- How To Set Up A Travel Blog
- HOW TO GET YOUR TRAVEL BLOG UP AND RUNNING ON WORDPRESS
- How To Write Content Regularly On Travel Blog
A travel blog is your best shot at making money while traveling.
Why do you want to earn income from a travel blog? Is it because you love to travel and want to fund your travels? Is it because you’ve already traveled so much on business and want to monetize that experience? Or maybe you’ve already jotted down your travel adventures in your personal diary and now want to convert it into a blog? Do you have a travel blog as yet?
Whatever your reason, whether you’re a solo traveler or an elite traveler, and at whichever level you are at this point in time, this series of articles will guide you to get up and running with your very own travel blog in no time. Not only that, it will help you to achieve a standing of a Maven in the travelers fraternity and use that reputation to earn some decent money while traveling. How much you will earn from your travels and will that be sufficient to give up your day job will depend entirely on how effectively you use the tools I’m putting at your disposal, and how much time you’re willing to dedicate for this every single day.
How to make money from a travel blog while not an easy task is pretty achievable if you follow the practical advice contained in the guide that follows. How to set up a travel blog is the first part in the series of making money while traveling.
CREATE A TRAVEL BLOG ON WORDPRESS:
If you’re serious about making money through your travel blog, you’ll have to spend some money on it by buying hosting and your domain instead of relying on a free hosted blog.
For paid hosting, some of the top services in the business are iPage, Hostgator and Bluehost. These are especially good because they allow you 1-click install of wordpress instead of having to download it separately and then uploading it on your host.
You’ll get a free domain with the hosting as well as the ability to host unlimited domains on a single hosting account. You’ll have to check though which package you’re buying. The unlimited domains feature is not available with the starter package.
But why WordPress? Because for some inexplicable reason, Google loves wordpress blogs, and if you want to get a headstart in your marketing efforts, you better stick to wordpress from day one for your travel blog unless you want to reinvent the wheel.
COME UP WITH A GREAT NAME FOR DOMAIN & TRAVEL BLOG:
Prior to creating the blog, you’ll first have to determine the right keyword to be used both as your domain name and blog title which is the first crucial step. Normally an additional step is to find out the right niche in which you want to foray and then determine the optimal keyword for that niche, but since we’ve already decided on travel income as the niche, the next logical step is the keyword.
Now this is a critical step because once you decide on a particular domain name, not only can you not change it, it will be a determinant in driving traffic to your site, which is crucial if you want earn money through your travel blog.
To come up with a good keyword for your niche would be simply to make use of the phrase ‘travel income’ as your domain and blog name. But it’s not as easy as it sounds.
The most popular keywords in most popular niches are already bought by shrewd internet marketers looking to make a quick buck. In most cases they don’t create a blog on these domain names but just park the domain with a page flooded with ads. That’s one way of making money from a domain, but their main purpose is to sell that domain name at a premium price to those looking to create a blog with that name.
I would never advise you to pay an exorbitant amount for these pricey domain names. For one, although a domain name with the right keyword counts a lot in SEO ( Search Engine Optimization), it’s not the end of the world if you don’t use it. People have created hugely successful website with their own names or bizarre brand names and still managed to make it big. Mashable, Perez Hilton are just two cases in point.
Secondly, you can always come up with variations of the phrase or word to get a combination which isn’t taken by anyone, as yet. Let’s say you decided on ‘travel income’ and travelincome.com is already taken. You can then try travelincome.org, travelincome.com. [countryname], travelincome.net or even travelincome.biz. Anything to avoid paying the extra amount by buying it from someone else. That’s because a domain costs a mere $10 but if you buy it from someone else, he can charge you as much as $1000. That’s because it’s his property and he can do pretty damn what he wants with it.
THE SEARCH FOR THE ULTIMATE KEYWORD FOR TRAVEL BLOG
Let’s say even all the domain extensions are taken. What now?
You can now focus on the .com extension also called a TLD (Top Level Domain) by coming up with subtle variations to use with the phrase travel income. You can use travelincomeblog.com, travelincomehq.com, etravelincome.com, travelsincome.com. I’m sure you get the drift.
So why didn’t I make use of the same technique for my own travel income blog? Why did I settle on travelhustling.com?
That’s because my site is not only concerned with making money through my travel blog, but also how to make the most of my travels through things I learn along the way and then share my trials and tribulations with my audience so that they learn from it. And hustling is a word I came across reading Chris Gullebeau’s awesome book The $100 start-up in which he defined ‘hustling as the gentle of self-promotion or how to get the word out about a project.’
He furt
“Being willing to promote in an authentic, non-sleazy manner is a core attribute of microbusiness success. As Elizabeth’s story illustrates, sometimes the best hustling lies in creating a great offer and getting people to talk about it. In other cases, you want to have as many of the right kind of customers as possible, so there’s nothing wrong with putting yourself forward.”
For some reason, this definition stuck with me and hence the decision to go with travelhustling.com.
If you feel you want to go with some keyword other than ‘travel income’, first check the popularity of it using Google’s Keyword Tool or the Market Samurai software. Market Samurai although a paid software, has a trial version whose only constraint is the time limit. In any case it would give you enough time to search for a keyword for one project.
Your aim is to come up a keyword which is not only popular but has a higher CPC value as well on Google.
If you check Google’s Keyword tool for travel income, here are the results:
Not very promising huh?
However, if you search for the phrase ‘make money while traveling’, this is what you get:
Which is not bad. But can you use such a long phrase as the name of your domain? Its not advisable, but then again its your decision. Similarly you’ll have to really dig in deep with these keyword tools to come up with the best keyword possible for your travel blog domain.
Once you’ve come with the right keyword, registered the domain and created your travel blog on wordpress, we’ll then talk about what to do next.
Disclaimer:
Some of the links in this article are actually affiliate links and I’ll get paid if you buy the service using that link. This does not mean of course, that I’m promoting useless services just to make a quick buck. These are actually quite good services which you can verify for yourself online independently.
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