These are some of the most common travel blogging questions we’ve been asked. Here’s what we’ve learned over the past 12 years of blogging and want to share with you.
What’s your process for making content?
It depends on what kind of content it is; if I’m making a video, the answer could be go outside with my tripod, find a nice view and just start. When it comes to development, that’s a totally different process, and writing is another process. Always write things down. Set out a rough plan for the day, week, and month so you can be efficient. Again, always write down your ideas. Sometimes an idea doesn’t sound very good when you write it down, but you never know how it can manifest a couple of weeks later.
How do you make most of your money? Is it through sponsors?
There are 2 ways to go about this. 1) you have to ask yourself why would anybody want to give you money? What skills do you have, what can you offer? How can you be useful to other people? That’s the first thing you need to address. After you figure that out, there are to strategies that you can go with. One, you can find one way to make $1 million. Or, you can find a million ways to make $1.
So some people are really good at finding the one way that makes one million dollars, it’s a lot more rare. But it’s a lot easier to find a lot of ways to make money and let that accumulate. So what I would say is think of your business or finances as a table, and the more legs you have for that table to stand on, all the better. You don’t need to find just one way to make money.
If you look through my site, you can see there are lots of ways that I’m generating revenue. I would say don’t try to copy something that someone is doing specifically, but maybe look at the strategies that blogs are using and see what is working for other people and maybe what isn’t working for other people.
I highly recommend that you go through a lot of trial and error. There is one case where it doesn’t matter how talented you are or aren’t at something, and that is when hard work is involved. That’s something that’s all on you. You have no excuse not to work hard. The harder you work the more results you’re going to get, and the one thing that you can do to even the playing field, the one thing that is in your control is hard work.
What are some platforms you use to spark growth for your blog?
I started blogging more than ten years ago. And at that time, there really wasn’t Instagram so I was doing Facebook and Twitter, and now I’m doing a lot more YouTube, which is something that I did start years ago and sort of gave up on. Now, I’m really getting back into it, and I really enjoy the process of making videos. I don’t really have a good answer for this question, I don’t really have a good method to spark growth. I just keep trying to be useful and help people travel smarter. I think if I keep doing that and I keep being successful with that I can help the blog grow.
Did you attend conferences to get started?
Yes, when I first started my blog about 10 years ago, I did attend one conference, the TBEX conference, which was nice. I met some other bloggers who I’ve kept in touch with since then. But actually since then, I haven’t really gone to any other conferences. I don’t think conferences are particularly useful and I know a lot of people wouldn’t agree with me on that. But for me, I just don’t think they’re useful for what I do. They’re great for meeting people and connecting with other people but conferences I don’t think were a big part of my blog growth.
How many hours a week do you work on your blog?
That really depends, but it’s probably a lot. I don’t know exactly, but it’s well over 40 or 50 hours.
What are the type of skills that you need to know to start a blog?
How to make a website is a good one.
What are the best/worst parts of your job?
The worst parts of the job are nothing to complain about. I can’t think of one single worst part about the job to be absolutely honest with you. It’s got normal work stresses, sometimes it’s a little busier than others, but nothing really major to complain about, which is kind of nice. I guess add that to best parts about the job.
