D o you live to travel? Are you a frequent flyer? Then creating a travel blog should be right your alley if you’re keen for a new hobby.
Starting up a travel blog can be a very rewarding experience. You can share helpful advice to others and brag about your adventures all in one go. Then when you are not travelling, you can look back on great memories you documented on your blog – think of it as an online journal except you can post videos and photo galleries as well as a nice anecdote.
My first travel blog
Travel blogs are very popular in this day and age. They are also great avenues for endorsement deals; many travel bloggers create a business out of it. For instance, the guys at Lonely Planet, though originally this company started out as a travel guide book.
But onto your travel blog!
The first few steps to start up the blog in the beginning involves a lot of brainstorming and decision making. You need to decide on the name also on a catchy tag like “your best stop for sightseeing Europe,” and decide which domain for blogging you would like to use.
WordPress is great for beginning bloggers and its many features suit documenting travel – there are photo gallery functions (widgets) and you can upload videos. There is also a great variety of ready made themes to choose from. Tumblr on the other hand is good for photography enthusiasts and in travel; a photo is a thousand words.
Once you have made these decisions then write up some blogging ideas. Just how are you going to document your trip? Let’s take Santa Monica Hotels as an example. You can write about the food, the room, customer service, great deals and you can write about where you can go if you used Santa Monica Hotels as a base of operations.
Santa Monica is a popular tourist destination in Southern California and there is plenty to do there. As an idea you could do a collage of photographs of the beach, dishes of food you ate out and about and a recount of great places to shop.
Most readers of travel blogs sort out information, so it would be a great idea if you included travelling tips, such as where to rent a car, obtain your right to drive in other locations, where to stay, budgeting tips and what to pack.
Blogs about secret locations are a big hit too and also unique and somewhat unusual things to do. For example, at Santa Monica, you can sign up for a flying trapeze lesson at Trapeze School New York, they have a school located at Santa Monica Pier. Also located at the Pier is an ice cream parlor called Soda Jerks and this parlor has been open since the 1930s.
Once you start blogging then investing time in creating either a facebook page or twitter account is another great way to increase your number of readers. Also after you have published a decent number of blogs, it is good then to create a sense of consistency and have a recurring theme, such as have a line of blogs called ‘travel tip of the week,’ for example is a nice way to develop a recurring readership.
So good luck with your travel blogs and remember to have fun with the whole process.
