Should You Start a Travel Blog?
We get lots of questions from people about whether or not they should start a family travel blog, or perhaps even just start a road trip blog of a particular trip, so let’s take a look at some of the reasons you should and shouldn’t start a travel blog and if it will be right for your family. Remember, it’s such a personal decision both in starting a blog, and how you present it, maintain it, that what you choose to do will ultimately need to be the best choice for your family.
Top Reasons to Start a Travel Blog.
1. You want to keep your friends and family up to date: This is probably the number one reason that most people decide to start a travel blog of their own, and it’s a great reason to give it a go. The most popular blogging platforms allow you a couple of options when it comes to the privacy of your blog. You can keep it totally private so that it requires a password to log in and read, you can just block search engines to try and stop it showing up in search results, or you can leave it open to anyone and everyone who wants to find it.
2. You want to document your travels for later: Blogging is a great way to document your travel journey around Australia, your family holidays, or a specific time in your life. Unlike a written journal or scrapbook, it’s easy to make notes on your phone, take digital pictures, and videos, and bring it all together into a colourful collection of memories. Our kids complete hand written travel journals as we go, but printing out photos to go with their words can be a hassle, which is why I love how instantly we can upload blog posts and they will always be there to come back to.
3. You enjoy writing: If you want to blog, then you’ll need to love writing, or at least love the challenge of writing out your trip details. Blogging does take some time and effort to put into practice, so if you’re not sure you’ll be able to find the motivation to type out your blog posts, then you might find yourself struggling a bit. A great way to help yourself is use the notes section on your phone to plot reminders about funny incidents, things you’ve done and other memory jogs, that way you can refer to it to help bring your words to life.
Top Challenges of Travel Blogging
1. Staying up to date can be really difficult: For instance, for us, during our three month Tasmanian holiday proved a difficult time to stay on top of our blog. We use solar power to keep our van batteries charged, and a generator for backup. Because we were in Tassie as it cooled down in Autumn, it made things a little more difficult with keeping laptops and phones charged. Added to that, the beautiful Tasmanian scenery is so mountainous that phone and internet service is patchy, it became easier to admit defeat and know we’d have a backlog of things to write about on our return to mainland.
2. Your life is on the Internet: Think Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. If you have accounts for those, then much of your life is probably on the internet anyway. Having a blog is great fun, and you can add as much or as little detail as you are comfortable with broadcasting online. As already mentioned, most blogging platforms allow you to hide your blog from public view, or limit who can see it anyway so it’s easy to just give access to family and friends. We just prefer to be safe. We rarely post our exact location at any time, just because I’m mindful of the fact I’m exposing my children to the outside world. Sometimes we do, especially if we’re working with a brand or at an event, but most blog posts are written later on. It’s up to you if you show your children’s faces, or give away any other details of your family.
3. Real world over the virtual: The more you blog, the more exciting it can become, especially if you start to see possibilities of building a brand or working with destinations and product providers, or if you install Google analytics and see the number of people who are visiting to read your blog. The best advice I have here, is before you worry about how good this trip will be for the blog, or that you need to get this type of photo for the blog, or visit that type of attraction, think about your family first. Blogs are hard work, but they should be fun, and your family won’t really care in the long run that the blog is there, sure they’ll love having it to look back over, but they’ll care more about the time, in the real world that you shared together.
A note on making money with blogs: Yes, it is very possible for blogs to produce an income for their owners. It takes a lot of hard work, time and effort to produce a blog that is worthy of income and goodies to start flowing your way. It is however possible, and you shouldn’t let anyone tell you otherwise. If you’re interested in starting a blog as a business, then feel free, as always to drop us a line and we’ll do what we can to answer any questions you have.
