When I first started travel blogging, I hadn’t been abroad in eight years. Yet, somehow, I’d been bitten by the travel bug while going about my mundane life.
I already had a blog, but I decided one day that I wanted it to have more of a travel focus. Here’s how I got started writing about travel despite not having the means to do any actual traveling…
Write about past trips
I found that writing posts reminiscing about past trips was not only a great way to take a stroll down memory lane, but also a great way to ease myself into travel blogging. Writing about past trips allowed me to practice different writing styles (lists, guides, creative prose) and learn what makes a good, popular piece of travel writing based on how my readers responded to the article. This helped me to decide what kind of content I should produce on any future trips.
Write bucket-lists
Writing about places you want to visit doesn’t have to be just a dull list of cities or activities… instead, you can use these types of articles to research a destination and find fun facts to give to your reader.
It also enables you to get on the radar of tour companies and tourist boards of the places you include on the lists, so that they know you’re up for trips there at a later date.
Write about your hometown
You might not consider visiting new places in your own hometown to be “travel,” but someone reading your blog post may be coming to the town as a visitor and will be in need of insider knowledge.
This also allows you to go out and explore places that residents of a town tend to ignore. Go out and see your hometown through the eyes of an explorer—you’ll learn something new, you’ll feel like you’ve taken a mini-break, and you’ll have something fresh to write about.
Writing about your hometown will also help you to build up a network of local contacts that you can tap into once your travel blogging career starts to take off.
Blogging is fun. Don’t let the fact that you don’t currently have the means to travel stop you from pursuing you dream of becoming a travel blogger… and eventually using your blog to help you land paid articles or free perks. It takes a bit more time and a little bit of creativity to get off the ground, but if you keep it up, you’ll get there.
The best place to start your journey with us is with our free newsletter The Right Way to Travel. Sign up here today and we’ll send you a complimentary copy of our new report Five Fun Ways to Get Paid To Travel: A Quick-Start Guide.