How to start a travel blog from scratch (if you want to make money)
Travel blogging might be harder than ever, but it isn’t dead. Here’s how (and why) to start a travel blog right now.
Travel blogging isn’t easy. If you want to get rich quick, this is not the way to do it.
But, it is entirely possible to make money travel blogging. If you’re curious about starting your own site, or just need some motivation to keep going, here are some insights into exactly how I started, grew, and now maintain, a successful travel blog.
I’ll tell you right now, before you even need to scroll, that it’s only worth it if you really love it.
The first thing you need to do is get clarity on why you want a blog in the first place
I first started thinking about starting a travel blog when I read how much a travel blogger was making in a month. This blogger was someone I knew, we had both taken part in the same travel writing internship years earlier, so it really made me sit up and pay attention when she shared her income.
At the time, I was making less than half of that sum with my freelance travel writing.
Suddenly, travel blogging seemed like a great idea.
I started playing around with publishing a few posts to my Squarespace website, which I already had for my writing portfolio. I didn’t think too hard about it, I just looked up some keywords that were easy to target and went from there (I have a background in digital content management, so I leap frogged a few steps. But don’t worry, I’ll talk about SEO more below).
I didn’t take the blog thing seriously for another six months, though. Part of me arrogantly thought it would be easy to grow traffic, so I didn’t try that hard. I also felt resistance to spending time doing unpaid work when my day rate for freelance writing was around $800.
I didn’t go all in on my travel blog until I lost all my freelance work.
Things had dwindled steadily for a few months, then abruptly dried up. In the same month, a scooter accident in Nicaragua left me unable to walk.
That was a rough time.
On the bright side, I had a lot of spare time to throw myself into my blog. I finally took the leap because I decided that I wanted more control over my income. I was tired of the volatility of freelance writing. I also wanted more money.
I think we probably all want something similar in that sense. To work on something we love, not too much, and get paid well for it.
A simple dream.
Travel blogging isn’t quite that straightforward. It took me another six months before my traffic took off, and a couple more months after that before I got into Mediavine and started making regular income.
The summary:
Travel blogging takes a lot of time. It also takes consistency and discipline.
If you’re not fully dedicated, you won’t see growth.
You should enjoy writing, and ideally be pretty good at it. If you’re just going to use AI to churn out generic garbage, why do it?
Decide on your niche, and make sure you have a unique point of view
You’ll hear people in the blogging world talk a lot about niches, and whether or not you need to ‘niche down.’ I think you should have a well-defined niche, for a few reasons.
1. If you don’t have a clear niche, what is the value you have to offer your audience?
Seriously, if you want to be a travel blogger because you take a couple of trips a year, I’m not sure why what you have to say would be more valuable than anything else on the internet.
My least favourite types of travel blogs are the ones that are written by wealthy white people and touch on almost every continent.
Those blogs show no in-depth knowledge, real opinions or actual advice. They are filled almost excluively with generic posts designed to net traffic, not readers. You know the kind — ones with titles like “top 10 things to do in [insert location].”
You will never build an engaged audience if you only write generic content that duplicates what is already in every post in the top 10 search results.
I truly think you can’t write well about a destination unless you are from there, or have spent a significant amount of time there.
You might be able to write detailed breakdowns of how much you spent, or talk about what you packed, but you won’t be able to add the kind of depth and nuance an expert would.
So, narrow your focus.
If you like to travel, you’re probably an expert in at least one destination or topic. Maybe that’s your hometown, or maybe that’s being a skilled budgeter while you travel.
Your niche should be something you know so well, there isn’t already a ton of information about it online.
2. Having a niche will help you grow traffic to your blog faster
A niche is also very important to SEO.
Focusing your content on one overarching topic, like travel in a single state of the US, means you will be able to more quickly build out topic clusters. Like, itineraries in that state, top things to do in each destination there, and where to find the best places to eat.
You’ll also build your credibility faster, in the eyes of your audience and Google.
I know I can trust people when they live in a place, or know it inside out. I’m even more willing to listen to strangers online when they have an obvious passion for a place and want to tell me about it from their point of view.
The summary:
Zero in. You need a niche and that niche should reflect your expertise. A generic travel blog has far less value than an expert one.
Choose a name for your publication and create a content plan
Choosing a blog name doesn’t have to be super complicated. Mine is just my name.
Please don’t choose something with ‘wandering’ or ‘abroad’ in the title, and give ‘blonde’ a pass too.
You really want to think of your blog as an independent publication — what would a professional travel magazine be called? What is a name that you can pitch to brands without it sounding unserious?
There are other elements involved in growing your brand, like choosing colours and fonts.
Here are a couple of helpful resources:
Domains.squarespace to check if your domain name is available
Before launching your blog, you should map out a rough content plan with at least 20 ideas from posts.
You might think this is a little chicken and egg, but honestly it’s a good way to see if you have a solid foundation for a site or not.
In terms of content, the hardest part of starting a travel blog is identifying the value you have to add. You don’t want to write content purely for SEO — this is part of the enshittification of the internet. You want to have a voice, an opinion, a place to tell stories.
But you also need to do that in a way that serves your readers. Every piece of content should answer a question or satisfy a need.
You also want to aim for content that will naturally deeply engage people. That is, things that can’t be answered in a few seconds. Can I drink the tap water in X location doesn’t really merit a whole blog post, but “how I purify water when I’m travelling without buying plastic bottles” does.
Developing your content strategy
As with every other part of blogging, your content strategy will probably change over time.
In the beginning, I went after low hanging fruit keywords that I knew I had a good chance of ranking for.
As my site grew, I changed tactics and now I focus on more competitive keywords but ones that are more valuable, both in terms of income from ads and in terms of what I can offer my readers.
Some keywords are tempting to write for, because they have high volume, but they don’t really do much to build your brand. Take weather related keywords, for example. A weather related page gets some of the highest impressions of any on my site, but few click throughs and not a great deal in terms of user engagement.
Here is a non-exhaustive list of all the things you’re going to need to learn if you want to start a blog that actually makes money:
User experience (UX) design
Conversion optimisation
SEO
Email marketing
The summary:
Write around five posts and have a plan for around 20 more
Your content strategy will probably change over time, but you can save yourself some time and effort by getting clear on your approach up front. Make sure you know who you’re talking to and what value you have to offer.
Choosing a platform and launch your site
Most of the articles you read about starting a new travel blog are going to guide you towards Wordpress, for no other reason than that’s how bloggers have traditionally created sites.
I have many thoughts and feelings about this, which can basically be boiled down to — there is no need to do exactly what everyone else is doing. There are many successful travel bloggers with Wordpress sites, but there are also many with travel blogs on Squarespace (including me).
I advocate for Squarespace for a few key reasons:
It’s really easy to get started, without needing to have prior website building or coding experience.
The whole process, of setting up a domain name and template is straightforward. No need to worry about the plug ins, hosting, and other dramas of Wordpress.
To get a travel blog off the ground, you want your main focus to be on writing and publising as much content as you can. With Squarespace, you won’t have to worry about learning all the technical details and get jump straight into writing.
Wordpress comes with a steep learning curve.
Learn how to optimise your blog for SEO
There is really only one way to get steady, high volume of traffic to your blog, and that is with SEO.
Other tactics — like posting links in engagement threads in Facebook groups — will get you nowhere.
Pinterest will not get you the traffic you need to make real money.
So, you have to learn SEO.
A checklist once your site is live
Set up Google Search Console
Submit your sitemap
Set up a dashboard on a free tool, like Ahrefs, where you can do regular site audits and track some of your progress
The final step: Wait
It takes a while before you’ll start to see traction in search.
You might start to see impressions rise within a few weeks, but it might take months before you get regular clicks through to your blog.
This is often the hardest part of blogging, as you pour so much effort into something without knowing if it will pay off.
My final advice to you, though, is to keep taking consistent action.
If you keep writing and publishing content to your blog, you will refine your voice, your website design skills, learn more about what works in SEO, and get a better idea of what you enjoy doing.
Effort compounds, so remember that while it can be painfully slow in the beginning, if you keep taking consistent action eventually you will make progress.
If you found this helpful, you might also like to take a peek at my other tips on blogging on Squarespace:
