How To Write A Travel Blog: The Professional Travel Blog Writing Guide

In this post, I’ll share my 10+ years of travel blog writing experience to help you understand how to write a travel blog that will actually gain an audience.

Whether you’re just starting out, or you’ve been blogging for years, learning how to write a travel blog is something every aspiring travel blogger needs to master.

Unfortunately, so many people out there are writing blog posts that are thin, not formatted properly, and will never be shared by humans or loved by Google bots.

There’s a simple and easy-to-follow formula that you can use to make sure that you’re creating the best travel blog posts possible, both for your readers and for search engines.

If you know how to write a blog post properly, then you can grow your audience, keep readers on your pages and help more people with your blog.

This blog that you’re reading has over 1,200 blog posts on it and we’ve been mastering how to write a blog post for nearly a decade.

In this post, I’m going to show you the secret to how we’ve written so many blog posts that have helped us grow this blog to over 400,000 readers per month and how you can write articles that people will share on their social platforms, helping you to grow your traffic quickly.

How To Write a Travel Blog Post:
Travel Blog Writing Basics

Don’t worry, if you’ve been blogging for a long time and looking for some advanced strategies, we’ll get there later on in this post. But first, we have to cover some of the basics of how to write a blog post. Surprisingly, even some pro-bloggers fail to follow the basic rules of blog writing.

1. Write an Intro

Every good blog post is like an essay. It needs to have a well-defined beginning, middle, and end. The intro to your blog post should be no more than 3-4 paragraphs and in the first paragraph, you should clearly outline what your post will be.

Ideally, you should also mention why you’re an authority on the topic.

In the case of a travel blog, this might mean making it clear that you have spent more than a few hours at the destination you’re writing about (Did you live there? Spend a week there?). For a tech review, it should be clear that you know what you’re talking about and have personally used the product you’re reviewing for a considerable amount of time.

You should also give the reader a hook.

This is a little something to entice them to continue reading. Sometimes this will come in the form of a short sentence that says something like “read on to find out which places to visit and why I wouldn’t go to some of them again”. This kind of writing can hook people into reading more of your content and helps to keep them engaged.

2. Write “The Middle”

The middle of your content is the meat of the post. Make sure you break up this content well and make it as easy to read as possible (more about blog post formatting later in this article). You should have as much information as you can about the topic you’re writing on. 

Make the post as in-depth and useful for the reader as possible.

If you’re writing a diary style blog post about your personal life or your travels, then you should still include some information that will be useful for your readers as well.

Where did you stay? How much did it cost? Where can you order the item from? How many hours does it take to get there? Where is the best place to find it?

Answering these types of questions can help the reader find value in your content, even when the post is a personal story.

3. Write an Outro

The biggest mistake that bloggers make when writing an outro is that they simply repeat the intro. This is a big no-no. The outro is one of the most important parts of a blog post because if people made it that far, they obviously like what you wrote. This is your chance to get them to remember you.

Leave them with something to think about. Give them a question to engage with. Offer them something extra like a short ebook on the topic. Get their email if you can. Encourage them to comment. Lead them to more posts on your blog that are about a similar topic.

It’s important to note here that you should never open a new line of thought in your outro. It can be very jarring to a reader – who has managed to complete reading a long post – to reach the end and find that there’s much more that wasn’t discussed in the article.

Don’t open up a whole new can of worms in the outro. Keep it simple, conclude your thoughts and attempt to invoke some emotion in the reader.

How To Write a Travel Blog:
Choosing a Topic

Before you open up WordPress and click that “New Post” button in your dashboard, you should have already figured out what you want to write about. This isn’t easy for some bloggers out there and it’s true that even if you know how to write a blog post, you might hit writer’s block and not know what to write about. It happens to the best of us! Here are a few handy blog writing tips to counteract that.

Read Other Blogs In Your Niche

A great way to figure out what you should write about next is to draw inspiration from your peers. I’m not saying go onto someone’s blog, find a title and write the exact same post on your own site. Instead, read a few of your favourite bloggers’ most recent posts and see if you can drum up some inspiration.

When authors and novelists have writer’s block, they often pick up a book. For bloggers, a great way to find a new topic to write about is to browse the web for a while.

Find Out What’s Trending On Your Blog

An easy way to write posts that your readers will love is to simply double down on what has already worked for your blog in the past. Do you have a post that already went viral or one that did better than all of the rest?

If you’re not sure what has done well on your site in the past, you can head into Google Analytics and on the left side, you can click Behaviour → Site Content → All Pages. This will show a list of all of your pages organized by the most page views to the least. Look at the top 5 – 6 and see if you can write another blog post about a similar topic and see if it does well again.

Note: Never write the same article twice. Even if you reword everything, it’s best not to have 2 similar posts on your site. Always write 100% original content to ensure you aren’t penalized by Google. 

Find Out What’s Trending Worldwide

Sometimes you just need a little inspiration and a good place to find inspiration is through tools like BuzzSumo and Google Trends. These websites allow you to search for a topic and see what not only what is being written on the subject, but what is being shared the most and talked about the most online. Basically, what’s going viral currently.

As you scroll through the results in these tools, you’ll likely find many topics you can write about. But as always when blog writing, the goal isn’t just to write a great blog post, the goal is to write a better blog post than anything else published online before.

That’s why it’s important to click on at least 4-5 of the results and scan them, make notes, and try to think of ways you can make your article better.

Can you incorporate the best aspects of the 4-5 articles you read? Can you add even better topics that those bloggers didn’t think about? Knowing how to write a blog post is half the battle, but by using this data you can figure out how to write the best post that’s ever been written on the topic.

Break Down What You’ve Already Written

If you knew how to write a blog post before you read this article, you’ll likely have dozens, if not hundreds of them already published on your blog. Go into each of those blog posts and see if you can create a second, supporting article to supplement the information.

A good way to do this is to look at your subheadings (more about subheadings and formatting blog posts later in this post). Are there any subheadings that you could elaborate on and create a separate post for? 

For example, let’s say you wrote a post on your blog called “The 10 Best Compasses For Travel” and in that post, you listed 10 of the coolest compasses on the market. In this case, it would be quite easy to create a separate post for each of these compasses. The post could be more in-depth on that particular compass and you could link the individual compass article back to the main compass list post.

Doing this is great for user experience and even better for Google. This is called a pillar web and it’s one way to ensure that your blog gets seen in search results.

Break Down What Someone Else Has Already Written

Maybe you’re brand new to blogging and not only do you not know how to write a blog post, but you’ve actually never written one. If that’s the case, you can start by writing your first blog post and breaking it down in the way I outlined above. After that, you could also search BuzzSumo for other topics to write about.

Perhaps you aren’t inclined to write a better article than the massive guide you found going viral in BuzzSumo. But could you write a post on one of the subheadings and go into more depth than that writer did? This can be a great way to write shorter posts that are more likely to go viral.

Do Keyword Research

If you’re already taking your blog seriously, then you probably spend the $10 / month on KeySearch. This tool helps bloggers figure out what keywords and key phrases are being searched in Google. It shows how many people search the phrase each month and gives you an idea of how difficult it would be to rank for that term.

But KeySearch is also a great tool for simply finding a new topic to write about. When you type a keyword or key phrase into KeySearch, it populates a column on the right side of the screen with a bunch of “relevant keywords”.

These are often worthy of completely new posts. I can’t count the number of times I’ve found a great new topic to write about from this section of KeySearch.

What makes it even more useful is that oftentimes you find topics in this section that are searched in Google tens of thousands of times per month, meaning that by writing the post, you’ll give yourself a good chance of landing massive traffic.

If this all sounds too confusing, check out my Free SEO Training Video which explains it in great detail.

Travel Blog Writing Ideas
(25 Travel Blog Post Ideas)

There are a few frequently used blog post types that can help your blog writing immensely. Once you have a topic idea, you can look over this list of blog post types to find out what you might want to write about. Try to stagger these so that your blog has a wide variety of post types.

1. Listicle

Everyone loves a list. There’s a reason why magazines always have titles like “7 Effortless Techniques To Lose 20lbs in 20 weeks”. It’s catchy, it grabs people’s attention and it’s engaging. Everyone loves a list.

Listicle Blog Post Ideas For Travel Blogs:

• Things To Do in…
• Where To Stay in…
• Best Neighbourhoods in…
• Top Attractions in…
• Best Restaurants in…
• Meals To Try in…
• Best Hotels in…
• Best Hostels in…
• Best Co-Working Spaces in…

2. How-To’s & Tutorials

Google is all about answering questions and some of the most asked questions in search engines start with the words “how to”. Posts like “how to pack for travel” or “how to fix a kitchen sink” are bound to have high search volume and thus will drive you a lot of traffic, but they’re also super useful for your readers.

How-To Blog Post Ideas For Travel Blogs:

• How To Get from X to Y
• How To Pack For…
• How To Find…
• How To Travel in…
• How To Travel in X on a Budget
• How To Use…
• How To Find Cheap Flights
• How To Find Cheap Accommodation
• How To Pack Efficiently
• How To Pack a Backpack
• How To Pack a Rolling Luggage
• How To Find Luxury Accommodation in…

3. Resource Posts & Link Lists

This is very similar to a listicle, but a link list actually lists other people’s content or services. Posts like “10 Productivity Apps To Save Time & Be More Efficient” are very catchy, super useful and often are highly engaging.

4. Cheat Sheets, To-Do’s & Check-Lists

People love to get stuff done. That’s why these types of posts are often wildly successful. “10 Things To Do Before You Hit The Road” and “A Backpacker’s Packing Check List” are great examples of this type of post for the travel niche, but these posts can be written on any topic.

To-Do Blog Post Ideas For Travel Blogs:

• Packing Checklist For Men
• Packing Checklist For Women
• Packing Checklist For Kids
• Things To Do Before a Big Trip
• Money Saving Cheat Sheet For Travel
• Pre-Flight Checklist For Travellers

5. Reviews

Customers typically like to learn about products and services before they spend money on them. Review posts can be very popular and in fact, there are entire blogs and YouTube channels dedicated to reviews.

6. Comparisons

Once you have two reviews written, why not write a comparison article? If you wrote about two different backpacks for example, try writing the post [Backpack 1] vs [Backpack 2]. Not only are these types of posts super useful, but they’re also often highly searched in Google.

7. Interviews

If you know someone who’s an expert on a topic, why not interview them on your blog? You can put the questions as headings to break up the post and the answers can be very useful for your readers.

8. Collaboration Posts

What the kids call “collabs”, these posts are not only super useful because you can have multiple experts contribute to them, but they’re also good for SEO. You can host a collab post on your site, but also join collabs on other sites, link back to your blog and boost your DA.

Collaberation Blog Post Ideas For Travel Blogs:

• 10 Bloggers Share Their Favorite Countries
• 15 Bloggers Tell Their Scariest Travel Story
• 20 Travellers List Their Top Gifts For Travellers
• 5 Travel Writers Share Their Tips on How To Write a Travel Blog

9. Write About Your Home Town

Often people ask me how to write a travel blog if you’re not travelling yet. This is the perfect opportunity to write about your own city or town. Consider writing things to do, checklists and travel guides to your town.

10. Write About Places You’ve Already Been

Another way to write a travel blog before you start travelling is to write about places you’ve already travelled to. Again, how-to articles, travel guides and things to do listicles will be great options for these types of posts.

11. Write About Saving Up For Travel

People love these types of posts. Consider writing tips and tricks for how to save money for travel. This can be a check-list, a how-to or a cheat sheet, or even just a general guide.

12. Write About Planning Your Trip

This is another travel blog post type that people often overlook. Everyone wants to write about their actual travels, but oftentimes the posts about planning for a big trip have more searches in Google and are more useful to readers.

13. Write About Packing

I mentioned this in the listicle section above, but packing lists are some of travel bloggers’ best travel blog post ideas. They are highly searched in Google and are super useful for would-be travellers.

14. Write About Your Feelings (Diary-Style)

In 2022, these types of blog posts are becoming fewer are further between, but that doesn’t mean there’s not still a place for them. Not everything has to be SEO-focused. Once you have an audience, they’ll likely be invested in your own story. Why not share it with them? Be honest and authentic and tell them how you feel.

15. Best Of’s

Best of’s are a great way to call out your favorite travel bloggers, blog posts, travel gear companies or news articles. Not only do readers love them, but they’re a good way to get noticed and potentially garner some backlinks and partnerships.

16. Suggested Itineraries

If you’ve visited a place and travelled it extensively, then you’re an expert. Consider putting together a 2-day itinerary in a blog post. Include the times of day (ie: 8:00am, wake up and have coffee at The Goat Cafe). Let the reader know how they can follow in your footsteps through detailed travel blog post itineraries.

17. Travel Tips

A list of travel tips, either in general, or for a specific destination, can be real reader magnets. Make sure your tips are as useful as possible and aren’t just generic travel tips and you’ll see your readership engage with them.

18. Travel Blogging Advice

You’ll see that over the past 10 years of travel blogging professionally, we’ve written a lot of travel blogging advice on this blog (like this post you’re reading). As you grow your blog, share your successes (and your failures) with your readers.

19. Income Reports

I know it’s a bit faux pa in most western countries to talk about how much money you earn, but these types of posts are as popular as they are inspiring to would-be travel bloggers. Break down how you earn your income blogging and show the reader how they can benefit from your knowledge.

20. Events Calendar

Particularly if you write about a specific destination like a country or city, events calendars are excellent travel blog post ideas. Write about upcoming events and include important information like times, costs and where to buy tickets.

21. Personal Stories

Harking back to where all travel blogs came from, consider writing chronological stories of your travels. They may not do the best in search results, but they will help endear you to your readers.

22. Ultimate Travel Guides

These types of posts should be 3,000-6,000+ words and should cover everything a reader would want to know about a destination.

Ultimate Travel Guide Post Ideas For Travel Blogs:

• [Country] Travel Guide
• [City] Travel Guide
• [Continent] Travel Guide
• Budget Travel Guide
• Backpacking Travel Guide
• Luxury Travel Guide

23. What I Hate About…

These are extremely controversial and if you write this, you should be ready for 2 things: a lot of amazing engagement and a lot of blowback from readers who disagree. These types of controversial pieces aren’t for the faint-hearted writer, but they can create invaluable conversations on your blog and socials.

24. What I Love About…

On the opposite side of the spectrum of #23, blogging about what you love about a country or city can create the same level of engagement, without the controversy. People like to hear about travellers who visit their city or country and fall in love with it. Patriots will comment and share your post in the thousands, helping you grow.

25. Write Shock Factor Titles (Clickbait)

I know, we all hate clickbait. But sometimes it just works. Titles of travel blog posts like “We’re Breaking Up” or “I Think I’m Going To Quit Travelling” are extremely effective. Just make sure you’re still being authentic and honest with your audience.

How To Write a Travel Blog Title

Studies have shown that when your blog post shows up in search results or in text links on the web, only one in 5 readers will click that link. The catchier your blog title is, the more you can boost these numbers. Here are a few ways that can help you choose a catchy blog post title.

Use Adjectives To Evoke Emotion

This is a classic marketing tactic that works very well. Instead of simply creating a post called “how to build a brand” you can write something like “How To Effortlessly Build a Brand In 5 Actionable Steps”. By adding the adjectives of “effortless” and “actionable”, you’re more likely to evoke emotion in the reader and thus, you’ll better your chances of them scrolling past the blog post title and actually reading your article.

Blog Writing Adjective Examples:

• Effortless
• Unique
• Painstaking
• Curious
• Fun
• Fantastic
• Free
• Crazy
• Incredible
• Exciting
• Essential
• Game-Changing
• Absolute
• Sexy
• Strange

What is The Perfect Travel Blog Post Title Length?

Actually, there is no perfect length for a blog post title, but Google will truncate your title if it’s longer than 65 characters, so you should never go beyond this length. Some studies have shown that headlines between 8 and 12 words are shared most often on Twitter, while headlines between 12 and 14 words are liked most often on Facebook, but this is in no way a science.

A more recent 2020 study by Backlinko showed that URLs at position #1 are on average 9.2 characters shorter than URLs that rank in position #10.

Use Numbers in Your Blog Post Title

This is a great way to grab people’s attention. We all love a number. It helps us to estimate how much time we’ll spend reading the post and it tells our brain that what we’re about to read is going to be broken up and easy to digest. Not all numbers are created equal! Odd numbers and double matching digits (like 22 and 33) tend to be clicked more often.

If you’re writing on a topic where each list item inherently needs a lot of description (Like “Places To Visit in France“), then keep your list a bit lower. The post I’ve linked to here is actually 31 places in France, but I plan to shorten that to 10 because I believe people are overwhelmed when they see the title and aren’t clicking it enough. Use your best judgment when adding numbers to your title and writing blog post lists.

Never Deceive, Always Deliver

The worst thing you can do is have a click-bait title that doesn’t deliver on any of its promises. If you’re telling people that you have “7 effortless ways to grow your Instagram”, then you better actually list 7 ways and they should be effortless (or with very little effort). Never deceive your readers because while you might get initial clicks, you’ll never build a brand this way.

How To Write a Travel Blog
(Travel Blog Writing Format)

The blog writing format is very different from a magazine, a novel or any other typical form of print media. If you were to write a blog post in the same way you’d write a book, you’ll very quickly find that nobody stays on your pages. There are a few key formatting rules that you need to stick with in order to write better blog posts.

Shorter Sentences

People who read online simply don’t have the same attention span that they have when reading a book in print. When they read a book, they’ve gone to the store (or on Amazon), picked it out and plan to read it word for word. This simply isn’t how people read online.

People are in a hurry when they’re browsing the web. They type a question into Google and they want a quick answer. Even the most engaging blogs only keep people on a single page for around 2 minutes on average. This means that you have to learn how to write a blog post that people can scan through quickly.

One of the best ways to do this is by shortening your sentences. Using free WordPress plugins like Yoast, you will even see recommendations about your writing and one of these that frequently pops up is run-on sentences. Sentences in novels can go on for 100 words or more, on a blog, they should never be longer than about 40 words. 

People scan content so quickly online that they often don’t comprehend what they’re reading. A study by the American Press Institute has shown that the average reader comprehends 100% of what they read as long as the sentences are 8 words maximum. The longer the sentences, the more their comprehension depreciates. Overall, people only comprehend 10% of what they’re reading if sentences are longer than 40 words!

Keep your sentences short when writing blog posts. It will help your readers to understand what you’re writing and it will keep them on your page longer. 

By the way, I’m aware of the irony that some of the sentences in this post are longer than my suggested length. While I could painstakingly edit this post to shorten all of my sentences, sometimes it’s also good to have a natural flow in an article.

Shorter Paragraphs

Similar to sentences, long paragraphs can spell disaster for your “average time on page”. When a reader scrolls through a blog post and sees a massive wall of text not broken up by any images or styling, they will often click away.

View your site on both a mobile device and on a desktop. None of your paragraphs should span more than 5 lines when viewing on a desktop device (laptop or computer).

Mobile devices are a little different because the viewing area is so narrow. In the case of most smartphones and tablets, you can get away with a paragraph covering 10 – 12 lines on the screen. 

Still, you should try to keep paragraphs short, 2 – 3 lines on a desktop screen and 5 – 7 lines on mobile on average.

No Flowery Language

People who read content online typically want to get their answers as quickly as possible. This means that any extra words are simply “fat” that get in the way of the point the blogger is trying to make.

In a novel you might read: “the golden autumn leaves danced in the sun while a babbling brook gently caressed the rocks, washing them clean as it trickled down the damp, mossy forest floor beneath my feet”.

If you wrote this on a blog, you would lose readers. Guaranteed. Maybe not when you first start out and only your (patient and loving) friends and family are reading, but as you start getting complete strangers reading your content, they will click away if you use this type of language. Trim the fat!

On a blog, that same sentence should be: “The autumn-coloured leaves danced in the sun as I stood next to the small creek”.

Break Up Content With Headings & Sub-Headings

Another way to help readers to easily scan your posts and find what they’re looking for is to break up main points with headings and subheadings (also known as header tags). On a blog, you can choose to write in regular paragraph text as you’re reading now, or larger text as you see in this post.

The larger text is known as headings and subheadings and in WordPress, you can easily choose these by selecting H1, H2, H3 or H4 when writing a post.

So far this post has three different font sizes. H1 is in the title of the blog post (H1 should only be used for the blog post title). Next, you see H2, those are the larger words that are in the blue colour. Lastly, I’ve used H3 for the smaller subheading text.

This helps to break down the post into easier to read, bite-sized pieces, but even more importantly, it’s good for SEO. Google loves it when you make your posts easier to read, so they will reward you for breaking up your content with these H1, H2, H3 and H4 tags.

There are a few simple rules to follow when organizing a post with headers:

• Make Subheadings Catchy Like Titles: Subheadings not only break up your post, but they should also keep the reader interested and curious about what’s to come. Treat every subheading like a mini blog post title that will keep your readers engaged and invoke their curiosity.
• Use Plain English: This may sound like it’s going against my previous rule, but you can still have a catchy subheading that’s written in plain English. Don’t try to be too clever with your subheadings, it will only serve to confuse your readers and it can ruin the point of formatting a post this way.
• Nobody Likes a Spoiler: Don’t let your subheaders give away too much of what is to come. While subheadings help readers to scan the content, your ultimate goal is to actually get them to read it, while still quickly getting the answers they need. If you answer everything in the subheadings, the reader will simply click away faster.

There are also H5, H6 etc, but these don’t ever need to be used. Typically you can easily categorize content by only using H1-4.

Break Up Text With Photos

Another excellent way to break up large parts of text in a blog post is by adding photos. Photos are slow to load, so you don’t want to have too many in a single blog post. 

Images help to illustrate your point and make your content more visual which also helps to keep your readers engaged and on your page. Whenever adding photos with WordPress, be sure to resize and compress them before uploading them into your library. Also be sure to add an Alt Text, and Title of the image.

Use Special Formatting

When you’re first learning how to write a blog post, you probably don’t know what the kitchen sink is. It’s a funny term, but it’s what you call all of those blog post format icons in the edit post screen of WordPress:

You should use the special formatting at least 2 – 3 times throughout your posts. Some examples of special formatting include:

• A bulleted list

1. A numbered list

Text indented

Bold text

italic text

Some kind of quotation like this.

Not only does this type of styling help the reader to better absorb and understand your content, but many tests have shown that Google gives points for this as well. Use text styling a few times throughout your blog post, but don’t overdo it. By having too much different styling you can actually confuse your readers.

Use Page Jumps

This is another way to format your posts that also helps in Google. If you’ve noticed, many blogs now have special links at the top of the screen where a reader can quickly click a bit of text and jump down the page to find the answer they’re looking for. 

These are known as page jumps and every blog post on your site that’s over 1,000 words should have these. Click here to read about how to easily create page jumps using HTML in WordPress or use a simple plugin like Easy TOC.

Travel Blog Post Design

When we first started blogging, there was no such thing as a WordPress Page Builder and if there was, they were all so rudimentary that it wasn’t really worth purchasing them. These days, you can create unbelievably professional blog posts and pages using drag-and-drop page builders like Thrive Architect or Elementor.

We use these plugins on a few of our websites for some of the fancier-looking pages and we love it.

Page builders make it easy to create beautiful-looking pages in minutes.

Update 2022: Website loading speed is becoming more important for ranking in Google. In response, WordPress has improved its “Block Editor” software so that you can create beautiful pages and posts without the use of a slower-loading page loader. We now recommend only building your main pages (Home, About, Contact, etc.) with a page or theme builder, and the rest (like blog posts) using WordPress’s built-in block editor for speed.

Travel Blog Writing Tools

There are a lot of tools you can use to ensure you’re writing the best blog posts you possibly can be on your site. Things like bad spelling and grammar, or using a lot of cliches can really affect the overall reader experience. Here are a few tools you can use to make sure your writing is crisp, clear and professional.

Grammarly

This is a free browser extension that can work wonders for bloggers. While you’re writing a blog post, Grammarly will underline spelling errors, grammatical errors, redundancies, and improperly placed punctuations. It’s incredibly smart and easy to use.

Before you hit that publish button and release your content to the world, make sure Grammarly has looked it over for you and you don’t have any underlined words or phrases.

Thesaurus

Can’t think of a word? Don’t worry, Thesaurus.com can help you think of synonyms, antonyms and pretty much any word that you’re brain’s synapses have misplaced somewhere. Whenever I’m writing a blog post, I’ll have Thesaurus.com open in another tab. Whenever I get stuck on a word, I’ll simply type an underline to go back to like this: _____.

After I’m done writing my post, I’ll open the Thesaurus tab and type in a word similar to what I’m looking for and nine times out of ten it’ll help me fill in the blank.

Distraction-Free Writing

Sometimes it’s easy to get distracted with so many other things showing up on your screen. In WordPress, you can enable “Distraction Free Writing” in the screen options tab at the top of the edit post screen. This will minimize all of the other on-screen distractions that you might see.

Cliche Finder

Nobody likes to read a blog post that feels too generic. Cliches are an easy way to quickly lose your readers’ attention. Use tools like Cliché Finder to find and eliminate any instances of cliches and overused phrases in your blog posts.

Yoast SEO

Yoast is an excellent free SEO plugin for WordPress that can help you ensure that you maximize your SEO. This plugin will scan your article as you write it and will help give you an idea of how optimized your post is for search engines. It’s by no means the only tool you need and it only gives vague answers, but coupling this with the SEO formula can help grow your traffic quickly.

Travel Blog Writing Tips
What Do Add To Your Travel Blog Post Before Publishing

Here are a few tips to help you write the best travel blog post possible. By adding these things to your blog post, you can help both your readers and your rankings in search results.

Add Personal Experience: You should only ever write about destinations, services, gear and experiences that you’ve actually had and make it extremely clear to the reader that you’re writing from first-hand knowledge, particularly in the intro of your blog post.

Include a Table of Contents: Internet readers have a notoriously short attention span. Help them get through your post using a table of contents that allows them to jump to the part of your post they want to read.

Add Great Photos: Whether you’re writing a review post or a travel guide, make sure your photos are crisp, clear, and engaging. For most blogs, adding photos at 1000px wide will ensure they have enough definition, while not slowing down the site too much.

Add Infographics: Infographics and diagrams can be a great way to visualize the content of your blog post in a single photograph. They say a picture is worth a thousand words, but when you add a diagram with pictures and words explaining the content, it is truly priceless to the reader.

Create Charts & Graphs: Similar to infographics, charts, graphs, and comparison tables are a great visual tool to help people easily analyze and compare the products, places, or topics you’re covering in your post.

Add FAQs: Every blog post should have an FAQ section at the bottom. This is a great way to summarize the topic, while adding a bunch of useful answers to questions that the reader likely has. You can find FAQs for any topic by typing a question on your topic into Google. Generally, Google will populate a list of “People Also Ask” that is a goldmine for your own FAQ section.

Be Honest & Genuine: I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again. Your readers aren’t stupid. They can spot B.S a mile away. Always be honest and genuine with them. Lying or pretending to be someone you’re not will only harm you in the long term.

How To Write a Travel Blog Efficiently

Trying to write two 3,000+ word blog posts every week is a daunting task, particularly when you don’t know how to write a blog post efficiently. There are a few blog writing tips that you can utilize while you’re writing your posts to ensure that you’re writing as efficiently as possible. Keep in mind that you should never rush your writing. But by utilizing these tips you can write better content faster.

Start With An Outline

Before I start writing a blog post, I always type my headings and subheadings into the editor first. This helps me to ensure that the structure of my blog post is solid before I start writing. I recommend always starting a blog post with a basic outline. You can add to it, rearrange it and change it later, but as a basic rule, you should have an outline of your post before you begin writing.

As a bonus writing tip, also type out a few keywords and key phrases that you want the post to rank for at the bottom of the page. That way you can constantly be reminded of some of the keywords you want in the post while you’re writing it.

Keep Going No Matter What

If you’re writing and you get stuck on something, keep going. Don’t let anything break up your flow. Resist the urge to Google answers while you’re writing or to stop to think of a word. If you can’t think of it now, type an underline like this ____. Then when you’re done writing the entire article, simply search the page (ctrl+F on PC, cmd+F on Mac) and find all of your underlines so you can fill them in. 

Don’t stop to fix spelling errors or grammar, you can do that after you’re done writing. Simply sit down and let your brain vomit words all over your blog. You can always go back and fix it up when you’ve finished the first draft of the article.

Stop Multi-Tasking

You might think that multi-tasking can help you be more efficient, but in truth, multi-taskers see a 40% decrease in productivity, take 50% longer to accomplish tasks, and make 50% more mistakes. Simply put, don’t multi-task. If you’re writing an article, don’t also try to design your blog or answer phone calls. Stop trying to do so many things at once.

Turn Off All Distractions

This goes hand-in-hand with not multi-talking. Having distractions while writing is one of the major productivity killers for blog writers. When you sit down to write a blog post, you should close every other tab in your web browser. Put your phone on airplane mode, turn off your email alerts, turn off Facebook, Instagram and your television and just focus on writing. This can boost your productivity many times over.

Write in Timed Intervals

This is the 5-25 rule and it’s something straight out of the 4-hour work week, but it works well with writing too. Instead of sitting down for 4 hours and burning out your brain by writing 4,000 words all at once, try setting a timer to remind yourself to take a 5-minute break every 25 minutes. The act of taking breaks has been proven to boost creativity and productivity.

For more about how to be a productive blog writer, check out Neil Patel’s awesome blog post: How to Become a Better, Faster, and More Efficient Writer in 7 Steps.

How To Write a Travel Blog For SEO

We have an article all about how you can quickly explode your blog traffic using simple and effective SEO and we also have a free 1-hour SEO training video that you can sign up for by clicking here, so I won’t get into SEO too much in this post, but there are some basics you need to know.

Keywords & Key Phrases

When you’re writing a blog post for SEO, you should always be writing it with a key phrase (aka keyword) in mind. The key phrase is what people will be typing into Google to find your post, so you’ll want to use tools like KeySearch to make sure that the word you’re trying to rank for has a sufficient amount of searches per month (1,000+) and isn’t too difficult to rank for.

You’ll then want to add that key phrase naturally into the article. Key places to include your keyword are in the title, the URL, the first sentence of the blog post, the second paragraph of the post, at least once every 5 – 6 paragraphs thereafter and also in the alt tag of your images and in your header tags.

By structuring your post using keywords in the right position, Google will better understand what your post is about and will send you traffic.

There is a formula to writing good blog posts and where you place your keywords, so if you’re interested in writing SEO, definitely click the link above and sign up for our SEO Training Video.

Anchor Texts

Anchor text is the actual text that’s used to link. In this example How To Start a Travel Blog, the text “How To Start a Travel Blog” is the anchor text and it links to our blog post “How To Start a Travel Blog” which is a key term we’re trying to rank for.

When you’re linking to a new SEO post that you wrote, whether it’s from your own blog or from a guest post on another blog, try to use SEO keywords in the anchor text.

Note: Google doesn’t like overoptimized anchor usage, so be careful to always vary your anchor texts both on internal links and in backlinks built from other blogs. Only 1-3% of anchors should be exact-match.

Interlinking

One of the most important aspects of SEO and also user experience is to interlink your posts. While you’re writing a blog post, be sure to link to other relevant posts that you’ve already written on your blog. This will help create a web of content on your site, which helps Google bots to crawl it more efficiently. There’s a reason they call it the web!

External Linking

While internal linking refers to linking to other posts on your own blog, external linking or outbound links are the links that go out to other relevant blog posts and websites. This is also good for the user experience. Try to link out to authoritative sites (like Wikipedia, news sites & top blogs in your niche) at least 3 – 4 times in every post.

Note: never link out to competing articles. If your article is trying to rank for How To Start a Travel Blog, don’t link to another blogger’s post about the same topic. 

Meta Description

A meta description is the text that appears below the blog post title in search engine results. This text is not directly related to Google’s algorithms, but having a catchy meta description is like having a catchy title, it will encourage people to click and read your post. The meta description should include your focus keyword, should explain the article and should be under 160 characters long.

Travel Blog Writing Examples & Inspiration

Sometimes the best way to learn how to write a travel blog is by following examples of some of the great travel blog writers out there.

Below I’ve listed a few blogs that, in my opinion, showcase some of the best travel blog writing online today.

Nomadic Matt

I have to include Nomadic Matt here because he is the O.G in travel blogging. His style is simple, honest and useful.

These days, Matt has quite a few writers on his blog, but all follow his lead and write as if they are talking to the reader, while helping them to learn how to travel on a budget.

Expert Vagabond

Another old-school travel blogger, Matt Karsten of Expert Vagabond is an adventure travel blogger turned father of 2.

His blog is chalked full of well-written first-person accounts of his travel adventures, as well as useful how-to’s that follow the best practices of travel blog writing.

Santorini Dave

If you want to learn how to write a travel blog for SEO, look no further than Santorini Dave. His site might not be pretty, but it ranks for just about every term he writes about.

This blog is a clinic on travel blog writing with the user (and search engines) in mind. There are links connecting all of his main posts and he does a good job of helping you find everything you need on a single page.

The Planet D

You can tell I’ve been blogging for a long time because most of these travel bloggers I’m including for inspiration have been at it since the beginning.

The Planet D is no different. They’re among the first travel bloggers ever to become successful and they do it mainly through Dave’s excellent photography and Deb’s engaging writing.

yTravel Blog

A perfect example of how to write a family travel blog, yTravelBlog travels the world with 2 beautiful daughters and they all contribute to the blog in different ways.

This is a great place to look for a variety of writing styles, but the head writer and mother, Caz, is a truly fantastic travel writer.

How To Write a Travel Blog FAQs

After travel blogging for more than 10 years, I’ve heard pretty much every question in the book. Below I’ll answer some of the main questions I receive about how to write a travel blog.

What is The Perfect Length For a Blog Post?

With all of this talk about how short your readers’ attention spans are online, you’re probably thinking that the perfect blog post is short, but that is not the case. The longer the blog post, the better, particularly when you’re writing for SEO.

Long blog posts generally show up more in search results. Google wants every question to be answered, so the more exhaustive your content is, the more likely you are to show up in search results.

No blog post on your site should be under 1,000 words.

When you’re writing for SEO your blog post should be at least 2,700 words. The average blog post on your site should be around 3,000 words and for some super detailed guides, you may even get up to 5,000-7,000 words.

I wouldn’t go much longer than 7,000 words because the work involved vs the potential SEO gain starts to diminish after around 5,000 words.

What is The Perfect Travel Blog Post Title Length?

According to Backlinko and other studies, your blog title (and URL) should be short and consise. 9 words is a good blog post title length.

How Do I Write a Travel Blog if I’m Not Currently Travelling?

There are many topics to write about even if you’re not currently travel blogging. Here are some travel blog writing post ideas for those who are still at home prepping for travel:

• Packing Lists
• Saving Money
• Preparing For Travel
• Quitting Your Job
• Personal Stories
• Writing About Your Hometown
• Writing About Nearby Towns
• Writing About Your Weekends Away
• Write About Your Feelings While Waiting for a Big Trip

How Long Does it Take To Write a Blog Post?

There’s no simple answer to this question, but to give you something to gauge your travel blog writing time on, it generally takes me 2 hours to come up with a first draft of a 3,000-word travel blog post.

In my travel blogging course, I have over 500 students and when they first start out, they tend to take around 6 hours to write the same amount of words, but as they get better at travel blog writing, they often meet my timeframe of 2 hours per 3,000 words.

How Often Should You Write a Travel Blog Post?

Travel blogging is a numbers game, so the more content you produce, the quicker your travel blog will grow. When starting out, I recommend aiming for 3 posts per week.

Of these posts, at least 2 of them should be 2,500+ words. Use the WordPress plugin, Editorial Calendar, to help you with your publication schedule and keep it consistent. If you can commit to 3 posts per week, great. Never do fewer than that.

If you can only write 1 post per week, that’s ok too. But you should always write that one post every week. Your readers will always appreciate consistency.

How Does Writing a Travel Blog Make Money?

Learning how to write a travel blog was the best decision we ever made, not just because we earn money, but also because it’s given us a wonderful online community of like-minded travellers.

Travel blogs earn money from a variety of sources including:

• In-Content Ads: By placing ads on a travel blog, bloggers are able to earn recurring revenue from advertisers.
• Affiliates: Travel bloggers can join affiliate programs that allow them to create special tracking links to products, services, and accommodation like hotels and hostels. When a reader clicks one of those links and makes a purchase, the travel blogger is automatically paid a commission.
• Partnerships & Sponsors: Sometimes big brands like booking websites, tourism boards or gear companies will pay travel bloggers to write about their product, service or destination.

These are just a few of the ways to show you how to write a travel blog and make money. For more, check out our guide on How To Make Money With a Travel Blog.

How Long Does it Take To Make Money From a Travel Blog?

This varies wildly depending on how much content you produce and how you market your travel blog, but from my students in my blogging courses, I find that generally people start earning some money within 6-12 months of blogging, and can sometimes replace their full-time income after 18 months to 2 years.

How Do I Pick a Travel Blog Niche To Write About?

We have a full guide on travel blog topics that make money, but basically you should write about something that you have the most experience in.

Always consider “niching down” as much as possible. As an example, don’t just be a budget travel blog, be a blog about travelling on a budget in Thailand.

What is The Best Blogging Platform for Travel Blog Writing?

The answer to this is simple in my opinion. It’s WordPress. This is the most popular blogging platform by far.

WordPress makes writing a travel blog easy, with easy formatting tools, great SEO plugins, and design aspects that make it easy to build a professional-looking travel blog in just a few hours.

Final Thoughts on How To Write a Travel Blog

Now you have all of the tools you need to write the perfect blog post. Blog writing is a constant battle. It’s a battle to write the best content possible. It’s a battle to deliver on your promises. But most of all, it’s a battle to grab readers’ attention and keep it for the duration of a post.

If you’re reading this outro, then I’ve done my job in keeping your attention, and hopefully when you use the tools in the ultimate guide, you’ll successfully write better blog posts on your own site.

Keep in mind that consistency is key when writing blog posts. Not only do you need to know how to write a great blog post, but you also need to write on a consistent basis.

If you can manage 1 post per week, great. Write that post every Monday at 10:00 am EST (for example). Your blog should be like a newspaper. Your readers will want to be able to rely on your content being published on the same day, at the same time.

By using all of the tools I’ve given you in this article, you should know how to write a blog post better than you did before you clicked on this page. You should utilize all of these tools to ensure you’re writing the best posts possible, both for your readers and for search engines.

I look forward to hearing how this post might shape the way you craft your own posts. Did you learn something new? Comment down below!

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