Client spotlight: what it means to be a travel blogger

Client spotlight: what it means to be a travel blogger

Agathon is home to professional WordPress bloggers across a variety of niches, including food bloggers, faith bloggers, and family bloggers. Most recently, we’ve had the opportunity to partner with a growing contingent of travel bloggers!

With our focus on security, site speed, and personal, expert support, Agathon is a valuable partner for travel bloggers, able to step in and help even when they’re in remote locations to ensure their blog continues to run well while they focus on the experiences in front of them.

We recently asked a few of our travel blogger clients to share their thoughts about travel and blogging. Here’s what they had to say:

Anna Everywhere, a travel blogger, standing before a castle
Anna, Anna Everywhere: 10 Things I Wish I Knew Before I Started Blogging

1. What led you to start a travel blog?

We started our travel blog while cycling from Cairo, Egypt to Cape Town, South Africa in the Tour d’Afrique. It was the world’s longest cycling race at the time. We wanted to pitch a TV show about an ordinary couple taking on extraordinary challenges, so cycling the continent of Africa seemed like a good start. The Planet D was started to keep followers of the race up to date, but we also wanted to use our blog as a C.V. to showcase our videos and media appearances to help pitch our TV show.

After the race, we found that people really liked reading about our adventures, and when our TV show fizzled, we decided to focus on building our brand online through the website that we started. At the time, we had already traveled to 40 countries, so we had a lot of travel experiences to share. Our story resonated with people.

Dave & Deb, The Planet D

We started our website when we moved to Ecuador, and Steven started blogging on his personal website about living in Ecuador as an ex-pat. After that we decided to create Travel To Blank to share our adventures around the globe with everyone!

Steven and Jazmin, TravelToBlank.com

I traveled for business as a consultant. After a few years of frequent travel, I started to burn out and wanted to work for myself and control my schedule. I started Business Travel Life with the goal of helping other business travelers have a healthier travel experience. It has grown to all things business travel. 

Kristina, Business Travel Life
Mar from the travel blog Once In A Lifetime Journey, spreads out all of her boarding passes in a large heart shape
Mar, Once In A Lifetime Journey: Who Is Once in a Lifetime Journey?

I started it as an online diary for myself because I thought it would be great to read the stories ten years later. At that time I did not know that it would become a company employing a small team, I just did it for myself. Unavoidably, when you put something online, people will find it, and this is what happened. I realised others were reading it too. I met travel bloggers who turned it into their careers at a conference two years after starting out and realised it was possible. It then took me a couple more of years to put together a business plan and achieve a degree of revenue that would allow me to maintain my travel and lifestyle while continuing to live in Singapore (the world’s most expensive city) and sticking to my luxury and out of the ordinary travel. 

Mar, Once In A Lifetime Journey

I actually started my travel blog as a portfolio to help me get a better job later. Meanwhile, it turned into a full-time job, so I stopped looking for a ‘normal’ job. 

Anna, Anna Everywhere

I used to work as a travel writer before I retrained as a city lawyer. I started the blog when I left the law to start building my travel writing portfolio again, then realised I loved blogging so much that I took it full time. 

Julianna, The Discoveries Of

I didn’t mean to start a travel blog. When I quit my job to travel, my brain needed something to do, so I started an online diary of our adventures for family and friends to follow. Turns out, many other people were interested in our journey too, so the diary turned into a ‘how to’ guide and info for other people looking to do similar trips.

Kat, Wandering Bird
Machu Picchu
Steven and Jazmin, TravelToBlank.com: The Ultimate Guide to See Machu Picchu on a Budget

2. What do you love about travel?

We love experiencing new things and learning more about different cultures. We have both being traveling since we were little with our families and ever since we met it became part of who we are. There is nothing more exciting than going somewhere new and pushing yourself to be open while getting out of your comfort zone. Our favorite thing about traveling is meeting new people and having long conversations to understand different viewpoints and perspectives on the world. 

Steven and Jazmin, Travel to Blank

I am a very curious person and I love to discover places that are unknown to the rest of the world and receive few visitors (I have visited almost 110 countries). I like to learn from different cultures, points of views and perspectives, and I believe that traveling gives you that more than anything else. From perspective comes openness and tolerance and the ability to have a more balanced view on topics.

Mar, Once In A Lifetime Journey

I love travelling because it makes you realise that your normal is not everyone’s normal. It forces you to immerse yourself in other cultures—the food, the language, the customs and the people—and that’s something I really enjoy. 

Julianna, The Discoveries Of
Motorhome parked in front of gorgeous water with mountains in the backdrop
Kat, Wandering Bird: How to tour Europe in a motorhome

I’ve always loved to travel. Many of my earliest memories involve setting off on a road trip with my parents, going to sleep in the car and waking up somewhere new; it was magical. As an adult, I enjoy the different cultures, the foods and the people we meet on the road. I also love how a place on a map suddenly becomes real, and everytime you think or hear about that place for the rest of your life, it will have a memory attached. That’s special. 

Kat, Wandering Bird

I love traveling because it encourages me to try new experiences. Whether I try new food, a new activity or see something for the first time, travel builds this incredible index in my mind and soul of experiences around the world. Every place I travel, I experience something for the first time and learn somethings new. 

Kristina, Business Travel Life

We love to travel because it is always an adventure. When we travel, we are inspired to try new things and step out of our comfort zone. There’s something about being in a different place that motivates us to do more. Plus travel is the best education. We have learned so much on our travels. Travel makes us better people. I think it has taught us to be more open-minded and to listen to people. It has helped us understand other cultures and different ways of living. And we have learned more about history and art than we ever learned from a classroom or books.

But the number one thing that we love about travel is how it keeps our relationship fresh. It was travel that brought us closer together in the first place and whenever we travel now, we always have a fun time spending time with one another, relying on each other and learning more about each other. There’s nothing better than sharing an adventure, a beautiful sunset or a quiet moment with the one you love. 

Dave & Deb, The Planet D
the London ferris wheel
Julianna, The Discoveries Of: 2 Days in London Itinerary, An Insider’s Guide

3. What is your favorite thing about being a travel blogger?

My favorite thing about being a travel blogger is that I get to connect with different people from around the world on different platforms all the time.

Steven and Jazmin, TravelToBlank.com

Our favorite part of being travel bloggers is creating content that inspires people to travel. Dave loves taking the perfect photograph that captures a destination, and I love editing a video and writing a story that gives people information while stirring excitement about a location. It used to be travel that was the most exciting part of our job, but now we are excited when we are at the desk putting together the content we gathered while at the destination. We still love to travel, but it’s the storytelling through photos, video and writing that really excites us. 

Dave & Deb, The Planet D

The flexibility that working for myself affords is the biggest advantage of working online. This applies to many industries, not just blogging, but blogging requires little more than a laptop with internet, and this makes it a truly mobile job. My team and I are remote, although we are not digital nomads working on the road. We have a fixed home, a desk with a monitor and a local (not just online) community and then travel part-time.

In my case, I travel 40% of the year and have been doing so for about 6-7 years, I used to travel much more during the ten years before that. My job allows me to work from anywhere and at any time, so the flexibility extends to not only location but also time of day or day of the week. I can take a Tuesday off if I want, or work in the morning or the evening, and I can work longer hours when I am at home so I only have to do maintenance work when I am on the road. 

Mar, Once In A Lifetime Journey

My favourite thing about being a travel blogger is that you get to create a strategy and implement it from start to finish. You come up with the ideas, go and do the research (the fun bit!), then create the content and promote it—there’s no part I’m not fully involved in, and I really enjoy it. 

Julianna, The Discoveries Of
Deb, a travel blogger, standing in the middle of snow for as far as the eye can see
Dave & Deb, The Planet D: How to Overcome Your Travel Anxiety and Fears

4. What is the hardest part about being a travel blogger?

The hardest thing, at least for us, is to keep focused and do all the work that being a blogger and content creator entails. We make a living from it and that requires us to prioritize an endless list of projects to improve our website and our brand while making sure to stay on top of contacts and communication. 

Steven and Jazmin, TravelToBlank.com

For me, the hardest part is the lack of colleagues. While I meet people on my travels, working from home can be lonely and you’re not always up for a chit-chat. While there are co-working spaces in some spots, in many places you still cannot pay per day, so it’s not like I can always just pop up to one when I’m on the road.

Anna, Anna Everywhere

Blogging is hard! So much more work than I ever expected—I think I work longer hours now than I did in my job!!! But I LOVE getting emails from readers who have been inspired to live their life differently: to take a risk, go somewhere new, take a sabbatical, or even quit their job to travel. Those are the emails which keep me creating content and sharing our story. 

Kat, Wandering Bird

The hardest part of being a travel blogger is time management. We have struggled with this for years, and it is always a work in progress. It seems that we always have new goals and new ideas, so even when we do outsource more work or hire more assistants, we still have more on our plate. But I think most entrepreneurs get caught in the cycle of always working too much. There are always new goals and new tasks to be done. We are constantly trying to find the balance of enjoying time with family and friends and not letting life pass us by.

Dave & Deb, The Planet D

Travel bloggers work extremely hard to produce quality content for their readers. While traveling, they spend huge amounts of time taking photos and videos, writing notes, and gathering content to share with their readers. The stability of their server is one thing they shouldn’t have to worry about. We’re honored to serve as a technology partner for these bloggers (and all of our clients!) so they can focus on the parts of blogging they do best!

How can we help support your site?

Whether you blog about travel or something else, we’d love the opportunity to support your business, not just as your hosting company but as a tech partner! Contact us for a free, no-obligation hosting assessment today.

Client spotlight: what it means to be a travel blogger

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