For full disclosure, this post on how to start a travel blog contains links to products and services that may earn me a small commission. This helps me to keep this blog up and running. Thanks for your support!

If there is one thing I wish I had done over the course of my journey that I didn’t, it’s keep a dedicated travel blog. Sure, ten years in, I now have this one. But this is a blog centered around professional development, I wish I had more closely chronicled my experiences and adventures as well. I really wish someone had shown me how to start a travel blog before I first left home. So many amazing things have happened to me that I can scarcely remember them all. It’s funny, because people back home remember the crazy stories that I tell much better than I do. So when they bring them up, I’m often like, “Oh yeah, I did live through the 3/11 earthquake in Japan,” or “Oh, I forgot I had been in Hong Kong during the Umbrella Protests.” I mean, if nothing else, I wish I had kept track of my travels simply for posterity’s sake. 

Why Keep a Travel Blog?

Well, aside from keeping a record for your own personal enjoyment, keeping a travel blog is a great way to keep your friends and family in the loop as you travel the globe. They want to see the world through your eyes and live vicariously through you! You help them do that by keeping a travel blog. 

It’s also a great way to share your experiences with fellow travelers. I know what you’re thinking: There are a  million travel blogs out there. Why wouldn’t anyone care about what happens to me? Well, the answer is, they do! Everyone reads articles from travel blogs before they go on trips. They want to know if there are better/easier ways to do things. So leave a record of what you did and how you did it. It WILL be helpful to someone eventually. And if you define a clear enough niche, like a blog on teaching English while traveling or travel hacks while living in China, then you can really generate a lot of traffic. Then you could potentially turn it in to a business someday!

Step 1: Choose a Name and Create a Logo

The first thing you need to do is choose a name for your blog. Since it will most like double as your domain name, you’ll want to check and see if this domain is already taken. Teachfortravel.com, for example, is obviously taken. Plug your idea into your address bar and see if it is available. Put some thought into it, though, because this will define you and your niche to your readers. Likewise, your logo will make your site more memorable in the minds of your readers. Here are some tips for choosing a name:

• Choose a name that is true, yet versatile – Make sure that your chosen name will still be relevant if the content evolves. For example, Teach for travel can incorporate a ton of different subcategories of content, but Gap Year Travel is fairly limiting and pigeonholes you into one type of content, forever. 
• Try to Avoid Cliches –  anything with ESL or TESL, for example. Or something like “wanderlust.” Using words or terms that are commonplace in your field will make your site easy to overlook because it will be just one of many.
• Keep it short – I think this is fairly intuitive, but the longer your site name, the less likely that your readers will be able to remember it.
• Keep it simple – Teach for Travel – it doesn’t get much simpler than that. If I had said TEFL for Travel, though, that wouldn’t be simple to those new to the world of teaching abroad. What’s a TEFL, afterall? Try to avoid terms that might exclude new readers.

Step 2: Pick a Host

After you have chosen your domain name, you will need to purchase it, and also hire out a company to “host” it. This can be done separately, but people  typically go with a service that does both. The two most common hosting providers are hostgator and bluehost. They are both pretty cheap and offer a lot of functionality and security. I personally use bluehost, but either are fine choices.

Another great thing about both of these hosts is that they have a wordpress installation option included in their dashboards. If you’ve never tried to install wordpress on a site yourself, you won’t know how helpful this is. Luckily for you, you don’t need to worry about this. If you sign up for bluehost or hostgator, they do it for you.

Step 3: Install WordPress

This brings me to the next step. After you’ve purchased your domain name and signed up for a hosting package, the next thing you will want to do is to install WordPress. WordPress is a graphic interface of source that makes designing and editing your website extremely simple and intuitive. It is also the industry standard for anyone that does not have knowledge of advanced coding. And the best part is: it’s free and open source!

If you opt for a host that doesn’t have WordPress installation integrated into their dashboard, you will need to install WordPress by adding a package of files to your server directory. Here is a helpful article if that sounds like Greek to you. Luckily, if you signed up with bluehost or hostgator, you can do it with just a couple clicks. Just log in to your hosting service and click on your domain in your dashboard. There will be an option to create a site, and that’s when it will prompt you to install WordPress. It couldn’t be easier!

Step 4: Setting up your website

After you’ve installed WordPress, go to domainname.com/wp-admin and use the username and password you created to log in. And now the fun begins! What makes WordPress so extremely popular is that it makes customizing your website incredibly simple. This is done, primarily, through the use of plugins. There is a plugin for just about anything you wish to do to your website. Some of my personal favorites are:

• Elementor: my go to plugin. This lets you drag and drop features onto your blog page and makes designing sites simple and intuitive.
• Mailchimp: this is the industry standard for creating mailing lists, which are important to building site loyalty. 
• Woocommerce: if you are going to be buying or selling things, this is a great plugin to facilitate payments.
• Jetpack: I think this one comes preinstalled, but you need to activate it. It helps monitor seo, traffic, and social media integration. It’s a good catch all.
• Yoast: Probably one of the most important plugins you could download. This assists you to make sure that each post/page is SEO optimized, which could translate into how many people might end up seeing it. 

Step 5: Choose a Theme

Now, there are a lot of plugins that help you add certain elements or features to your blog, but most of the “design” as you might think of it comes from the theme that you decide to use. And when I design, I mean the aesthetics of your site. Color schemes, typography, page layout, etc. WordPress comes with a few free themes preinstalled. But they are pretty low frills. I recommend browsing the net and seeing what other options you can find.

There are a lot of other free themes that you can find out there, but most have limited functionality. What I recommend doing is first look through other clogs in similar categories. See what they are doing and how they are achieving it. Make a list of what features you want your site to have, along with some ideas that you want to borrow from other sites. Lastly, search the net for theme creators and see if they have a design that aligns with your vision. You might get lucky and find a free one that fits your needs, but usually you will need to pay for a “premium theme” in order to tick all of your boxes. I wouldn’t worry too much about this. The cost is usually pretty low and it is a one time purchase, so premium themes are totally worth it. Try StudioPress. They have tons of options, so you are bound to find something that realizes your vision. 

Step 6: Start Creating Content

Now that the easy work is finished, the real work begins! The challenge of creating a travel blog is not in the set up, but finding your niche, finding your voice, and publishing enough content consistently to get people interested in what you have to say. Unfortunately, I can’t help you much with this aspect of it, but you will probably start simply. Write your ‘About Us’ page, or your bio if you want. Then your home page. Then try to come up with three or four pages at least that you will consider your “cornerstone content.” Articles that really exemplify who you are and what your blog is all about. After that, just take it one blog post at a time!

***

And that’s it. I sincerely hope you take my advice and build a site, if nothing more than to showcase your journey. I would love to see what you come up with! If you follow my steps and do create your site, send me a link to it at matthew@teachfortravel.com. I will link to it in this article!