How to be a Travel Writer

by Don George

Besides, your activity on social networks is vital in building and fostering your audience. Your social profiles give you the opportunity to have conversations, to promote new content and to learn about who is reading your blog and what they think of it. They bring your blog to life and make the experience of getting to know your ‘brand’ more fun, engaging and personal. The web is fundamentally a social place, all about building relationships, expressing identity and sharing ideas.

  A blogger’s view: Tim Leffel

  Tim Leffel is an award-winning travel writer and entrepreneur – founder and editor of online travel magazine Perceptive Travel (www.perceptivetravel.com) and publisher of www.cheapestdestinationsblog.com (since 2003), travelwriting2.com (since 2010) and www.hotel-scoop.com (since 2012). His books include Travel Writing 2.0: Earning Money From Your Travels in the New Media Landscape.

  I started before the internet came along, as a travel writer doing articles for print and trade publications. I launched a blog the same year WordPress started, in 2003. Through the years after that I started new projects, wrote other books, and kept freelancing. I strongly believe the best way to be anti-fragile and make consistent money at this pursuit is to have multiple streams of income, so I’ve always tried to keep moving and growing as a writer and publisher.

  Bloggers now need to narrowly define who their audience is and what they can offer that’s not being done by 100 or 1000 other people. Starting a blog that just says, ‘Look at me, I’m traveling around the world!’ might have worked six or eight years ago, but that’s an incredibly tough slog now.

  Focus! If you’re trying to please everyone and write about everywhere, you’ll never stand out. The internet is a long-tail medium, so don’t be a generalist. Pick a corner of the travel world that you can own and everything will be much easier.

  Then it’s a matter of reaching the target audience, building on it, and growing by earning attention. There’s no magic formula for that or some secret short cut. It’s really a matter of writing good, unique material and then grinding it out week after week on the promotion side of things. (But without turning readers off in the process.)

  The number of travel blogs keeps going up, but the number that are making money keeps going up too. I surveyed a lot of bloggers for both editions of my book and there are far more now earning $100K per year than there were in 2010. There are also a lot more making enough to fund their travels or to kick back in Goa or Chiang Mai for six months. I have no idea what the ratio is and many bloggers are just hobbyists.

  It takes a year or two for most bloggers to get to the point where their earnings are more than the night’s bar tab on a consistent basis. So they shouldn’t quit their job and blog around the world unless they’ve got at least a year’s worth of travel money saved up. It’s a slow process even if you do everything perfectly right and get lucky on top.

  I’m at the point now where I’m making a comfortable six-figure living, but I do pay out a lot to freelancers and assistants so I certainly don’t feel loaded. I worked part-time for more than 10 years, and eventually when the earnings reached the point where I could take the leap, I struck out on my own and haven’t looked back.

  Probably half my income is direct advertising deals on my blogs and websites, next is book royalties and courses, after that a zillion other things, including freelancing.

  I have a very clearly defined audience for all my sites. Perceptive Travel is the loosest – adventurous, but educated and literary. I go from budget (Cheapest Destinations Blog) to upscale (Luxury Latin America) on other sites and create content for that audience in each case. I do surveys regularly and have Quantcast on a few of my sites to make sure I’m doing this right.

  I’ve traveled to dozens of countries on someone else’s tab and I get to travel for a living, writing and posting photos about interesting places and people. It’s been a very long time since I’ve dreaded a Monday…

  Monetizing your blog

  A recent ProBlogger survey found that of 1500 bloggers trying to make money from their blog, 63 percent made less than $3.50 per day. Thirteen percent made between $1000 and $10,000 per month. There is money out there, but it’s not easy to get.

  There is no one way to make money from blogging, and in fact most bloggers who do it successfully have a number of different simultaneous income streams – read the insights from bloggers featured in this chapter to find out how they have made it work. The key is finding the mix that works for you, through experimentation and measuring the success of what you try. The bloggers we spoke to all agree – it takes time, and it takes a lot of work. We’ll cover a few of the different options here, but the possibilities are endless, limited only by your imagination and entrepreneurial drive. Spend time looking at other travel blogs and see what strategies other bloggers are making work for them.

  Advertising

  Many bloggers start here. Ad networks like Google AdSense act as a middleman, making it easy to run ads on your blog without needing to sell advertising space. You’ll need to have decent traffic coming to your site to start making money, but as your traffic and brand grows, advertisers will be willing to pay to get exposure to your audience.

  Writer’s tip: Embrace self-promotion

  While link building is a key reason to reach out to other bloggers and influencers, it’s not the only benefit. Promoting your blog’s content also means you’ll get more social shares, more loyal fans and email subscribers, more invites to interviews and opportunities for guest posts. Most successful bloggers say that they spend as much time – if not more – promoting their content as they do creating it.

  As well as blogger outreach and social sharing, here are some other avenues for promoting your content:

  • Think about how you can promote new content on your own site, including as ‘related reading’ links in already popular posts.

  • Promote new content in your email newsletter (though it might seem old-school, most bloggers consider email a hugely important element of their audience engagement).

  • You can buy highly targeted and inexpensive traffic to get more eyeballs on your content using the likes of Outbrain or StumbleUpon.

  Affiliate marketing

  Affiliate promotions – when you link to a product for sale on another site and earn a commission on any sales that are made as result of that click – are the most common way for bloggers to earn money. There are many affiliate programs out there and you may need to try a few to see what works for you. Many bloggers start with one of the big ones, Google AdSense or Amazon.

  While the commission on sales with a program like Amazon’s Affiliate Program is small (4–8 per cent), there are also benefits – it’s a trusted brand that many of your readers will already have an account with, and it offers a huge array of products that you can end up earning commission on (you earn a commission on whatever the person buys when they click through from your link, even if it’s not what you sent them there for).

  The key thing to bear in mind is that the value you have built in your blog is the trust your audience has in you. Make sure you only promote quality products that you truly believe in and that have relevance to your audience, or you can harm that trust – and destroy your blog’s value.

  A blogger’s view: Matthew Kepnes

  Matt Kepnes started his budget travel blog (www.nomadicmatt.com) in 2008. Since then it has become one of world’s most popular travel blogs. He has a range of budget travel ebooks, a New York Times bestselling book, How to Travel the World on $50 a Day, and runs courses on blogging at superstarblogging.nomadicmatt.com.

  In April 2008 I’d just come home from 18 months on the road and I didn’t want to go back to an office job. I wanted to become a Lonely Planet writer. I started the blog as an online résumé where I could showcase the writing I’d done and get better at it. I had no idea how to break into the industry and didn’t know where to start, so I started with the shitty online publications that would pay $20 for an article, but at least
someone would look over my writing, I’d get some edits and step my way up the ladder. I ended up writing my own guidebook. In a way I became my own little Lonely Planet.

  There weren’t a lot of travel blogs back then. I had the benefit of being one of the first. By 2010 there were tons and tons of them – since then many have gone the way of the dinosaur. I think I was always a bit more business-oriented than some of the other travel bloggers. I really focused on guest blogging and getting featured on other websites, and I think that gave me an edge.

  It’s such a competitive field now, that being business-orientated and self-promoting is key to the success of being a travel writer. There’s such a low barrier to entry. It’s important to pound your chest and toot your own horn a little bit. It’s the only way you’re going to get heard.

  There’s good money from all the sponsored content, link content, and brand deals that some travel bloggers do. I’m a believer in traditional travel writing – helping people get from A to B. When you become a mouthpiece for brands you lose that. Most travel writers start blogging for the love of travel, but after a while they realize they need to make money, and they end up selling their audience as a commodity.

  If you’re going to build a website that provides an income, you need to think of it like a business where you provide something to your customers. When I was doing product reviews, it felt like a betrayal of trust with my readership. And it’s time intensive, so I could only make as much money as there were hours in the day. But selling books and courses – though there’s a lot of work up front, it becomes passive income. The growth potential is unlimited.

  If you want to be a freelance writer, having an online property can get you freelance jobs but it can also earn you income. It’s not mutually exclusive – you don’t have to be either one or the other. I know bloggers who earn 80 percent of their income from freelance travel writing. I don’t really like freelance travel writing, I like doing my website. People come up with the mix that works for them.

  Email is the lifeblood of my blog. You should always have an email list. Facebook can bury your posts, the lifecycle of a Tweet is 3 seconds… Even if you don’t read an email when it hits your inbox, it’s there. It can’t be avoided, it can’t be missed. You can make hard sales pitches and announce products in a more detailed way than on social media.

  Learn to write well – the barrier to entry is so low that everybody has a blog, but not everyone has a quality blog. Never stop trying to be a better writer. Most bloggers never even start trying to be a better writer.

  Writer’s tip: Social media management

  Even successful bloggers admit that getting the balance right on social media can be difficult and that it requires a major time investment. When you’re starting out, the places you really need to be are Twitter, Facebook and Instagram – use them to publicize each new post. As you build your blog and your presence, you can start to explore Google+, Pinterest, StumbleUpon and Snapchat; YouTube if you go down the video path. Focus on the platforms that you really enjoy and build as you go.

  Remember: it’s called social media. It’s a conversation. The bloggers who stand out are the ones who actively seek out other bloggers’ articles of interest, comment on them and share them. After all, that’s what you want other bloggers to do with your posts. You need to be present on the platforms, actively responding to comments, engaging people and interacting.

  Keep your content on social platforms consistent with the overall feel and theme of your blog, don’t over-post or you’ll start to annoy people, and use hashtags wisely. Follow people who do it well, and learn from them.

  Selling services

  The travel space is full of potential for selling services. There are travel bloggers out there offering tours, personal travel advice, travel writing workshops – you name it. The limitation on this type of monetization is your time – not only to organize, but to physically be present for the activity. Think of the opportunity cost – it’s time you can’t spend creating or promoting content, which may end up being the more profitable activity, depending on your mix of strategies.

  Selling products

  For bloggers who have created a strong brand and an engaged following, selling products can become their major source of income. Ebooks and courses are popular products to sell, and some bloggers also sell merchandise like T-shirts, prints and tote bags. Guidebook products are popular among travel bloggers and for some, these can be a good source of include (see Nomadic Matt’s story, pages 146–7). A big plus with this type of monetization is that it becomes a passive income stream, a source of earnings that you don’t have to keep working at after the initial effort (which can be considerable).

  It’s also worth mentioning that there may be opportunities to repurpose content that you have already created for your blog as a paid product. Collecting together, repackaging and perhaps adding some new content to all your posts on, say, budget travel, or on Greece, you could create a ‘Budget Travel Handbook’ or a travel guide to Greece.

  Travel writing: the glamorous life?

  There you are on the African savannah, notebook in hand, camera around your neck, bouncing through the bush in hot pursuit of the king of beasts. Later on you’ll be sitting around the campfire recounting the day’s exploits while sampling the local beer.

  Sounds wonderful, doesn’t it? But to get there, you had to fly for a day and a half, squeezed into an economy-class seat between an apprentice sumo wrestler and a man whose personal beliefs forbid bathing. You spent a skin-slapping night on a flea-infested mattress, then had your bones rearranged on a bus bounding over a potholed highway. Your stomach hadn’t adjusted well to all the time and temperature changes, so you subsisted on bottled water and cookies.

  And now, while others snore blissfully away, you sit in your tent scribbling into your notebook by lamplight, having cursed the flat battery in your laptop. The following afternoon, while others nap, you interview the driver and the cook. And on the day when everyone sleeps in after the late-night bush trek, you get up before sunrise to photograph the tawny dawn light.

  Now, is that glamour tarnishing just a bit?

  The realities of travel writing

  While travel writing certainly has the reputation of being an alluring profession, 95 per cent of the job involves a lot of hard work. It’s gathering minute details on hotels, bus timetables, restaurants and walking tours. It’s researching which god did what, which ruler took over from whom and when, and what is signified by the curious ceremony that’s performed every third Friday in May. It’s waiting for planes and trains, buses and ferries, tuk-tuks and trishaws. It’s swatting mosquitoes and squatting over hole-in-the-floor toilets.

  It’s eating alone night after night, while whispering couples glance your way with pity. It’s enviously eyeing the people languorously sunning themselves on the beach and realizing that you’ve got six more beaches to check out before lunch.

  Being a travel writer can be lonely, exhausting and depressing. You’re always on the lookout for a useful anecdote or scoping an angle. You can’t ever let up, because you’re always working. And that’s just the traveling part. After the trip you have to sell your piece – and that can be a time-consuming and energy-draining process. Even if your work has been commissioned beforehand, you have to be patient until the editor finds time to read it, and you may have to rewrite your article substantially after they’ve done so.

  Of course there are moments when it all seems worth it, and the rewards are many. But let us give you an honest, no-holds-barred picture of the challenges you might face, as well as some advice on how to make it all work for you.

  Surviving burnout

  Burnout is a major factor in the travel writer’s life. You grow tired of grueling travel schedules; of airports, train stations and bus depots; of late departures and late arrivals; of packing and unpacking; of trying to drum up the enthusiasm to explore some new uncomfortable corner of the world; of juggling home li
fe and road life. You have to strive constantly to balance fickle earnings with fixed expenses in order to pay your bills and maintain ongoing accounts. You have to set aside money for unexpected expenses and, in the USA, take care of your own health care. Both personally and practically, it can feel like you’re always playing catch-up.

  It’s important to heed the warning signals, and to structure your life accordingly. One antidote is to take a purely pleasure trip at least once a year. If you find yourself burning out in the middle of a trip, try to turn off your mental note-taking machine for a morning and just wander at will, for pleasure, or laze on the beach. Most successful travel writers ground themselves by building in a certain number of months at home between trips; they catch up on relationships and bills, write the pieces they’ve researched, and recharge their batteries.

  Dealing with rejection

  Rejection is part of the freelancer’s life. To survive, you need to adopt a certain Zen attitude, and accept that your stories or proposals will often be rejected. Above all, don’t be derailed by the notion that a rejection is somehow personal, a fundamental rejection of you as a writer or, worse, as a human being. Editors are inundated with stories, the vast majority of which they cannot use; they choose the very few that happen to fit into the particular edition they are currently working on. Becoming a published writer is a job, and you have to approach it with a certain steely professionalism. Prepare your work by following the tips in this book, and persevere by continuing to write and submit your proposals and stories.

  If you ever do find yourself sinking into the slough of depression, remember that virtually every writer, even the most legendary, has been rejected at some point in their professional life. For example, when he was starting out as a writer, the National Book Award-winning US writer John McPhee submitted dozens of story ideas to the New Yorker; each one was rejected. He persevered until they finally accepted one. A few years later he was a staff writer for that renowned magazine – one of the most coveted writing jobs in the USA. Rejection is simply part of the process.