When it comes to running a blog, one of the most important decisions that you can make comes from what it will be about. Starting a blog from scratch, though, can be very hard to envisage. One of the most easy-going and enjoyable places to start with, though, are travel blogs. The best travel blog experts out there, though, are successful because they add such a nice personal slant to the whole experience. They don’t look to impart or force authority on anyone; they just deliver cool, interesting and endearing information to the people that want to hear what that they have to say. How, though, can you make sure that you have the best chance of knowing how to travel blog? Here are some guidelines on how to start a travel blog from scratch and run it successfully.
Getting a good travel blog name
The first thing you need to to be aware of once you decide to start a travel a blog is that all good travel blogs need a funky name. It is the best way to get people involved; start off, though, by making sure that the name is both easy for people to read and nice and simple to pronounce. It should be short and simple, something nice and memorable. Preferably something with a big of rhyming to it will work well.
That being said, think long-term. Unless your blog is going to be dedicated to one city or country, make sure you are not pigeonholing yourself into talking about one place only. Lastly, when you think you have a good name, run it through Google and see if anyone has beat you to the punch. If not, you now have the best travel blog name that you could come up with!
Get it hosted
Now, you need to get your blog hosted. Go to a domain service like NameCheap and buy both a domain name and a hosting package – you will need both. A domain name is the www.yoururlhere.com link to your website, so make sure it is easy to understand and remember. Hosting is the location where your blog, website data, images and content are hosted. You can get good, high quality hosting programs for next to nothing – invest in one that is affordable now but can be scaled in future if you need to.
Install WordPress and officially start a travel blog
Start off by installing WordPress – most hosting packages offer a one-click-install feature that will throw a blank WordPress installation together for you in a matter of minutes. If not, you can go to WordPress’ official page and get the download & installation details needed for a manual WordPress install. If you are semi-PC fluent, you should find it easy enough.
Now, choose a good quality of theme. If you are short on cash and time, then go for our Ruta WordPress Theme. It’s a smart, sleek and free theme that you can use to make sure that your travel blogs have a good website layout to be hosted on. You would be surprised how important a good quality layout is!
Accessorize your site
Now, you need to install a bunch of plug-ins to help transform your website. Plug-ins give you the chance to take the basic WordPress facilities and make it stronger and easier to work with in general. To help you do that, we recommend that you start off by getting some new accessories and plug-ins that can make your site safer, easier to navigate and more functional in general.
For a start, make sure you invest in the following add-ons:
– Akismet – shuts up spammers in the comments section of your blog and can reduce the time needed to moderate pointless spam nonsense.
– Jetpack – great for securing your WordPress site with up-to-date security protocols, can help to increase your traffic and better engage your readership in various ways. A must-have for most good travel blogs.
– Yoast SEO – a fine tool to work with, Yoast SEO is a very impressive and creative piece of software that allows you to easily attract more visitors to your site by optimizing your content to be better read and keyword optimized accordingly.
– Google Analytics – essential for making sure that your site can be seen to be performing; gives you access to analysis on everything from visitor counts to page bounce rates and much more.
Social media
Social media is vital for the best travel blog owners, and we recommend that you get on social media as often as you can. Make a uniform username across all of your social media panels and ensure that they are a close to possible as the original blog name.
Then, identify your main readership. These are the people in terms of age demographics, earning potential and interests. You can then laser target people on each social media platform to get more information about how they work and why they would be a good fit for your blog to lure them in and get their attention.
Share all of your blog posts on all social media channels, too. Don’t spam your links out there and just start posting tweets and messages to people on social media throwing your links at them – but be sure to link up accordingly across all networks.
Have fun!
Lastly, don’t forget to treat your new travel blogs as if it is a new passion project. Be passionate, consistent and patient. This is going to take time; many other people are doing what you want to do. Therefore, you need to let your following build up slowly and to take hold. You should always be looking to help build up your blog in an inviting and organic manner: it should be something that you take very seriously, but also making sure that your commitment and passion can shine through in every post.
For more good blogging tips, be sure to check out this awesome rock solid set of tips for bloggers. In time, it will make it much more likely for you to see impressive changes to how you work and how your blog feels to readers new and old.
