Camp Leaders Guides: How to Become a Travel Blogger

Plus, the only experience you need to start? Travel. Everything else can follow from there, but a genuine love of travelling the world will set you up for success.

So, if you’re wondering ‘how to become a travel blogger’ and get paid to see the world, here’s our Camp Leaders Guide on doing exactly that.

This may seem obvious, but it’s so easy to get caught up in planning that you don’t actually ‘do’.

You can’t keep saying, “oh I’ll write this or I’ll write that”, building a fancy plan, but then realise you’ve done nothing for three months. Action builds momentum, and momentum will get you places. Sometimes starting is the hardest part because once you’ve started travelling or writing, you’ll enjoy it even more.

Get over the initial fear of the unknown and start.

Writing online is different to writing a book.

Yes, there are specific grammatical rules both will follow, but writing online is a different beast. It’s shorter, snappier, and needs to be much more engaging to keep people interested in the age of entertainment and distraction. It has a distinct feel and format, so look for more information about how you should structure your pieces.

One essential thing to pick up is some basic SEO knowledge. SEO, in an oversimplified way, is what will help you appear higher up on search engines such as Google. You could write incredible pieces, but without specific direction and optimisation, your audience may never find these pieces. SEO will help your website if you decide to set one up, and it also demonstrates to editors of other sites that you know your stuff.

Finally, keep your standards high when it comes to editing and formatting. Grammarly or Hemingway are fantastic, free tools to help tidy your writing up, which you should use as part of your editing process. Silly errors can put off editors and most likely put off readers, too.

You’ll never learn everything there is to know about writing online, so treat it as an ongoing journey and keep topping your knowledge up as you go.

Travel is a huge industry.

What type of travelling do you enjoy? It’s important to niche down into what you love because I guarantee there’ll be a whole audience of like-minded people out there looking for content to enjoy.

Are you someone who loves backpacking and budget travel? Great, build yourself within this area and focus your content creation around it. Do you love summer camp, activity travel, or even a specific place like America? Good, these could potentially be your niche. Each sector of travel is big enough for you to succeed as a blogger, but it’s important to find ‘your’ area. If you try and cover everything, you’ll spread too thin and end up helping no one.

Once you’ve found your niche, learn about it. Who are the big employers in the scene? Which influencers lead the area? Which content does well within this world?

Learning the ins and out’s of your niche will help you contribute more to it.

Don’t expect your early writing to be perfect. In fact, if you don’t cringe at some of your earlier work, you probably waited too long to get it out.

In the beginning, get it out there. Learn by doing. Get feedback from friends, family, and from the endless void that is the internet. By putting your creative work out to the world, you’re inviting attention, so it’s not always going to be the good type. Learn to develop a thick skin to the unnecessary but an open mind to the constructive.

Platforms such as Medium and Reddit allow you to write directly on their platform and build a following of like-minded followers. When distributing on social media, the standard ones of Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter would be well complimented with LinkedIn and, more commonly these days, Tik Tok.

Getting your work out there is key to reaching the next level as a travel blogger.

Input is as useful as output.

Take in new pieces of content about different topics and in different styles. Fiction, non-fiction, how-to’s, guides. Whatever it may be, all the content you consume will help shape your thinking and writing.

It’s always great when you pick up a little gem of information in something you’re reading or a turn of phrase that you’d like to use in a piece.

Plus, on the likes of Medium, you can highlight areas that you like to other readers, giving the writer a nice little boost of engagement whilst also getting your name out there.

You can leverage your network as you develop, so it’s worth engaging with others in the industry.

For example, if you develop a large audience within the youth travel sector, it’s much easier to work with other brands or thought leaders in that sector. It’s another reason why your niche is so important, but if you’re floating within it, it doesn’t help anyone.

Get your name out there and engage with others. Everyone appreciates positive engagement, whether it’s just a thumbs up on a piece you’ve read, tagging a fellow travel blogger on Twitter saying you like their work or engaging on their LinkedIn post.

You’re a writer the very moment you put words down, but when you get your first paid gig, it cements the fact that “this travel writing stuff could work”.

Finding this first gig doesn’t have to be difficult, either. You’ve got two main methods to find your first job; going direct or through a platform. Direct is what it says on the tin, going direct to a brand. Many businesses, including ourselves through Creators, always look for good content and happily pay for it. You’ll likely agree on a brief, and then it’s up to you to bring it together. Another route is through platforms such as UpWork or Fiverr. Here, you can advertise your work, services, and the price you’re willing to charge. People or brands can then purchase these from you as products, which you can then set the delivery time, number of revisions, keywords, and more.

Get that first pound in your account, and it’ll begin to feel very real.

If you’re wondering how to become a travel blogger, it happens the very minute you start writing.

Yes, the money and the potential freedom are great, but you’re a writer when you take action and start your journey. As we all do, you’ll get better with time, and your journey into becoming a fully-fledged writer will always continue.

So keep learning, keep writing, and more importantly, keep travelling.

If you’re an aspiring travel blogger, we’d love to hear from you. At Camp Leaders, we pay travel content creators for their work through our Creators team. If this sounds good, head to the Creators page to find out more and apply today.