Finance Your Dream Holiday With A Travel Blog

Holidays are expensive, particularly if you fancy travelling to some far-flung destination on the other side of the world. There are various ways to pay for a dream holiday. You could save up for a year or more or even take out a low cost credit card if you don't mind having a huge debt hanging over your head for a couple of years. But before you give up on the idea of travel because of the cost involved, it is worth mentioning that there is another way to finance travel. Yes, you could do what a lot of other web savvy individuals have done in the last few years: start a travel blog and use it to earn money.

How to Create a Travel Blog

Creating a travel blog is easy, but if you want to earn money from blogging there are a few things you need to be careful of. Firstly, although there are several free blog providers online, you can’t place any commercial adverts on a free blog. The only way you can place ads on a blog is if you host it yourself. This means you will need a domain name and a hosting provider. Once you have this in place, all you need to do is install Wordpress or similar and away you go.

3 Ways to Earn Money from a Blog

The key to earning money from a blog is to add advertisements and/or affiliate links to your content. Google Adsense is a popular scheme—all you have to do is sign up for an account and once you have been accepted, follow the instructions to place ads on your blog. Another way is to sign up for an affiliate scheme. However, you do need to find one that is related to your blog content for there is little point in placing ads for cat food if you are predominately writing about backpacking around Thailand. The third way to earn money from a blog is to encourage people to donate to your cause—open a PayPal account or similar and include a link on your blog where people can give you money.

Create Great Content

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The best way to encourage people to keep coming back to your blog is to write lots of interesting content. Travel blogs benefit from lots of photos and pictures, so don't be afraid of posting pictures of the places you want to go as well as the places you are currently visiting. If you are already travelling, treat your blog like a diary and add a new entry every few days or so. Visitors will keep coming back if they know the content is updated regularly.

Practice SEO

Although quality content is very important on a blog or website, in order to increase the number of visitors to your blog (and thus earn more money from it) you will need to learn a little bit about basic SEO. If you know nothing about SEO, it is a good idea to read up and find out more about it. SEO is a continually evolving field of play, so make sure you keep on top of the latest developments if you want to maximise your chances of success.

Blog writing is fun, so even if your blog never earns you a penny, enjoy the creating writing process and use it to keep friends and family entertained while you backpack around Southeast Asia for a year.

Featured images:

•  License: Creative Commons image source 
•  License: Creative Commons image source 
•  License: Creative Commons image source 
•  License: Creative Commons image source 
•  License: Creative Commons image source 

When not obsessing over rugby, Jack Norway likes to keep track of the latest travel packages and his favorite holiday destinations. He works at Picture Point Terraces, a first class resort facility provider. In his free time, he likes to blog about his traveling experiences.