Are you looking to make a travel website? If you travel often or want to make traveling a lifestyle for you, then you may want to think about building a money making travel website. There are many travel bloggers that are making a full time income traveling the world and writing about their experiences. While the process of getting this kind of site up and running is challenging, you have to understand that it won’t take away from anything if you travel regularly anyway. Here are some steps you can take to start a money making travel website.
Step 1: Get Your Technology Set Up Right
Before you try to head out to your next adventure, you want to make sure everything is set up correctly. The list includes your web hosting, email marketing service, domain registrar, SAAS subscriptions, cloud hosting and other tools you need to help you run your website and business. The reason this is so important is because you don’t want to deal with problems while you’re in a foreign country with limited connectivity.
Having a reliable web hosting provider and other website/business services will prove to be indispensable for helping you run your business. Having your site go down and having no way to reach customer support because you’re in the middle of nowhere means you’re losing out on hundreds if not thousands of visitors. Once you have that down, you can move on to building and designing your website.
Step 2: Target an Audience and Create the Right Content
The first thing you need to do after you’ve built and designed your website is a target audience and the right content. Think about the audience you want to address. Are you looking to write for budget travelers and backpackers? Do you want to write for travelers that want to stay at the best hotels? Evaluate how you personally travel and see what audience you can appeal to.
Once you have a clear idea on the audience, you need to start creating great content. Start writing travel guides, food tours, stories about excursions and money saving travel tips. Part of creating great content means that you’ll need to really know how to take great photos. If you’re not familiar with using a high quality camera, take some photography classes and think about the equipment you’ll need for your photos.
Step 3: Start Out Looking for Jobs
The easiest way to get started with building a travel website is to find websites to write for. There are many websites and magazines in need of travel content. Look to get your first paid gig so that you can start making some money and build some experience. You won’t get paid much in the beginning. Once you build a respectable portfolio and become a better writer, you’ll be able to ask publications for more.
You also need to think about getting possible jobs to pay for your trips. There might be a few companies willing to pay for part or even all of your travel costs but that’s very rare. Thankfully, there are many jobs that are perfect for travelers. This includes bartending jobs, house-sitting jobs, digital services, to translating jobs. You can also save money on hotels by taking part in the couch surfing program.
Step 4: Digital Marketing and Press
Once you’ve created some great content, you need to get the word out there about your travel website. You want to use as many different strategies as possible from offering free content to other sites, offering free guest posting services, marketing your content on social media to advertising on related sites. In order to make your marketing work for you, you need to make sure that you’re collecting emails from visitors to build an audience for your website.
Another great way to get your website and content out there is to reach out to the press. TV shows, news channels, radio stations, magazines and publishing websites are always on the lookout for interesting content. You need to reach out to these media outlets to generate a lot of buzz. These media outlets have tons of viewers and readers, so getting on these outlets will result in thousands upon thousands of new visitors to your site.
Step 5. Audience Monetization
Of course, you need to be able to monetize your travel website if you want to generate an income. There are multiple ways to do this. The first way is to promote as an affiliate. You can promote travel sites like TripAdvisor, AirBnB and companies for a share of the profits. You can even promote travel related products on your site through Amazon and other vendors.
The second way is to accept sponsorship spots on your website. If you build a large reader base, you can easily command thousands of dollars for ad space on your site. The third way to monetize your site is to sell your own travel guides. You can sell short digital guides for $10-$30 to travelers that have an interest in traveling to the country or city that you’ve written about.
That’s a quick primer on how to start a money making travel website. While this guide covers a good amount of things you need to do, it just scratches the surface when it comes to building a successful website. There’s a lot that goes into building a great travel website, so make a commitment to continue learning if you want to make this a lifestyle business for yourself.
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