Most recently, the travel blogging phenomena has exploded with new blogs popping up daily. This is mainly due to the recent growth and prosperity of affiliate links. Today, Ariana from PointChaser describes “How Lucrative is Travel Blogging?” I believe that travel blogging can be lucrative, but the fallacy is that blogging will get you rich quick.
Why is travel blogging not easy? Well, first of all you need to have a niche or else you will just be another blog in the travel blogosphere. Just like going to college in your freshman year, you’re treated like a number. How you differentiate yourself from others is how you carry yourself throughout your career at the university. This is the same for travel blogging.
Here are some reasons why travel blogging is not easy:
Unique Content
It’s pretty tough to compete with other blogs unless your content is unique. How hard is it to come up with unique content? It’s pretty hard. Readers aren’t stupid and can differentiate between unique content and filler content.
Daily Content
If you’re already having trouble with unique content, you’re going to have a tougher time coming up with daily content. The purpose of your blog is to attract readers from around the world. If you’re not posting daily, people are not going to be visiting your site.
Engagement
It’s tough to respond to every comment and every tweet left by readers. If you don’t respond to your readers, they might feel left out and might stop following your blog. It’s important to engage with readers.
SEO
I read that approximately 20% of your views should be coming from search engine referrals. After writing that blog post, you should be focusing on top keywords and tags which can bring in new readers from Google.
Hosting
Recently, Bluehost has gotten a lot of heat for downtime since it’s very popular hosting company for bloggers. You do need a good host that will provide 99% uptime because you will lose readers during the downtime.
Security
Now that you have a blog, you’re vulnerable to security issues such as DDoS denial of service attacks and hackers. It’s important to make a daily backup of your blog. Some bloggers do a 2x daily backup just in case. You never know until the day you lose everything and you don’t have some sort of backup.
Affiliate Links
It’s tough to get affiliate links if you don’t get enough page views.
Competition
There will always be a travel blogger that is much better than you. It’s a tough world out there.
Your list is spot on. Blog because you love the hobby and worry about monatization aspect later. Otherwise you are going to have a hard to justifying the long nights writing posts.
The prolifiration of so many new bloggers results in readers looking at most of these blogs with jaundiced eyes. As a reader, I roll my eyes when I see a new blog from an inexperienced blogger, aggressively seeking to monetize. Here’s a clue – if you just started
the “travel hobby” in 2012, don’t quit your day job.
Is it the inexperienced blogger you roll your eyes at or the blatant attempt to monetize?
It would have to be a combination of both. I have to get my credit cards by clicking a link somewhere and I actually seek out links on bloggers’ sites that give me real information and/or entertainment. I have no problem paying for “services rendered”. There are others, on the other hand, that don’t have the content, expertise or humility to be worth my time. Some people want to run before they can walk.
Did you say entertainment? 😉
And this was so so good:
Some people want to run before they can walk.
Seriously love your posts Jamison. Keep up the great work.
So true Jamison – Hard to constantly be creating new content, plus all the other zillion things you have to do… I love to travel and that will never stop, so for me, the blog is just an extension of that, not really for monatization, but for the joy it brings me and the social interaction, although it would be nice to get paid!!
Thanks for the tip about backups. Never thought of that.
I just started my own blog, but I’m pretty much sold on the fact that I may never make money on it so focusing on polishing my focus and content.
Don’t be sold on the fact that it will never make any money. “If you build it (well), they (readers) will come.”