
Consider doing these things while you are eating that fabulous dinner you just snapped a pic of, while you are sunning yourself on the beach with a mai tai, or while commuting from one location to the next (trains are great for this – just be sure to get pictures or video of the trip, too). If you can find some way to make it fun, it won’t be such a monumental challenge at the end of a long day of seeing sights and creating memories.
Take A Lot of Photos on Outings
People are visual. There’s no way around it. People want to see pictures and video of what you’re talking about. They want to live vicariously through you and what you’re seeing. They want to see the edge of the cliff you were standing on. They want to see the 5-star meal you’re about to devour. They want to see it all. So, show them.
Take pictures or video of everything – your food, your transportation, your accommodations, your scenery, your acquaintances – everything. Take selfies. Capture pictures of street vendors and the public markets. Record video of the sun slipping down over the horizon wherever you are. Get snaps of the wildlife, the street signs, and restaurant menus. It’s all fabulous fodder for your blog.
Sure, you can use two exclamation points at the end of sentence when you talk about how fun your experience of riding a mountain rail was, or you can show a picture of your beaming face and hands thrown in the air. The old adage is still true: a picture really is worth a thousand words – and extra exclamation points.
Write About It All
In addition to taking copious amounts of photos and video, journal about everything. Make it a point to write about all your fleeting thoughts and emotions, the ways your senses pick up on things around you. It does not have to be perfect by any means. Just get it out of your head and on to paper or in your digital notes.
You can make lists, jot down keywords, create full paragraphs, or fill pages. Just write about it all. You can always refer back to this when you begin to prepare for your blogs. Words will trigger emotions. Emotions will trigger memories and those memories are what you share.
Combining your writing with photos and video will have a one-two punch that will keep readers intrigued and entertained. They’ll come back for more. Give it to them.
Consider Monetizing Your Blog
Monetizing a blog that incorporates writing about your trips as well as your photography or videography can be a great source of entertainment and income as you globetrek.
Here are a few tips to boost your success with generating revenue through blogging:
- Implement affiliate advertisements and links. Research companies of all kinds that are willing to advertise on your blog. Strategically speaking, advertisers that are related to the travel industry will be the best choice.
- Direct affiliate sales take place when you know your niche and want to work with local companies in a particular area or in a specific tourism focus. Meet with company owners and present the benefits of working together on each other’s blogs and you quickly become an expert on site as well as on the web.
- Become a brand ambassador for a company. For example, you may find a company that sells gear for surfing that will let you try it out, put it to the test, and promote sales of that gear. This also applies to other products or services for a particular brand – restaurants, attractions and the like.
- Do your research and find podcasts that want to be promoted or that you want to boost and cross-market each other. You can write about what they are talking about and they can talk about what you’re writing about. Win-win.
Using the any of these suggestions or a combination thereof to build your blog presence and visibility, you can create opportunities for more travel opportunities and a strong potential source of income.
It may also be worth noting that there are an abundance of companies out there who want to help you grow your presence, through increased like and followers on social media platforms.
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