If being able to travel while you work is your idea of heaven, maybe it’s time to start a travel blog. It’s what Christina and I do full time now and we absolutely love it. Thankfully starting a travel blog is easy when you know how, so we thought we’d share our tips on getting your very own site up and running. Here’s how to start a travel blog in about 15 minutes. You even get your blog’s domain free.
We’ve all had that horrible feeling of sitting at work and wondering where we’re going. It definitely happened to Christina and me, and we feel so grateful that blogging became an option for us.
We didn’t start out meaning to run a travel site though. Initially we wanted to write lifestyle stories focused on a he said she said perspective, which we still write occasionally.
The biggest problem we faced was finding a suitable domain name for our blog. Christina had been blogging from Hair Romance for a few years by that point, so we settled on ‘Mr and Mrs Romance‘ almost by accident.
From there, we’ve travelled around the world, eaten beautiful food at some incredible places and experienced the most remarkable things – and it’s all been thanks to our site.
And the thing to remember is it’s not just about making money (in fact if you’re looking to make an easy buck, don’t get into blogging as a career!), it’s about saving memories. We can look back on our amazing life together so easily now we have a searchable index of our stories.
How to start your own travel blog
Because blogging is so much about sharing, we want to share with you the quickest, cheapest and to be honest easiest way for you to start your own blog, and hopefully find the happiness and satisfaction we’ve had working online.
As you know, we only recommend things that we’ve tried ourselves – from train journeys to Lake Como to trails through the Borneo jungle to see orang utans in the wild.
We used Bluehost when we first started out, and the service is so good, it’s always been the place we’ve told people interested in blogging to go to first. Like I said, we wouldn’t recommend it if we hadn’t tried it and loved it already.
If you do decide to use BlueHost and you click on our link here to get there, we will earn a small commission from BlueHost. The price won’t change for you.
Follow these steps to start a travel blog:
But here’s our step-by-step guide door-opener to a whole new fantastic world of creativity, community, story-telling and the potential to travel the world with your business.
It’s amazing how quick, cheap and simple it is to start your own travel blog once you know where to begin.
There are a few moving parts to any blog. The ‘host’ is basically the home of your site – the amount of memory you pay for to store your blog.
The content management system (in most cases WordPress) is the platform that’s loaded onto the raw memory from your host.
Finally the theme is the look of your site, and this is run by the content management system. These are the three main elements you need for your new blog.
1. Let’s start with the most important part: the host
Bluehost has a few different options for hosting. We recommend the basic plan to begin with. You can move up the plans as your site grows.
The basic plan is cheap and includes everything. When you sign up for your 1st year, it even gives you your domain name for free, which is usually an added cost. Buying a 1, 2 or 3 year plan and paying up front secures your site for that time and is considerably cheaper than paying month by month.
Once you’ve chosen your plan (we’d recommend either the 12, 24 or 36 month package), you need to choose your domain name if you don’t have one already.
This can be the hardest part because it’s got to sum up everything about your site and be available. This screen will tell you if your URL is already taken or not.
Finally, you have some extra details to choose from as part of your package. You probably won’t need many of these, though we do recommend the Domain Privacy Protection, which stops your name and address coming up on public directories like WhoIs.com.
Use a current email address to register your plan as you’ll get your login details etc here.
Then choose your password for your site, which should be as powerful as possible. Hackers love a weak password, so use a range of numbers, symbols and letters in upper and lower cases.
2. Choosing your WordPress options
We use WordPress for Mr and Mrs Romance and Hair Romance, and we find it to be the best option for blogs. This very popular content management system gives you the platform for lots of flexibility to customise your blog.
Bluehost installs WordPress.org onto your account for free automatically, which is awesome. It all happens in the background so you don’t need to worry about connecting it up to the hosting service.
Later down the line, if you choose to upgrade your level of WordPress, you can do that easily. Initially though, the one Bluehost gives you is perfect.
3. Start building your blog and making it beautiful
You need to choose a theme for your blog, which gives your site its particular look, functionality and style. There are lots of beautiful themes that are free to choose from right here. Picking the right theme for you and your blog can take time, and you’ll probably want to change your theme from time to time as well.
Changing themes is easy, so don’t worry that you’ll be forever stuck the theme you choose now.
Once you’ve chosen your theme, you’re ready to go! Start importing images, typing your stories and sharing your travel experiences with the world.
Good luck, travel safe and, most importantly, have fun!
Jim & Christina xx
