How To Start A Travel Blog – Beat My Path
DISCOVER THE AMAZING WORLD OF ONLINE TRAVEL WRITING WITH BEAT MY PATH!!!
Millions of people throughout time have had the sudden urge to travel the world, escape reality, and start over with a process of discovery and self-awareness. It’s no secret that one of the most desired lifestyles on offer is that of the nomadic traveller, so it’s no wonder so many people take the leap into the unknown and want to discover HOW TO START A TRAVEL BLOG!!!
Whether it’s a few-weeks’ holiday, or a twelve month gap-year before you change direction and start afresh; the travel bug is always there – crouched in the back of your mind, whispering your name. Maybe you want to turn life on its head and set out on a one way path to find peace within? Travelling the world and discovering new cultures, new experiences, new ways of life, and possibly even finding a new you, is a truly beautiful thing and something that can really inspire the best in people.
However, once you finally take that step, and you’re travel dream is turning out to be everything you ever wanted, and more – what then? What do you do with these wonderful adventure stories and how do you inspire others with the lessons you have learnt along the road? How do you communicate the emotions, the enlightenment, and the new ways of thinking that you have achieved? That’s we’re we come in – YOU START A TRAVEL BLOG AND TELL YOUR STORY TO THE WORLD!
People start travel blogs, diaries and journals, for a variety of reasons;
- To communicate with loved ones back home,
- To record the wonderful adventures they have along the way,
- To share their experiences with fellow travellers and,
- For the love of writing and story-telling
Beat My Path is the perfect solution to help you become a successful travel blogger! The best part about it is, where other options will cost a small fortune, we can help you achieve your goals by giving you the opportunity to GET PAID TO BE A TRAVEL BLOGGER!!! Read-on: discover how – regardless of your reasons for starting a travel blog – we not only have the best tools to get you up and running, but we can help you create a beautiful online platform to start telling your stories, today! The information listed below will not only show you how to start a travel blog with Beat My Path, but it will get you up and running without the painful and tedious tasks that go with creating a travel blog from scratch!
WHAT IS THE BEAT MY PATH TRAVEL BLOGGING COMMUNITY?
Beat My Path is a brand new concept, where we pay our travel bloggers to write amazing content for our platform – and not just convince them to submit their articles for free – and it’s taking the travel world by storm! Our revolutionary online travel blogging community allows our team of bloggers to not only create a fantastic travel diary or journal for themselves, but also to communicate directly with our huge audience of monthly readers; telling their stories and experiences to the world.
Submit an application through our website and get the chance to be seen by our ever growing audience of online readers, and of course, GET PAID TO DO IT! It doesn’t matter if you’re honing your skills and writing for a little bit of fun, or if you’re an Oxford Scholar; Beat My Path wants to hear from, YOU – get started today and tell us your travel stories!
WHY START A TRAVEL BLOG WITH BEAT MY PATH?
At Beat My Path, we like to be honest with our writers, so they know what they’re getting in to – before they get in to it! When it comes to starting a travel blog you have two options; you can start fresh, on your own; or you can write for us and GET PAID TO BE A TRAVEL BLOGGER!
Let us be clear; if your reasons for starting a travel diary are any of the four reasons listed at the top of this article, Beat My Path is the perfect option for you to get started immediately. However, before we begin with why you should join our travel blogging community, we would like to discuss a more important topic; the overwhelming difficulties involved with starting a blog of your own, from scratch.
Most people set out with the best of intentions and dreams of becoming the next big travel writer, making money from article after article, written from a hammock over-looking crystal-clear waters, sipping on a cocktail. We’re sorry to break it too you, but this is NOT how it works! Starting a successful travel journal is a bit like winning the lottery, but you don’t just “get lucky”! You actually have to work countless hours, spending huge amounts of money, with little to no return, for YEARS!
Before you ask yourself “How To Start A Travel Blog”, let’s address some of the issues that you may not have thought of until now, which will help you to decide the more important questions of, “What Do I Want To Achieve With My Travel Blog”. We will highlight how these issues may affect your path to success if you chose to start a new blog on your own, from scratch. We will also endeavour to explain how these issues can be avoided by creating a blog with Beat My Path.
MARKET SATURATION – WILL YOU BE SEEN?
Starting On Your Own: Did you know when you search Google for “Paris Travel Blog”, there are more than 30 million listings that appear? I bet you probably expected that, but have you ever really taken the time to think how that might relate to your ambitions of starting a travel blog?
Well, let’s talk about it… If you’re goals are to communicate and share your stories with other travellers, write for the love of writing (to an audience), create or engage that audience, or make money to pay for your travels; well that needs online traffic and website visitors, and unfortunately you’re starting at the back of the line – behind 30 million fellow bloggers!
It goes without saying that if you’re not on page one, you’re post isn’t being read! And, if you think it’s as easy as flicking the go-switch, and all of a sudden you’ve cut the line straight to the top: we have some very sad news for you! It can take years of SEO (Search Engine Optimisation), and countless amounts of money to make it to the first page, so before you start out on your own, you need to ask yourself – do you have a few spare years and countless amounts of money? If the answer is no, you need to accept, the reasons you have for starting a blog on your own may never be fulfilled. So, is it the right option for you?
Writing With Beat My Path: While we may not rank on the first page of every travel related Google search, we do have a huge number of active readers who frequent our website on a regular basis, and our traffic numbers are growing every day. So when you start a blog with Beat My Path, your articles have the opportunity to be featured, published and read by a guaranteed audience, straight off the bat!
You don’t need to worry about SEO, or getting to the top, or waiting years to do it, or it costing you even one cent, because once your articles are published on our public website, they are being read! Instantly your goals have a REALISTIC chance of success, as your stories will be instantly read by travellers from around the world. Create great content and engage and grow your audience – Beat My Path is no pipe-dream!
Oh, and did we mention that you get paid to write for Beat My Path? That’s right! Instead of you forking out $1000’s, and spending countless hours in front of a computer – most likely to get absolutely no where and fail miserably – we turn the tables in your favour, and WE PAY YOU TO BECOME A TRAVEL BLOGGER FOR BEAT MY PATH!!! Why would you do it any other way?!?!?
SETUP COSTS AND ONGOING EXPENSES
Starting On Your Own: We touched on the cost of Search Engine Optimisation above, but when it comes to starting a travel blog from scratch, unfortunately that is just where the expenses begin… There’s soooooo much more where that came from! Let’s outline a few of the typical website costs;
The Domain – This is the cost of purchasing a domain. Depending on the domain type you purchase, this is usually around $10 – $30 each year. Domains also carry optional extras such as “Domain Privacy”; this stops scammers and marketing companies from acquiring your contact details and harassing you with never ending sales calls. Highly recommended, but prices vary depending on the registrar.
Web Hosting – This is the cost of hosting your blog on a web server. Typically this can be up to $200 per month for a very large blog, but expect to pay around $30 per month for the average website.
Blogging Platform – Once you have a domain and you’ve purchased a hosting plan, now you need to find a blog platform which allows you to create a website and publish it. There are many good platforms out there to choose from, but they obviously cost money. Expect to pay between $10 and $100 per month, depending on the platform you choose and the optional extras you might require.
Blog Themes – Website themes are the colours, styles and layouts of the website – essentially the “design” of your blog. Most platforms come with a small selection of free themes to choose from, and you can always choose one of these free themes and get started right away. However, most of the free themes are very basic in their design; if you want a more professional looking website, you will need to opt for a more professional theme which can set you back between $30 and $500. There is also the option of a custom theme where a company will design you an original template which is totally unique to your brand and style. A custom theme will set you back between $3,000 and $20,000.
Blog Plugins – Plugins are external tools provided by companies to assist you in getting the most functionality and ease-of-use out of your blog. These plugins are totally optional and you can get by without them, but if you want to maximise your time and functionality, they will be an additional fee.
As you can see, the costs, both initial and ongoing, can be exorbitant and very expensive. If you lay out the initial expenses only to realise you don’t have the time or effort to take your blog all the way, you will have wasted quite a large amount of money. There is also the issue that as time goes by, and you’ve spent years creating your blog, and endless hours curating your posts; if you can no longer afford the ongoing expenses, the blog will be removed and the memories will be lost forever.
Writing With Beat My Path: NOT ONLY IS IT FREE – WITH NO INITIAL OR ON-GOING EXPENSES – BUT WE PAY YOU TO WRITE!!! While you may not get the luxury of creating your own domain, or selecting or designing a custom theme to match your style and personality, you do get your own personal online space on our website, all to yourself! You will also gain access to all of the additional benefits that come with writing for the Beat My Path community, like getting paid for your content and your time, of course! No other travel blogging platform can offer you this, so why would you want to do it any other way!
When you write for Beat My Path, there are no hosting fees, no account set-up fees, no subscriptions fees, or even any fees required for plugins – and we have an amazing team of experts on-hand who take care of everything technical, so you don’t have to! Oh, and remember when we told you how much Search Engine Optimisation costs? Well, we take care of that too! So, with a huge number of active readers already visiting our website each and every day, you have the opportunity to achieve your goals without laying out a single cent!
TRAVEL TIME & SPENDING MONEY
Starting On Your Own: When you decide to start a travel blog, you need to consider quite strongly; how much time and money do you have? If you’re just writing for the people back home, you can skip this point completely – it’s not relevant. But if you really want to be a player in the travel blogging industry, you need to take this point very seriously as it really is a dream-killer for most people. Bear with us, this will take a bit of explaining but there is a very strong point to be made!
Before we start, we need you to ask yourself the following question; can you afford to travel to new and exciting places weekly, if not daily, experiencing the best attractions from around the world, all without receiving a salary, for at least two years?
Why? We’re glad you asked!
When it comes to getting a successful travel diary, journal or blog started and taking it through to its successful completion, we have covered the issues above, regarding market saturation and the initial and ongoing website costs. These are hard enough things to overcome on their own, however, before you even consider those issues, you must consider the biggest problem of all; the thing that stops most blogs in their tracks – the time and money required to travel the world and write the wonderful stories you’ve been dreaming of. It’s not so much a question of how much time and money you have to get your blog started – anyone can go on a holiday and come back with a box full of great experiences to write about. It’s actually how long you can afford to consistently travel without working on any other project or job – because if you can’t do it for a minimum of two years, you might as well give up now, SORRY!
Essentially, you can’t write about Paris if you can’t travel to Paris. You can’t tell people the best things to do and see, or places to eat, or hotels to stay in, if you can’t afford to do it yourself. Most people can’t afford to pay for these things if they’re writing for free and unfortunately most people aren’t independently wealthy with passive incomes to rely on. The most heartbreaking part is, the process of building a successful travel journal, diary or blog, building an audience and creating a successful brand, takes the best writers and marketers around two years of constant full-time work. Successful bloggers will write new and interesting posts every few days, and to do this they have to have new and interesting experiences every few days – they treat this as a full time job and invest their entire life-savings into the risky leap-of-faith, with the hope that one day it will pay off. Either that, or they’re filthy rich and just like to travel!
The thing you need to ask yourself is; will you run out of time and money before your travel blog makes it to the top? As we mentioned above; most travel bloggers take in excess of two years to establish their success, and this is all the while writing a new article every few days. If you can’t afford to travel for at least two years, and write a new and unique post every few days, then despite your best efforts, and the best posts on earth, it may never gain the traction required to be a successful option. If this is the case, the costs involved in the initial setup may be spent in vain and a “free” option seems to be the only logical choice.
Writing With Beat My Path: WE HAVE GOOD NEWS – Beat My Path is already a well-established travel blogging platform with an already well-established reader base! If you want to write for us, it doesn’t matter if you’re travelling for a week at a time, a month every year, or for the rest of your life! We will always be here when you decide to take your next holiday, and you can submit your new articles and content, piece by piece, as you take your next adventures.
How good is that! Take a holiday, have an amazing time, come home and write about it – GET PAID TO BE A TRAVEL BLOGGER!!! BOOM!!!
With Beat My Path you don’t need to “gain traction”. You don’t need to “continuously engage your audience”. You don’t need to “worry about marketing”. You don’t even need to travel that often! If you are a great, engaging writer, and you take the time to create informative articles, you can essentially get paid to travel by writing about your annual holidays or weekends away! Over time, you will not only wind up with a fantastic, interesting travel blog (hopefully with a large following of your own), but also with a lifetime record of your amazing stories and memories.
Not only does it cost you absolutely nothing to get started, but you also don’t have to continually pour money into trips that you might not be able to afford, just to have a remote shot at being read online by even a single person. With Beat My Path you can travel at your own pace, and write when you want to write… we, and more importantly, our readers, will be here when you’re ready to pick up where you left off!
THE SUMMARY
If you have read everything we have written, considered all the options and possibilities, and you still want to go out on your own and take on the world – we commend you! It’s a hard and very challenging path you’re about to walk and we wish you the best of luck at success! If you climb the mountain and gaze out over the summit, you will be all the more proud that you have achieved it on your own, and we applaud that type of courage!
However, if you want the opportunity to become a successful travel blogger, without the long, expensive, and drawn-out process of starting from scratch, all while getting paid to do it: APPLY TO BECOME A BEAT MY PATH TRAVEL BLOGGER TODAY!
The application process is simple and easy, and you can have an initial response within just a few days! Follow the instructions on our Write For Us page, and we look forward to reading your work soon!
HOW TO GET APPROVED & PUBLISHED ON BEAT MY PATH
So you’ve submitted your application to join the Beat My Path travel blogging community, and you want to know how to get started writing great articles that will not only get published on our public website, but will also get you noticed and seen by our huge monthly audience of readers?
Will you be the next big thing? Will you be our next top-travel-blogger? Only time will tell, but if that’s your goal, there’s a few things you should know about creating the best possible blog so you stand out from the crowd!
CREATE GREAT CONTENT WITH DETAILED INFORMATION
The most important part of writing a great blog is to make sure the content and the information it provides is exceptional. You don’t necessarily have to be the best writer on the planet, but the information you provide must be detailed and well set out so it can be useful to, and easily understood by our readers. We recommend that a good quality blog article should be NO LESS THAN 2000-WORDS IN LENGTH.
Make sure you explain what you liked, and why you liked it; describe the country, city or attraction in great detail, and speak from the heart – tell the reader what you felt when you had the experience, and why you felt that way. You want to make the reader jump out of their skin, feel what you felt, and wish they stood where you stood.
TAKE AMAZING PHOTOS
When it comes to the images you include in your blog, more doesn’t always mean better. The most amazingly written blog can be ruined by an overbearing amount of really bad photos – so if in doubt, only use the best looking images and leave the others out. That said, they don’t have to be perfect! People want to see what they’re reading about and it doesn’t matter if you’re not the world’s best photographer. Bottom line – whatever you decide, don’t let us scare you away from including every image you want to include, because at the end of the day, it’s your blog and yours alone – add in whatever you want! Just keep in mind that when it comes to being published on our website and standing out to our readers, images matter.
Try to make sure your images are of the highest quality available. If you’re taking photos from your phone, we HIGHLY RECOMMEND a free image editing app called “Snapseed”, which is available to be downloaded for free in all major smartphone app stores. This easy-to-use app allows you to instantly turn any bland image into a masterpiece bursting with colour and vibrance!
WRITE ABOUT A SPECIFIC TOPIC
When it comes to getting published, we give a very high weighting to specificity. Basically, if you’re writing about a country, then write about that country. If you’re writing about an attraction, then write about that attraction. Try to stay away from writing about multiple unrelated countries or attractions in the same blog.
For example; if you are writing about “Mexico”, then write about Mexico as a whole, the cities you visited in Mexico, and your favourite attractions in those cities. We wouldn’t recommend including the next country you visited along the way. If you visit more than one country, we recommend you split them into separate articles.
WRITE ABOUT INDIVIDUAL ATTRACTIONS
Most people tend to write generally, about a country or a destination they have visited. However, no one seems to want to write about the little guy – an entire blog dedicated to one specific attraction. It might surprise you to know that these are often the articles that are read the most. Think about it, when you’re looking for information about a hotel, restaurant, bar or attraction; what are you going to read? Obviously, you want an article that details every aspect of the attraction you’re interested in! Go a step further – do you want to read a 2 sentence review, or do you want a full-blown article by someone who can not only capture the feeling, but can positively describe the experience in every single detail – someone who makes you want to experience it for yourself!
For example; if you visit Paris and you loved the Eiffel Tower – write a blog about Paris, but then you should consider writing another one specifically about the Eiffel Tower, or the quaint little cafe you had breakfast at, or the luxury hotel you stayed in. It’s these sorts of articles that not only get published, but really get the readers juices flowing!
WRITE ABOUT NEW DESTINATIONS AND ATTRACTIONS
Beat My Path is always growing and we can’t grow without new and informative information! One of the easiest ways to get published on our website is to write a blog about a destination or an attraction that we don’t have listed on our website. If it’s not on our website, we want it on our website, and if you’re the first person to write about it, there is a good chance we’re going to publish it!
WE LOOOOOVE LISTS!!!
We, and our readers, LOVE lists. They are easy to read, easy to understand and they’re full of great information! So what do we mean when we say lists? Something along these lines; “The Top 10 Things To Do In New York City” – write about your experience with the top attractions in New York City; tell the reader what each attraction is and what made it so great for you. Maybe you could try the “Most Beautiful Cities To See In Spain” or, “Top 10 Countries To Visit in Asia”. Readers love to read them, and we love to publish them. It should go without saying, but make sure you don’t just list a few countries and cities on the page – and that’s it. For each country, city, or attraction that you list in the blog, you will need to write a few interesting paragraphs explaining what it is, and why it made your list.
WE ALSO LOVE TRAVEL ADVICE
When it comes to travel blogs, we also like to hear your advice on a subject. Maybe that’s regarding “Solo Female Travel In South America”, or “Scammers in Beijing”, or “How To Make Your Money Go Further in Australia”. When it comes to these types of blogs, they need to be specific to a region, country, city or attraction, but our readers find them VERY informative – so tell us what you know!
SO, THERE YOU HAVE IT!!!
These are our best practices for creating the best possible blog to get published! If you have any further questions regarding our process, or you would like to know how we can help you with your goals of becoming the best writer you can be, please Contact Us at any time. We wish you the best of luck with your future goals, we hope our guide on how to start a travel blog has helped you in your decisions, and will continue to help you along the way, and finally, we want to say a big thank you from everyone in the Beat My Path travel blogging community – we hope you will join us soon!