HOW TO START A TRAVEL BLOG – BLOG MASTERCLASS 1

Not a week goes by where I’m not asked the age old question, ‘How can I start a travel blog?’ Of course, there’s always the additional question surrounding how they would then get paid for travelling the world – and whilst it is absolutely possible to do (after all, look at me!) it is by no means an easy journey.

But luckily for you, you have me to tell you the answers. We will begin this blog masterclass with the first of this four-part series: How to actually start a travel blog. Because there’s no use in affiliate marketing or media packs if you don’t even own a domain!

** Psst – I’m also running an online course which goes into all the gory bits of starting up a travel blog! **

WHAT QUALITIES SHOULD A BLOGGER HAVE?

Let’s be honest – times have changed since 2012, and now the blogging industry is pretty saturated. It can be extremely difficult to start up a blog if you don’t have the right tools, and even harder if you have no idea where to even start. Audiences can be difficult to attract, social media can be finicky to use, and an incredible amount of time and effort has to be invested into a blog. 

As such, the two qualities that you will need to become a blogger are being motivated and passionate. Without them, this will not be an easy journey.

Along with these, you need to be good with setting tasks and deadlines and sticking to them, as your readers will want regular content – especially as you grow. There’s no point in getting them hooked if you only post once a year.

You need to be able to adapt and stay on top of trends, staying aware of your competitors and audience demand – and most of all, you need to be willing to learn. I have learnt so much over the past few years with my travel blog – more than I ever thought possible! – and it never would have happened had I closed myself off to the possibilities.

Plus, it helps to have a trusty mentor such as yours truly to help you navigate the hurdles (;

GET A NOTEBOOK

Before you do absolutely anything, you should first grab yourself a notebook.

You’ll need a good notebook from the get-go, to write down your thoughts, keep track of blog post ideas, plan scheduling, scribble to-do lists, and overall help to organise what is inherently going to be a pretty chaotic journey.

Some (boring) people keep track of this with online documents, but personally, I like to write my notes by hand and have a physical copy of them by my side as I go about life. But of course, this is up to you. 

REFER TO A BLOG PLAN

Some of the first things that you will then be putting into this notebook will be your blog plans. You will need to answer the following questions:

– Why did you decide to create a blog?

– What audience are you looking to attract?

– What sort of content do you want to produce?

– What do you want to accomplish on a daily basis?

Once you’ve figured out exactly why you’ve decided to start up a blog and have a general idea of what you’ll be doing, you can then think about the specifics, such as:

– What is your niche, your USP?

– What will your readers benefit from reading your posts?

– How much time and resources are you willing to invest?

I know that it can be easier said than done to come up with a USP. I personally went about doing so by drawing a large spider diagram on the first page of my notebook, filling it with the things I was most passionate about. This included writing, food, and solo and female travel.

Then, I wrote about things that I knew a lot about, and within this I jotted down YA books, Crohn’s disease, and tea. I then thought about what sort of audience I want to attract, and decided to go for the target audience that I represented, resulting in a primary audience of female solo travellers aged between 18 and 26 and a secondary, more general audience, which loves tea and books, and had some sort of illness (especially those good ol’ autoimmune diseases!).

Then, you will want to research 5+ leading blogs similar to your niche and note what they do successfully, and then what you would change to improve them. You will want to cover the following points:

– Their niche

– The length of content

– What they are doing that you like

– What they are doing that you don’t like

– The quality and regularity of images used

– The frequency with which they produce content

– The amount of followers they have on Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook

– Their target audience (check their comments and social media engagement)

Finally, research 5+ blogs that are smaller and have a much slower growth and compare to the first few you looked at – why are these not as successful, and what does this tell you about what audiences enjoy? By answering the same questions again, you should be able to see how this impacts their popularity.

GAME PLAN

The final aspect of your blog plan should include objectives in regards to growth and income. A strong game plan for the first month may look like this:

• First week: purchase domain name, set up social media and email addresses under the same handle. Share the blog and social media with all friends and family, aiming to get 100 followers by Sunday. Order business cards and pay a designer to design a logo and header.
• Second week: Publish first post, share on all social media, get friends and family to do the same. Find similar blogs and engage with them, aiming to get 10 comments by Sunday. Sign up to affiliate sites to understand what a business looks for in a blog.
• Third week: Write second post, aiming to get 15 comments. Spend 20 hours taking photos in local area and creating strong blog photography. Sign up to Google Adsense and Amazon Affiliates. 
• Fourth week: Write third blog post, aiming to get 20 comments, two social shares, and first commission from Amazon Affiliates. Spend 40 hours learning how to edit photos and publish high-quality images across all social media, directing them to blog content.

Long term-plans such as “I would like my posts to feature in Forbes online” or “I want my brand to be recognisable” should also be noted. Start thinking about how you can achieve these, and always keep it in the back of your mind as you go ahead.

GET THE EQUIPMENT

To create killer content, you need the equipment. I take my photographs with a Nikon D5300, which is a pretty good start-up camera which only cost me about £300, and over the years I’ve kept the body and just updated the lenses. So long as your photos are clear and help to illustrate your content, you should be golden.

Alternatively, you could always source royalty-free photographs online, but this lack of personality will absolutely be felt by your audiences.

Along with a good camera, it’s likely you’ll also need some sort of editing equipment to really bring the photographs to life. I personally use Lightroom and Photoshop, although I did start by using the inbuilt Photos editor on my Macbook!

You will likely need a good computer/ laptop with extra RAM, space, and a good processing speed, and little costs will always crop up – such as a new site designer, extra security for the website, a tech person to help speed up your site. So be warned that whilst travel blogging is one of the most rewarding jobs you can do, it can come with both big upfront costs and loads of little costs that crop up as you go along.

CHOOSE A NAME

And now, with your trusty notebook beside you, you should start brainstorming name ideas for your blog.

You will need to choose something catchy, something you will stick to for years to come. Personally, I changed my blog name so many times that by the end of it, even I couldn’t remember what it was called. Because of this, there are still endless links across the web to my old blog addresses, confusing potential audiences that will now never read this here blog post. 

With that in mind, think about your blog name BEFORE you start a travel blog. This will ensure that your branding is consistent and that audiences will always know where to find you. I recommend putting aside a week or so for constant brainstorming, using online name generators, looking at other blogs for the sort of vibe they go for, flicking through books and dictionaries – anything that could potentially result in a name that you’d still see yourself with in years to come.

One thing to make sure is that your blog name isn’t limiting in any way. For example, had I named my blog ‘Amy Travels Wales,’ I would have potentially been subjecting myself to only write about Wales. As great as the country is, I would have gotten bored with it eventually.

Along with that, make sure that your chosen name is available across all social media platforms. Mine wasn’t available on Instagram, so I had to beg the old owner of the account to give it up for me… Oh, how I grovelled.

What is it that they always say in American movies? Ah, yes. CONSISTENCY IS KEY. 

PICK YOUR PLATFORM

Like the whole name game, this is another thing that you’re not going to want to chop and change. You need to pick one platform and stay with it.

To begin with, I used Blogger, which wasn’t bad at all (for 2012). It came with easy-to-use themes, gave me all of the tools to build a blog myself, and was a perfect way to start out. However, with Blogger, the domain ended in .blogspot rather than .com – and who’s going to trust awkwarddonkey.blogspot.co.uk to write travel guides for them? 

When I decided to go for a whole blog redesign in 2017, I made the switch to WordPress. I didn’t buy my blog directly from them, though – instead, I used a hosting provider. If you’re serious about building and growing a blog, then it’s imperative that you go through hosting to maintain full ownership and control of your site.

To make it simple, I went through a hosting provider called Bluehost. They set me up with a matching email address, a domain name, and 24 hour support, and are super helpful with everything blog-related (such as acquiring security certificates, protecting against malware, recommending designers, etc). If a hosting provider doesn’t offer all of this, then you should be a bit sus.

For me, I spent about £350 on hosting – which covered the following three years – and £200 on a blog designer. Plus, if we’re being honest about it, £25 on a kickass notebook.

BRAND IDENTITY

And then, congrats, you have a blog! Or at least, partly.

The key now is to work on your brand identity. I highly recommend that you get your own blog designer, which you can find by either scouring the net, looking at design marketplaces, using services such as Fiverr and Upwork to hire a freelancer, or even stalking your favourite blogs, as sometimes at the very bottom of the page, their blog designers would have signed off and may have added the copyright notice.

I found my blog designer on a design marketplace called Envato, and they were super helpful in sorting out everything design-related on my blog. Since then, however, they have actually dropped off of the face of the earth – but luckily, ya boi knows HTML.

You should work out which theme, colour structure, and logo you would like, and your designer will work closely with you on this. The brandmark – AKA the logo – is one of the most important parts of the whole process as it will define your brand. Once you have received your brandmark, be sure to use it in everything you do – it should be clear at the top of your blog header, should be used when guest posting, and should be utilised to the max if you ever create any tangible products. 

You should then refer back to your notebook where you wrote down your targets and blog plan, and make sure that it all aligns. If you’re creating a travel blog for people with disabilities, make it clear in the branding! You’re going to want your audience to recognise the blog and content instantly, so make it memorable.

ONCE IT IS UP AND RUNNING…

One great way to make sure that your blog link is already embedded on the internet – even before your first post – is to submit it to websites such as Yandex, Bing, and Google. You can do this by typing things such as ‘submit blog to Google/ Bing/ etc’ into the search engine. This will then bring up the related search console, where you simply add your blog link to be ‘recognised’ by the search engine. It’s actually pretty simple, and shouldn’t take much time.

LEARN SEO

Right from the start, you should learn how to use SEO – also known as Search Engine Optimisation – so that you can steadily work yourself to the top of Google’s search results. You will pick a lot of this up as you go along, but it is useful to understand the basics from the get-go.

SEO is important as it will draw traffic to your blog as people search for terms relating to your content – in my case, ‘solo and female travel’ and ‘Crohn’s travel’. Google looks for pages that are high-quality, relevant, have consistent readers that find your content interesting, and that have been around long enough to establish some sort of authority. But to start building on this, you need to make sure of several things.

First, we have mobile friendliness, which we spoke about a little earlier. By optimising your blog for mobile, you ensure that traffic is able to visit you from multiple devices.

Following this, you should make sure that you have a good loading speed. This can be checked on PageSpeed Insights by Google, which also happens to give you some information on how you can improve the speed of your specific page. One of the main causes is images that are too big – so make sure that you never upload RAW photography files to the blog!

Then, you should think about the keywords people will be using to find your blog. You need to first really think about your audience – what are they interested in? What sort of problems may they have that you could solve with a blog post? What sort of language do they use to describe the things they do?

If you’re targeting your blog towards travel foodies and you just happen to live in Cardiff, you will need to make sure that you’re the leading player in the Cardiff foodie scene by producing loads of good quality, helpful posts regarding cafes and restaurants in Cardiff, using keywords such as ‘foodie’, ‘Cardiff’, ‘Cardiff food’, ‘where to eat Cardiff’ and so on.

If you then head over to Google and search these exact keywords, it will then come up with suggestions, such as ‘Cardiff snack bars’ and ‘vegan Cardiff’. You can then make sure that these keywords are used in your title, in your meta description, and in your image tags. Be careful to not use the same keyword 5,000 times in the same post – instead, spice it up with synonyms, similar phrases, and other variations.

Another thing that you can do for SEO is to have loads of healthy, organic links all over the internet leading to your blog. One great way to do this is with guest posts – which we will delve into on the next masterclass.

STORYTELLING

One of the most important parts of blogging – and perhaps one of the most underrated – is the fact that so much of it is centred around storytelling! A good post has a solid story arc,  serves a purpose, answers a question, personifies the people mentioned, and (if the blog is  travel-related) talks about the dazzling beauty of the places involved.

A lot of my blog pieces tend to have full-blown story arcs, simply because I know how much an audience responds to a well-planned story that happens to hit all the right spots (plus, I have a writing degree, which is useless for quite literally everything else). They posts are interesting, they’re helpful, they touch upon my own emotions and experiences – and it also happens to answer every question my audience happens to have!

One of the easiest ways to make sure that your blog post is going to be interesting is simply by doing interesting stuff. If you’re constantly pushing yourself, trying new things, and opening yourself up to new experiences, you already have content that audiences would likely be interested in reading.

Following this, you need to be able to edit. I write my posts straight onto the blog, but sometimes I paste them into Google Docs, choose a different font, and use the in-built spell checker to make sure I don’t miss any typos or grammatical issues. Getting friends and family to check over your posts or getting Google to read your post back out to you can both be super helpful if you’re a rubbish editor.

USE CTAS

Learn and optimise behind-the-scenes marketing through the use of CTAs (Call-To-Actions) – primarily sidebar CTAs, bottom-of-the-post CTAs, and Connect on Social Media CTAs.

Sidebar CTAs are where you place images or links on the side of your blog that state things such as ‘Check Out My Most Recent Post’. Readers can then click on the link to be redirected to exactly that, both making your site easier to navigate, and offering readers more helpful things to look at in the sidebar of your blog. You will be able to add these easily under the Appearance and Customisation part of your blogger dashboard.

Adding social media related CTAs tells your reader that you are available on other platforms, where you also happen to regularly produce content. Adding buttons that state things such as ‘Let’s Connect on Instagram’ will draw readers into checking out your social media, where you can then connect and build a following.

And bottom-of-the-post CTAs, such as the words ‘Do you agree? Tell me what you think in the comments!’ will generate more engagement on your blog as you encourage your reader to offer their own thoughts. From this, you can engage with your readers – making sure to answer any questions they may have, and thanking them if they compliment your writing/ photography skills.

CTAs are so important for keeping the audience engaged and interacting with your site for longer. And you know what they say, the longer the site time, the longer the…

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Anyway! I hope that you have enjoyed the first part of this Blog Masterclass series – there’s plenty more good stuff to come!

Please let me know if you have any questions regarding anything I’ve talked about (or not talked about) – after all, there’s nothing like an audience interacting with a CTA (;

Stay tuned for the second part of this four-part series: How to Build an Audience. And then, whilst you’re waiting, why not read my previous post on how to build a better blog, or check out my interviews with successful travel bloggers?

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