Travel is one of the markets to target as a blogger. You can monetize your blog with tour packages, airplane tickets, hotel bookings, and more. While figuring out which platform and WordPress, Joomla, or Drupal hosting service to choose for your blog is important, you should emphasize learning what makes a successful travel blog. To help out with this process, we’ve listed some of the top travel blogs of 2018 to get you started.
1. Nomadic Matt
Nomadic Matt is a great blog because it’s full of personality and helpful advice. The site starts with a beautiful splash photo and gets straight to what the blog is about. The author also establishes his credibility immediately, making visitors put stronger consideration into trusting his advice. It’s one of the strongest introductions in a travel blog.
One of the best parts of the site is the most requested travel advice section. This is a collection of blog posts about topics frequently asked about by other travelers. It helps blog visitors find what they’re looking for and get quickly acquainted with the blog.
2. Adventure.com
Adventure.com is very different from other blogs in that you get to follow in the footsteps of actual travelers. Many authors submit their posts across different parts of the world. Each bar shows you a first-person account of what they’re experiencing in their travels. As a result, you’re rewarded with unique stories and photos you won’t find in other blogs.
Because the content is from contributors writing about their current travels, it isn’t full of cliché travel tips and doesn’t overemphasize tourist destinations’ content. If you plan to start a travel blog, it might be conducive to incorporating this approach into your content creation strategy.
3. The Planet D
Planet D is a very visually oriented and atmospheric travel blog. The site’s design uses full and high-definition photos for the background. It also uses beautiful transition effects to take you from one section to the next. This is a great blog to study if you plan on putting the design above everything else.
The way the content is organized is also done well. The travel guides are broken down by the type of traveler the visitor is. There are guides for adventurers, luxury travelers, active travelers, adrenaline junkies, and more. This allows visitors to find travel guides based on how they describe themselves or what they want.
4. Everything Everywhere
Everything Everywhere is a general travel blog by Gary Ardnt. The site design itself is fairly simple. We love the clean and simple top navigation menu, which helps you quickly find what you’re looking for. While this isn’t the first time we’ve seen it, we like the visual map presentation where you can click on visited location pins to go to the posts about the destination.
The blog itself has a lot of personality to it. It features cool photos, podcast episodes, videos, and interviews with expert travelers. You get a good mix of content on the blog, such as general travel tips, destination-specific guides, and even blog posts written from a personal storytelling angle.
5. Travel with Bender
Travel with Bender takes the approach of providing his readers with the best travel hacks he’s discovered. You’ll learn everything from how to get the most out of your travels, which sights you absolutely shouldn’t miss out on, how to save money on hotels, and more. If you like getting the most out of your travels, this is the travel blog for you.
Aside from the content angle, the blog itself is vibrant with photos. You’ll be rewarded with beautiful photo collages of the author’s travels. Each post contains high-quality images that accompany the content to provide a better perspective of his travels. While this isn’t rare for a travel blog, many travel blogs tend to skimp out on visual content.
6. One Step 4Ward
Budget traveling is one of the hottest angles to build your blog around. One Step 4Ward is a blog focusing on traveling without breaking the bank. It’s jam-packed with money-saving tips, travel hacks, and helpful resources. It’s a great blog to learn from if you plan on targeting backpackers, budget travelers, and lifestyle travelers for your audience.
It’s also a daring blog, as the author often goes off the beaten path. You’ll find him in Iraq, Yemen, and the North Pole. Many readers stay glued to his blog to follow his adventures. It shows you don’t always have to build content around hot tourist destinations.
7. Migrationology
Migrationology is a fan favorite of many foodies. The travel blog focuses on traveling and discovering a country’s culture, one plate at a time. If you love traveling and trying out new food, you’ll want to follow Migrationology to learn which dishes to try, which restaurants to go to, and more.
Migrationology also publishes YouTube content, generating millions of views for its channel. This shows that you do more than succeed with a travel blog. You can monetize your site by adding video content and get more distribution for your blog using YouTube.
Again, the technical details like choosing the right WordPress, Joomla, or Drupal hosting service are important to building your travel blog. But at the end of the day, what’s going to determine the success of your blog is the design, content, target audience, and approach you’re going to take. Hopefully, these examples will give you some great ideas for building your blog.
