Launch Your Travel Writing Career

The single smartest first step to take at the outset of any writing or creative career is to launch a website dedicated to your craft.

Today its easy to launch your travel site in as little as 30 minutes, and build a solid framework in a day.

From there you can grow your site in countless ways, developing your travel niche and personal brand.

There are some fantastic gurus out there with tons of information about online publishing, such as Blogger Abroad and BlogTyrant.

Here’s a quick guide to help you launch your travel site.

What’s Needed to Get Started?

Two key logistical steps:

• Register Your URL with a Host Provider
• Set up a WordPress site

Registering Your URL

First, brainstorm potential names for your travel site and check their availability. You can register URL’s through a site host provider like Bluehost or Hostgator for around $10 per year.

It’s important when naming your site to consider keyword-rich word combinations that can help your rank with search engines. You’ll want your travel site to land high atop Google rankings, so think about two things: niche travel content, and long-tail keyword searches.

1. Niche Travel Content: Be a specialist, not a generalist. Look to develop a reputation for expertise in a particular destination or travel activity. The travel space has plenty of brand-name sites travel populated with huge ranges of content, so focus on a specific region or topic of travel expertise. Establish your niche when building the brand of you.
2. Long-tail keyword searches: With your niche travel content in mind, think about longer strings of keywords that could be potential URLs. Enter different word combinations into a search engine and see what competing sites come up. If your string of keywords yields a page filled with major sites, it will be hard to rank high on Google. Keep searching for your URL sweet spot.

Play around with keyword strings until you find a combination of keywords relevant to your travel niche that yields search results that aren’t overpopulated with major travel media sites.

For a more detailed look at keyword research, check out this Pat Flynn keyword research video, or explore the vast (paid and free) resources of Market Samurai.

Setting Up Your Host Provider

When you’re first getting set up with your host provider you’ll have all sorts of term and payment options — monthly plans, annual plans, biannual plans, etc. You’ll be offered discounts for longer-term commitments, but a yearly plan is a good place to start.

Focus on getting a plan hat’s easy to implement, with solid customer service in case you get stuck.

Like a lot of bloggers, I’d recommend BlueHost for site hosting needs, and use it to run this site. The 24/7 customer support is key. Hostgator is another option, with plans as low as $3.96 / month.

Setting Up Your WordPress Site

With your site domain name secured, its time to install WordPress and get to building your site’s initial framework and posts.

WordPress is one of the main web publishing platforms for bloggers, with a long track record in the industry, and countless customizable themes and plugins.

Installing the program is as straightforward as clicking some buttons for most host providers. After you’ve activated your WordPress site (and the default “Hello World” blog post) take a look around the dashboard:

• Themes: Here’s where your site can start taking on its unique look and feel, with a customizable, site-wide theme. You can search themes by verticals (eg travel, food) for suggestions and download one that looks good.
• Key Plugins: Plugins provide functionality and enhance your site performance. They’re easy to download through the dashboard. Among my favorites two stand out: SEO by Yoast  (search engine optimization) and Askimet (comment spam control.)
• WIdgets: Add content to site sidebars and footers with widgets, the easy-to-use design tools. Lists, links, advertisements, email list sign-up forms and more can be added with text widgets to your site.

Your Site’s Up – Now What?

Areas to consider when you launch your travel site.

• Content Architecture: You have your core topic, what content categories and subtopics stand out? How will you organize the content on your site? Think about how you’ll align your themes and site pages with your content categories.
• Posts: “Hello World” is just the very beginning. It’s your site, blog on topics as desired.
• Social Profile: Secure social handles at Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Tumblr, YouTube etc to match your brand and site.
• Editorial Calendar: Draft a three-month site posting schedule with a varied content blend, including topics of beat expertise. Tag blog posts with categories like “food travel” or “road trip,” add add your Categories widget to a sidebar.
• Rolling Out a Paid Product: Take your site to the next level by introducing a paid product — downloadable eBooks, travel consulting packages, a how-to course in your field of travel expertise, leading writing-specific travel tours. There are more ways to monetize your site than just AdSense and Amazon Affiliates.