When you’re creating content for your travel blog, you can do more than one post about a destination you’ve been to. Search for different angles about the country you’re going to the way that journalists and feature writers do.
Travel journalists follow a similar structure to travel bloggers, but often push their work further. By thinking like a journalist, you can strengthen your blog by adding quality content with in-depth information.
Here are my top tips to think like a journalist for better quality blog content.
1. Ask the right questions
Journalists start every story by asking five questions, “who, what, where, when, and why.” For travel stories—aside from the obvious “where”—the most important of these questions is “why.” Why did you choose this destination to cover? Why go there now? (This also nicely covers the “when.”) And, most importantly, why should your reader care?
2. Interview everybody
You never know who you might meet on your travels. Keep a journal or notebook with you as stories are everywhere! If you get talking to an interesting person, don’t be afraid to take out the journal and jot down some notes. People are naturally drawn to stories about other people—hence the “who” in journalists’ five questions.
3. Double-check facts
Is Paris the most visited city in the world? I don’t know and it is a possibility that the lovely elderly gentleman you spoke to while drinking a latte with the Eiffel Tower in view is incorrect. However, if an expert source told you this fact, you might assume they’d be correct. Even so, journalists never take the first word with facts. Ideally, you should have at least two sources (the more the merrier) for statistics and facts. If quoting a study or other trusted and accredited source, say so. “Paris is the third most visited city with 17.44 international visits says MasterCard’s 2019 Global Destination Cities Index.”
4. Develop story angles
Say you’ve just spent some time on the Mediterranean island of Malta and want to share your experience there. The article “My Vacation in Malta” is a generic, top-level approach to your experience. Being a travel addict, I am very likely to read your vacation in Malta. However, if you want to optimize your time in a country, you should target different types of audiences. By doing this, you will bring more traffic to your blog.
Here are a few examples of how your vacation to Malta can be written in different ways to create fresh new content:
- “The Home of Game of Thrones: What Malta Has to Offer Fan-Fanatics.” Targets TV fans.
- “Cave Diving in Comino.” Targets adventure seeks and divers.
- “Malta Is a Home Away from Home for Brits. They Even Drive on the Left Side of the Road.” Targets U.K. families looking for new but accessible destinations.
What was originally one article has become three articles targeting a variety of people.
By taking these journalism principles and applying them to your blog, you will create quality content that sets you ahead of the crowd and brings readers back time and again.