How to Start Your Own Travel Blog in Less Than 10 Minutes
Whether you want to blog as a hobby or as a profession, you can start your travel blog in just 10 minutes. Fortunately, you no longer have to build websites by hand-coding in HTML and designing in Dreamweaver. Things are now a lot simpler and easier, all thanks to WordPress, a convenient, out-of-the-box platform designed to make website creation easier for those that are not tech-savvy.
WordPress powers more than 25% of the internet and is quite easily the best platform to start blogging on. It’s very flexible and can do virtually anything you want it to do; from a simple newsletter to a more complex e-commerce site.
In this guide, we’ll be discussing everything you need to know about starting a travel blog in 10 minutes – whether you intend to do it for fun, as a hobby that pays, or earn enough income from your travel blog to support yourself.
Reasons Why You Should Start A Travel Blog
Typically, people want to start a travel blog for various individual reasons. Some of the most common ones are;
1. Simply For Fun
You probably just need a space where you can blog about your travels so your friends and family can see it. That’s great! You can go straight ahead to the section about how to set up your blog below.
2. To Acquire New Skills
You can learn writing, photography, social media management, entrepreneurship, marketing, and a million other skills from blogging.
3. Free Travel
Free hotel stay and free tours. You can even get entire trips for free! Obviously, all these will be in exchange for valuable publicity, which means you’ll have to put in some work and give your sponsors the expected publicity.
4. Build a Portfolio of Articles
Talk about the perfect launching pad for a career in freelancing or consulting, that’s what a blog can give you. With a great blogging platform showcasing your work, you’d easily get travel writing gigs, as well as gigs in WordPress consulting or social media management.
5. Earn an Income
Lastly, it’s possible to make a living directly through your blog from things like banner advertising, product sales, or affiliate links. The first thing you have to bear in mind is that you’ll be needing loads of visitors. One thing about affiliate links or banner ads is that, initially, you might not earn anything from them for a long while, then suddenly you’d start making quite a lot. You might not bother using them in your first year of blogging, because it’s simply too early. However, eventually, you can get regular passive income through your content. This is undoubtedly the most difficult thing to achieve as a travel blogger, but it’s also the most rewarding.
It’s possible you don’t know precisely how far you’d want to go with your blogging just yet, and that’s fine. Indeed, one thing you can be sure of; you’ll be gaining loads of skills and experience, plus sharpening your creative nous. Also, you can fully own and develop your travel blog completely in your own style, free of any company or platform. You can be your own person. That should be enough motivation to set up your blog today.
Steps For Setting Up Your Travel Blog
Whatever your reasons for setting up your travel blog, it’s best to set it up in such a way that it will continue working for you somewhere down the line. You’ll be saving yourself a lot of headaches and hassles as the blog evolves.
You should be aware of free blogging platforms like medium and wordpress.com where you can sign up for an account to post your articles. These don’t require any form of set up. However, they won’t allow you add anything commercial to your posts, so you have zero chances of making money from your blog. Also, they won’t allow you expand the functionality of your blog using themes and plugins, plus they own the license to your content. So it’s important that you choose the right platform.
Here’s how to set up your travel blog in just about 10 minutes only;
Step 1: Pick Your Domain Name
A domain name is the name you’d want your website to be known by. You can be flexible when picking your domain name but it’s advisable to have these points at the back of your mind;
Don’t Use Dates or Your Age – Don’t pick something related to your age. The name will become irrelevant as you get older. So it’s advisable to pick a name you can use no matter your age.
Create a Name That Will Last – Ensure you pick a name that’s not centered on a location, so you can travel far and wide. Also, if you decide to shift gears, a good domain name will still be relevant. For instance, if your domain name has “EuropeTravels” in it, and you decide to travel outside Europe, that domain name won’t make much sense anymore.
Avoid Certain Words – Words like “adventure”, “wanderlust”, “vagabond”, have been overused and they make it seem like you’re not being original.
Keep It Simple – Avoid using slang or jargon in the name of your blog. People who don’t know what it means will find it confusing. If people have to think hard about the meaning of your domain name, then you’ll be losing a lot of readers.
Keep It Short – Pick a name with only 3 – 4 words so that your blog name can roll off the tongue.
Step 2: Get A Hosting Plan
Once you’ve decided on a domain name, the next step is to register it online and pay for hosting (the system that powers your website). Most companies do both hosting and domain name registration together. There are many basic hosting companies out there, and a lot of them are really awful. However, two of the biggest and best are Bluehost or Wix. You can go with either of those two. You can read a comprehensive comparison of Bluehost vs. Wix here.
A paid host does not care what you do with your blog, you can advertise on it or customize it with themes and plugins. It’s entirely up to you. You can see this as owning a plot of land online where you can build a house and do with it as you deem fit.
Some of the paid hosting plans will get you unlimited bandwidth and storage, unlimited email addresses, hosting for an unlimited number of websites, and a free domain name (probably for a year).
Step 3: WordPress Installation
You can now install your local copy of WordPress on the hosting account you just signed up for.
WordPress is the most widely used software for setting up and managing blogs. One big advantage of using WordPress is that virtually all services or plugins are compatible with it. You’ll also have access to thousands of tutorials, visual themes, and other useful resources.
Once you login to your hosting platform, navigate to your account’s control panel.
Select ‘My Sites’ and click on ‘Create Site’.
Enter the name of your site. In the next step, choose your domain name.
The field that says ‘Directory’ can be left empty. Then click on “install”.
It takes about 5 minutes for the set-up to complete.
Step 4: Sign In To Your Travel Blog
Go to www.yourdomainname.com/wp-admin/ where you’ll find your WordPress admin. Log in with your admin details.
If you want to change some of the visual looks of your blog, go to Appearance > Themes where you can find a lot of beautiful themes to choose from. The good thing about WordPress is that it allows you to seamlessly switch between themes.
Going to Settings > General allows you to change the name and tagline for your blog.
And that’s all you have to do to set up your travel blog!
Later, you might want to add some pages such as About and Contact pages, switch to a premium theme, or install some additional plugins to improve your WordPress install.
Now that you have a self-hosted WordPress installation, you can rest assured that your blog is future-proof; it can be expanded and monetized.
For now, you can start creating some content for your travel blog, but before you do, check out this travel blogging advice from experienced travel bloggers.
Finally: A Couple of Tips For Your Travel Blog
Improve Your Writing. There are no word-count limits on the net, unlike in print. That’s a good thing, but it can also lead to posts where you go on endlessly and meander continuously. It’s essential that you reduce the mistakes and remove clichés from your writing.
Be Patient. It might be difficult finding an audience at first, but once you get started your readership might just snowball.
Don’t Give-in To Distraction. When you start blogging, your main focus should be content creation. If you begin to worry too much about SEO and monetization or even promoting your blog on social media, that can be counterproductive. Even if your end-game is to earn an income from blogging, making this your main focus in the first year is just like putting the cart before the horse. Your priority at this time should be creating great content that your readers will find valuable and informative.
Don’t Stop Learning. There are tons of amazing resources online where you can learn anything. There are courses, tutorials, and YouTube videos on blogging out there. All you need to do is look for the right materials and apply yourself.
