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Have you ever wanted to start a travel blog? Perhaps you are living overseas (like me in Spain) and have endless opportunities to travel here or there. Perhaps you travel a lot for work. Or perhaps you want to write about the region you live in. Whatever the reason, I am here to help you get started!
It doesn’t have to be daunting to start a travel blog. In fact when I initially started my blog, I set it all up within in a morning. Just follow these steps below and you will be good to go!
Why I blog
I actually wrote a post about this over a year ago. I have been a writer since I was a child. I have always enjoyed creating things. When I travel to a new spot, I love exploring and shooting photos. I love thinking about different things to write about and different angles to take. It’s work for sure, but it’s work that I enjoy. I might even love it more now than when I initially wanted to start a travel blog.
I recently took a trip to the mountains and made a list of all the content I plan to create in the coming months. It’s if anything more exciting now to think about all the places I want to share with the world.
Anyway, onto the steps. These are the basic things to just get started. Once you have these in place, you of course are not finished. Well … your work is really never finished as a blogger. However these three steps are the most important ones to build a good foundation.
1. Come up with a name
When I started A World of Dresses, my initial idea was to interview women around the world in dresses. I envisioned myself traveling and telling the stories of other women. While that still is something I would love to do one day, my blog morphed into something a little different.
I have always been the girl in a dress. Hence it only made sense that the fashion part centered around dresses. When it started, I didn’t have the opportunity to travel. However I knew with my impending move to Spain that I would end up traveling a lot more. So I was glad that I picked A World of Dresses as it has allowed me to blog about travel as well.
My advice when picking a blog name is to consider where you want to take your blog. If you envision yourself writing about something specific, that could influence the name you pick. You also want to make it something catchy and unique as well. Do a Google search to see what else is out there. You wouldn’t want to come up with the perfect name to only find out that it’s been taken already.
A World of Dresses has served as a great name. To this day, I have yet to find another fashion blogger who focuses on dresses. Perhaps she is out there and I’ve just never been introduced to her. Whenever I reach out to companies for collaborations, I always use the tag line “I’m the girl traveling the world in a dress.” It allows me to be uniquely authentic.
2. Buy a domain and hosting
You can do two things when starting a blog: get a free site or pay for your own website. I decided to go with the second option straight away. Basically if you ever have plans to earn money with your blog, you need to own it. When you go with a free website, you technically don’t own the content. Those sites are great for people writing a blog simply to update family and friends. A lot of bloggers start with a free site and then decide to buy a domain later. The process of migrating all your content over can be tedious. So I decided I didn’t want to do that.
I decided to go with Bluehost. They are for sure not the only hosting service out there. However I have been with them for over two years now and have been very pleased. I have no plans to switch. I’ve had to call their customer service before and they were very helpful. Furthermore their plans are very affordable.
Bluehost is very easy to use because they allow you to install WordPress onto your site. Through this, I can choose my blog themes, create content and do all the other normal blogger things. To be completely honest, I don’t know much about coding. I would be completely lost if I had to build my entire website from scratch. However with Bluehost and WordPress together, I don’t have to. I can instead focus on what I love doing which is creating content.
3. Create social media accounts
Creating quality content is a big part of blogging. You want to work to create your best stuff. However if no one sees it, your blog really won’t grow. This is where social media comes in. You want to make sure that you have a consistent social media presence.
Some people already have a strong following on Instagram and choose to just promote from that account. Others create a new one. Before I became a blogger, I occasionally used Instagram. I didn’t care if a photo got 2 or 12 likes. I never used Hashtags. When I started my blog, I wanted an Instagram aligned with my brand. So I created a new account and have focused on growing it consistently. It’s really up to you which one you choose. However Instagram is a social media platform you don’t want to ignore.
The second social media platform you cannot ignore is Pinterest. There are 175 million monthly users, according to Omnicore. People use Pinterest to search everything under the sun, so you want to make sure you’re active on the Platform. Planning a trip to England? There are tons of pins with itineraries and reviews. Need a new dress? Pinterest is the place to go for inspiration.
I live a busy life, so I cannot be manually pinning all day. That’s why I use Tailwind. It’s a place where you can schedule your pins for up to a month in advance. Furthermore, you can join these things called Tribes where other Tailwind users can pin your content and you can pin their’s. Because of Tailwind, my pins get 82,000 views per month.
Of course Twitter and Facebook are important too. You can schedule Facebook posts as well. I try to take about 15-20 minutes a week to schedule at least one Facebook post per day for the next week and a half. I use it to share old content that’s still relevant. I just always want to make sure that I have regular posts on my Facebook page.
Additional things
These are the big three things you need to get a good foundation. From here, you’ll have to get things moving. Here are a few suggestions to get you going:
- Brainstorm a list of 25-50 posts. You certainly don’t have to write all of them in one sitting. However this list will serve as a good source of inspiration.
- Figure out your posting schedule. I typically try to stick to Sunday, Tuesday and Friday.
- Figure out how often you plan to post on social media.
- Join some Facebook groups for support. I am in many different Facebook groups for bloggers. They have been helpful in so many ways.
Have you started a blog? What sorts of things do you want to blog about or do you blog about? What sorts of concerns did you have or would you have?
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