How to start a travel blog?

Have you asked yourself, should I start Blogging in 2020? Did you follow up that question with, how to start a Travel blog? Well, I’m going to begin to answer by saying this is how we started blogging and by no means do we know everything. We didn’t know anything about blogging before we started and I wish we would have done things a little differently from the start.

There are so many questions when you first start blogging and most of the websites dedicated to blogging answers these questions in a way that is hard to understand for complete beginners. We recently joined a group on Facebook dedicated to helping new people get started and grow. I constantly see questions being asked about how to start blogging and all the questions that come with blogging. The group constantly throws out different terms and ways of doing things. It can be confusing if you’re completely new to blogging.

We learn something new everyday about blogging and it’s such a rewarding hobby. There’s so much to learn from SEO, generating traffic to your blog, to how to even monetize a travel blog.

Deciding on why you should start a travel blog.

It’s hard to ask how to start a travel blog if you don’t know your why!

This is something you have probably asked yourself and have debated on this for a while. I’m going to tell you why we started blogging and hopefully, it will help you answer your own why. When we lived in Denver, Colorado we didn’t have enough money to travel all over the world so we would take weekend trips in and around our state.

We started exploring the states around Colorado and sharing our experiences on Facebook. Over time we would have people reaching out asking questions like, where do you recommend we eat when my family comes to Denver for vacation? or Can you help me plan my Yellowstone National Park itinerary?

Even before we lived in Denver we had an appetite for exploring the states. We have been to over 34 states in the US. Our inboxes started to fill up with our friends and family asking travel-related questions, so naturally, we thought it would be a good idea to just create a blog so we could always have these questions answered.

We didn’t know anything about blogging, and we didn’t care. We were just sharing our experiences with our friends, family, and others. The travel blogging niche is crowded but it didn’t matter to us. One of the reasons why I decided to write this blog post was because people have been asking us, is it hard to start blogging?

If you’re asking yourself should I start blogging in 2020, I will tell you yes! Why not?

Is blogging worth it?

What if no one reads my blog?

Honestly, we didn’t think about this when we started because we didn’t care if anyone read what we posted. If anything for us it was just a way of being able to hand out information on past trips, beyond that we didn’t care.

Now that we have been blogging for almost 2 years, I constantly think about these questions before beginning to write. I will get an idea in my head on something to share and then think ‘Do people even care about this?’

If you’re blogging for fun, stress relief or as a new hobby then it shouldn’t matter. Don’t worry about all the technical stuff and just create good content. You want to know how many people use google search? Google receives over 63,000 searches per second. I assure you someone will read your blog.

It may be one person but I can assure you someone will stumble upon it. If you decide to start a blog after reading this, email us and we will be your first reader!

What should I name my blog?

One of the most important decisions when starting your travel blog is picking out your name. This name will be on all of your social media accounts. It will be your domain name and on the front page of your blog.

Let’s Find Fun did not start as Let’s Find Fun. We started as We Find Fun and quickly realized that’s not that great. We did some brainstorming and eventually found that Let’s Find Fun sounds way better. I would recommend you start with a whiteboard or word document, write down any name that comes to mind when you think about your personality, goals and your travels.

After you have a list go through this checklist to see if that name is available.

• Check if the domain name is available – use the tool below!
• Check if that name is available on all social media platforms
  • Instagram
  • Facebook
  • Twitter
  • Pinterest
• Google search that name and see what comes up
  • Anything negative come up?
  • Anything similar come up?
• Ask your friends and family what they think of your name

We ultimately picked Let’s Find Fun because we wanted to include everyone in finding adventure. We often feel that travel blogging and travel influencers make travel feel luxurious and out of reach for your everyday person.

We want Let’s Find Fun to be inclusive to everyone no matter their budget and travel experience!

Setting up hosting

Let’s dive straight into how to start a travel blog with setting up your hosting!

To start your blog, you will have to decide on what platform to use. There’s a bunch of different options but we are going to talk about WordPress in this post. This blog runs on WordPress and approximately 75 million websites run on WordPress! There are a few different options when it comes to setting up your blog with WordPress. You have to decide if you want to use WordPress.com or self-hosted WordPress.org! We are going to break down the differences between the two along with giving you our opinions on the different platforms. Let’s Find Fun started on WordPress.com and after one year we were able to migrate to self-hosted WordPress.org without any issues!

Should I use WordPress.com?

Summary – Limited control / small learning curve

There are a few questions to ask to determine if WordPress.com is for you. We started with WordPress.com and it was an easy introduction to blogging. Our first year of blogging was with WordPress.com. I will say WordPress.com is perfect for anyone who just wants a platform to write on and share it with the world.

If your number one goal for starting your blog is to just get your thoughts on the internet, this is the platform for you. That’s the main reason we started blogging and WordPress.com was perfect. Is WordPress.com free and easy to start? Yes, absolutely.

If you’re interested in expanding past just writing and want full control over your blog answer the next few questions. The first question, do you plan on making money from your blog? Did you answer yes? You should consider doing WordPress.org. If you want to implement any type of eCommerce you will have trouble doing this with WordPress.com. If you want to implement ads you can’t with WordPress.com.

The second question, do you want to have 100% control over how your blog looks, runs, and operates? If the answer to this is yes, you should be considering WordPress.org.

WordPress.com does not allow plugins and you hear about plugins all the time in the blogging world. There’s literally a plugin for everything and they are super useful.

Popular plugins you may want to use but you can’t with WordPress.com

• SEO – Yoast
• Email marketing – Mail chimp
• Instagram – Instagram feed
• Pinterest – Pinit Button

What are the advantages of WordPress.com?

The biggest advantage of WordPress.com is that it’s completely free and can be set up in a few minutes. I have created WordPress.com blog ideas in less than 10 minutes. You can easily start blogging with WordPress.com. The learning curve is minimal.

What are the disadvantages of WordPress.com?

The only big disadvantage of using WordPress.com is that it limits your ability to completely take over the entire process of creating and making money from blogging. If you want to grow your blog into a business, you will want to start somewhere else.

Should I use WordPress.org?

Summary – Complete control / larger learning curve

What’s WordPress.org?

WordPress on its own is a content management system based on different programming languages. You can think of WordPress as an application. To use that application it needs to be installed somewhere.

You can think of hosting providers as the homeowner and you’re the renter. The home has WordPress appliances installed and you rent space then design everything for a monthly fee. You don’t have to stick with one hosting provider for the lifetime of your blog, if you end up not liking your homeowner you can pack up everything and move to another hosting provider if you would like. The process of getting WordPress installed is not hard. When we signed up for Bluehost during the initial setup there was an option to do a one-click install of WordPress.

Why we decided to move to WordPress.org

We migrated from WordPress.com last summer and it was one of the best decisions we have made. In the first year of Let’s Find Fun, we enjoyed writing content to answer questions for family and friends. We didn’t know anything about SEO, domain authority, or keywords.

We were just writing to help out the people we knew. Our traffic eventually started to pick up and we invested in the premium wordPress.com features. This got our feet wet with working on SEO, keywords and eventually implementing ads.

We soon hit a snag, because if you want more of those features with WordPress.com you have to pay. Paying for those features is not cheap, especially when you can switch over to self-hosted WordPress for less. We eventually started searching how to start a travel blog and how to generate more traffic. These searches led us to self hosting using WordPress.org.

What is self-hosted?

You hear this word a lot in the blogging community and it’s typically used by new people learning about blogging. It simply means you found /pay someone to host your site and you manage the hosting. When using WordPress.com you don’t have to worry or care about the hosting platform. You simply log in to WordPress.com and select your site. When your site is self-hosted the process is similar to WordPress.com after the initial setup! If you leave the pre-installed plugin Jetpack, you can still login to WordPress.com and click on the ‘Admin’ button to get into your self-hosted website.

How do I self-host a blog?

Great question, I had no idea how to answer this when we wanted to transition from WordPress.com to WordPress.org. First things first, you will have to pick a host for your website. There’s a ton of websites that work great for WordPress.

I would suggest doing your research on the best host providers for WordPress. We went with Bluehost for a number of reasons. Bluehost is a recommend host of WordPress and is currently hosting more than 850,000 other sites! Bluehost currently offers a one-click install of WordPress as well.

This means after you select your domain name and purchase hosting plan you can easily set up your website.

Popular WordPress Hostings

• Bluehost
• SiteGround
• HostGator

Can you migrate from WordPress.com to self-hosted WordPress.org?

Yes, this is what we did with Let’s Find Fun. We purchased the domain name letsfindfun.com with the WordPress.com premium features and when our annual subscription was about to expire, we migrated everything from WordPress.com to our current self-hosted WordPress.org.

We were able to export everything without losing anything. That means, our domain name, our theme, our email subscribers and all of our posts migrated over. The process wasn’t super easy or intuitive but it’s not as difficult as you think. We followed the wpbeggineers tutorial and everything worked like a charm.

What are the advantages of self-hosted WordPress.org?

The major advantage of a self-hosted wordPress.org site is that you have complete control. You can form your website into exactly what you want and monetize your website however you see fit.

What are the disadvantages of self-hosted WordPress.org?

There are only a few disadvantages to going the self-hosted route and it’s primarily the learning curve of getting it set up and configured. I will admit I’m an IT System Engineer when I’m not blogging and traveling, so it was easy for me to get it setup. In the beginning, I only had an idea of WordPress and self-hosting. I had to do a bunch of research and even follow a tutorial to get everything set up correctly. It wasn’t an overnight success with the perfect blog and even today we struggle with implementing new things. If you’re willing to learn and dedicate time to this it will be worth it in the long run. It’s worth learning everything if you want to make blogging your full-time gig!

Getting started and picking out your theme

There’s so many different themes. Pick something that’s easy to showcase your travels.

No matter which platform you decided to pick, the next step will be picking out your theme. The theme is simply the way your website looks, feels, and functions. Let’s Find Fun went through a few different themes until we ended up with our current look.

I would suggest checking out other websites in your niche and getting a feel for their theme. Don’t copy, but it’s always good to see what’s working for the people who are making a living off of blogging!

Picking out a theme for WordPress.com

If you decided to go with WordPress.com there’s a few really good free themes to choose from and if you want something else they have paid premium themes as well. We have tried a few different of the free themes when Let’s Find Fun was on WordPress.com.

I know a lot of people spend so much time and effort on this. It can be stressful, but don’t let it bring you down. Like I said before, Let’s Find Fun has had a few different themes in its evolution. I don’t know if it hurts SEO or Google Search positions, but we have changed it. Find something you like and can work with.

If it’s not completely perfect don’t worry, you will grow in your blogging knowledge and learn to mold it into the blog you want!

Free WordPress.com themes

• Cubic
• Mayland
• Brompton
• Radcliffe 2

Picking out a theme for self-hosted WordPress.org

If you decided to go with self-hosted WordPress.org you have more options in regards to your theme. You can find themes from all over the internet and upload them in your admin dashboard. Our current theme is from Kadence WP and it’s called Virtue.

We are using the free version of Virtue and it works for our needs. If you don’t want to use a theme created by someone else, WordPress.org gives you the tools to create your own from scratch. This would require a lot of CSS and HTML work though!

How to start a travel blog in 2020 is a tough question.

Starting a travel blog doesn’t have to be complicated

There are a billion different blogs on the internet dedicated to learning how to blog and I would highly suggest starting there. We are just a bunch of travel bloggers that are learning more and more each day about blogging. We started Let’s Find Fun not knowing really anything about blogging other than we have heard of WordPress.com and had used it in the past.

It’s overwhelming to read some of the big-time blogs and digest all of the stuff they pack into each post. I wanted to write this post to encourage people who are thinking about blogging or have asked us about blogging in the past. If you found this useful then let us know, we are storytellers at heart and enjoy sharing information and experiences with you.

We don’t know all the answers, heck we barely even know some of the answers, but we know other blogs that know more than we do. When starting out we relied heavily on WPbegineer.com on getting started and eventually used this website as a guide to migrating our website! I highly recommend looking around on WPbeginner for any questions you may have!

Where do you go now after all of that?

Your journey into How To Start A Travel Blog is over, you have a travel blog!

You have picked out your platform, your theme, and now you’re wondering where to go from here. I would start reading about SEO optimization and keywords. This is something we neglected to do in our first year of blogging and its hurting our traffic now. I have started using Neil Patel as my go-to guy for information about SEO and Keyword research. He has really good content and a free tool on his website! If you are interested in just writing content and you don’t care about traffic, just start creating content! You can always come back to worrying about traffic if you decide later it’s important to you!

Are you considering starting a travel blog? Are you overwhelmed with all the options and information? Did this How To Start A Travel Blog help you? Let us know!

If you’re new here, Welcome! Check our About Us page and consider subscribing. We post pretty regularly and we would love to have you in our travel tribe! How To Start A Travel Blog was our first how to so we really hope you like it!

The post How To Start A Travel Blog This Year appeared first on Let's Find Fun.