9 Simple Steps To Start Awesome Travel Blog & Make Money

 How to Start a travel blog that pays you back {Insider tutorial}- Exclusive insider guide and insight into starting your travel blog or any other blog to express yourself or to make money. Starting a travel blog as a part-time activity is the best decision I’ve ever made in my life.

Do you already have a website? What’s your goal? personal website or making money out of it? lost in the numerous websites on the Internet on how to start your blog or website?

A Brief History On My Decision To Create A Travel Blog

Starting my travel blog is the best decision I have ever made in my life some 3.5 years back. I started my travel blog TravelEscape to document my travel experiences in India & then soon realized how much satisfaction I got after starting up.

Believe me, guys; I had no prior experience of writing before starting my blog, no exposure of terminology like SEO, WordPress, digital marketing or even co-branding my blog with big and established brands in the travel segment.

In last 2.5 years, I have gained and learned some best tips and techniques to first what is needed to start a travel blog from scratch and then steps required to make your baby blog visible to your targeted audience and most important to search giant Google.

Step By Step Tutorial To Create A Successful Travel Blog

I hate confusing, redundant and over marketing words and jargons. I believe in the KISS strategy, which we all know “Keep it straightforward and sweet.” All the posts & content on my travel blog talks about meaningful and actionable information to our readers.

9 Actionable Steps Needed in Starting your Awesome Travel Blog

1. Find the perfect domain name to suit your objectives.
2. Set up the hassle-free hosting for your blog.
3. Install the modern & robust content management framework WordPress.
4. Learn how your blog’s dashboard works and to post impressive contents.
5. Download a kickass theme & plugins to spice yours travel blog.
6. Creating Your First Blog Post & Organize Your Site.
7. Create These Critical Pages For Your Travel Blog.
8. Understand how you grow your traffic through SEO and social readers.
9. How to Make Money With Your Blog (Moment Of Truth).

#Step One: Coming Up With a Name for Your Travel Blog

Step one is the very start of your awesome journey of the lifetime and most challenging part of the starting your blog. Can you believe finding your perfect name for your travel blog is so tough? You need to keep in mind that you’ll likely be known for your site name for the lifetime of your blog.

You can change your strategy, hosting partner, URL later or even the theme of your blog but you can’t change your domain name.

Here’s what I recommend while choosing the domain name

1. Always try your best and register with domain name ending .com
2. If at all you can’t find the availability of your preferred .com domain, next option is to work with the domain that ends with the local region (like .in, .uk) you are targeting. For, e.g., 80 % of my readers are based out in India, and so I registered with .in extension
3. Use generic name while registering the domain and avoid numbers, unique character, personal name, etc., think with longer strategy and register your domain name accordingly
4. These days save on registering the domain and get them free while choosing the hosting plan to host your excellent blog. You can check and register your preferred domain name free right here

#Step Two: Set up the Hassle-Free Hosting For Your Blog

Once you registered your excellent domain name, next come is to build a home for the baby. Purchasing a hosting is like renting space on a shared computer. Do not worry; all your data would be secured even the hosting server shared by a few other domains.

Shared hosting which cost around 2 to 3 $ per month works awesome for bloggers who are just starting his/her blogging career. Shared Hosting can be pretty cheap. As you can see from this list, the most expensive plan is $5.

I recommend new travel blogs get hosting with BlueHost or Siteground. They offer quality hosting for a small price ($2.95 per month for 12 months), and customer service is excellent too.

Where Do I Get a Domain Name And Hosting?

I’ve mostly used www.Bluehost.com as a web hosting and domain registrar for myself and for my web development projects. I strongly recommended another awesome hosting company Siteground to new travel bloggers, and their sites are doing great.

Update: My travel blog TravelEscape hosted on Siteground and getting approx 15,000 pages/views per month at the time of writing this post (March 2018). Yes, you can change your hosting vendor anytime if you decide to move on.

#Step Three: Install Modern & Robust CMS Framework WordPress

Think blogging think WordPress platform. WordPress is the king of blogging, and probably always will be. WordPress powers 25% of internet sites and is growing month on month. Most blogging professionals use WordPress, even major brands like the BBC. Installing the WordPress with your BlueHost or Siteground Account is super easy.

Three Most Popular Site Building Platforms in 2017- WordPress is the King

Both the primary hosting provide easy to use the navigation to quickly and safely install the pre-packaged WordPress framework software for your registered domain.  Isn’t the whole step is easy? but wait what actually is CMS WordPress?

As per Wikipedia – WordPress is a free and open-source content management system (CMS) based on PHP (The code) and MySQL (Database).WordPress is installed on a web server.WordPress is reportedly the easiest and most popular website management or blogging system in use on the Web, supporting more than 60 million websites

How To Install WordPress Step By Step

The process to install the WordPress software on your hosting server like Bluehost, Siteground, etc. is very easy for both beginner and advanced users. Moreover, most of the hosting companies tender free services to onboard or install the WordPress for you.

To avoid distracting you from long copy paste message that you see on another blog, I will give you the link from respective hosting companies on the WordPress installation step by step.

1. Siteground – Find here the steps for WordPress installation step by step.
2. Bluehost– Bluehost steps for WordPress installation step by step.

#Step Four: Learn How WordPress Dashboard Works

Congrats, you now have your identity on the internet world as your registered domain, you purchased your space in a housing complex, you did all housekeeping activity to make your lovely home “ready to move in .” Now, what! It’s time to get to know the in and out of your new house.

Hence, is the WordPress dashboard and how to get used to the easiest software to operate in the world. The admin section of the WordPress, the “WordPress Dashboard,” is where you will begin building your WordPress site. It’s something like the cockpit of the airplane where you have all the controls needed to make your site impressive to fly.

Some Key Points on WordPress Dashboard

• WordPress admin URL: if you installed WordPress on the root of your domain your URL to access WordPress would be: example.com/wp-admin
• Username: This is the username you set up when initially installing WordPress.
• Password: This is the password you set up when installing WordPress. If you emailed the installation details during the installation process it will be in that email as well.

Some Key Points on Creating Posts & Pages of Your Site

To write your first blog post, click on the Posts on your WordPress admin page » Add New menu in your WordPress dashboard. You will see an editor area where you can write your first blog post.

Once you’re done writing, go ahead and press the Publish button on the right to make your first blog post to the world ( remember our excitement of writing hello world in our high school days). Congrats, your post is live and accessible anywhere in the world.

On the posts screen, you will notice several other page’s sections such as Categories and Tags. You can use these to organize your blog posts like “solo trip,” “couple trip” etc.

I recommend some mandatory pages you need to create before making your blog site live.

1. About
2. Contact
3. Privacy Policy
4. Affiliate Disclosure

#Step Five: Download WordPress Theme & Plugins

WordPress installation generates some default and useless content (e.g Hellow world, sample page, etc.) that will appear on your site after the installation, but it’s usually a good & recommended suggestion to get rid of these contents to make your site look more professional and clean.

Next step as part of your travel blog journey is to select a good, reliable, secure and fast premium themes from the online marketplace. In layman term, a theme is like going with best and refined engine for your car. The primary engine would inevitably run your car but be investing by purchasing a premium engine would power pack your car’s engine for the long term and eventually pay you back.

Advantages of Investing in Premium WordPress Themes & Plugins

1. Performance & Speed-
2. Security-
3. Well written code & framework-
4. Support & Updates-

#Step Six: Creating Your First Blog Post & Organize Your Site

Now comes the first step in expressing yourself. To write your first blog post & make it live, click on the Posts » Add New menu in your WordPress dashboard. Below is the attached screen shot to refer.

You will see the WordPress editor area where you can write your first blog post. Once you’re done writing to the editor, here comes the most exciting part. Go ahead and click on the Publish button on the right to publish your first blog post to the world.

Don’t worry, you can edit, delete or even add to the just published post. Isn’t this a simple stuff? and doesn’t require you to know the technical part of creating a website.

#Step Seven: Create Critical Pages For Your Travel Blog.

#Step Eight: Traffic Growth Through SEO & Social Platforms

Let me ask you a very honest question. What is your single point objective for starting a travel blog right now? If your answer is getting decent traffic and reader’s reach for your blog, I would say you are on the right track. Else, you will end up creating a personal diary on the internet which ultimately only few would open and read.

If you want to build a successful and payback travel blog, a consistent presence on you or your travel blog is a mandatory and not optional step. Secondly posting regularly to your social media is important. Learning and mastering social media is huge topic, and you would find and read quite a lot on internet

To begin and as the first step, sign up for all the most popular social platforms, and keep your social media username the same and relevant to your travel blog if possible. Otherwise, people will get confused. Below is our social presence on the popular platform. I request you to please click and follow us if you find the content helpful and relevant.

1. Facebook
2. Twitter
3. Instagram
4. Google+
5. YouTube
6. Pinterest

#Step Nine: Start Making Money With Your Blog

The most anticipated section of the post. At first, your only blog readers will be family and friends. But that’s ok! it happens with me, it happened with big bloggers out there. We all started like that.

To begin making money with your newly created travel blog, you need to have a larger audience who consume your contents and buy kinds of stuff that you recommend. The more traffic your blog receives, the more money you can make with it. But honestly, it takes the time to build an audience and grow traffic.

Monetizing Your Travel Blog- Every Blogger’s Ultimate Objective

If you plan to do business out of your travel blog, you need to think from a business perspective and not treat your blog as a personal diary. I recommend don’t focus on making money right away, the focus should be on building your loyal audience.

However, you can start earning income early with Affiliate Programs like Amazon.com where you recommend products to your readers. E.g would be x best and affordable accessories to carry while you travel. Here you insert your affiliate id along with the recommended product

I am sure you would be writing a lot about your stay experience, what is good or bad about it. Monetize your travel blog with affiliate links of Booking.com or Agoda.com. Another option is showing display ads with Google Adsense.

Remember, all of these income streams grow only when your audience grows. So that should be your first priority moving forward!

Start with these seven most common ways you can make money blogging.

1. Affiliate Marketing. Works on actual purchase made by your recommendation (e.g., booking.com, etc.)
2.  Google AdSense. A quick way of making small money to start. Requires Ad sense approval.
3. Travel Consulting. Once you establish you or your blog as the brand- start selling your expertise service
4. Paid Reviews and Banner-ads. Again it depends on how much popular is your brand or you among the travel industry so that the brands approaches you.
5. Email List Building. Now, this is the smart and long-term strategy to retain your loyal customer if you do it right and without annoying your readers.