Some people are just naturally filled with wanderlust. They can’t be tied down to a single place because they’ll feel like a flightless bird, especially when all they want to do in life is to explore uncharted waters and territories. In the end, they’ll always find a way to break free from the chains that bind them.

If this is all too familiar for you, it might be a sign for a career change, or at least, the beginnings of one. Choosing to become a travel blogger will allow you to do everything you’ve ever imagined of doing — getting paid to travel, waking up in a new city or country every week, and just living life to the fullest.

If you’re truly determined to make a name for yourself in the travel industry, you’ll need to create a blog that will outshine all the others. Although this may be a bit difficult to achieve, it’s not an impossibility. So, if you don’t know where to begin, here are five steps you can follow to start your career as a travel blogger:

Step 1: Find a Niche

You already know that you will be writing about your travels in this blog, but do you have a specific angle that you want to take? It’s not necessary to pick a niche for your travel blog, but it may help you communicate to more people if you can become an expert of some sort in a specific area.

For instance, you can focus on local delicacies and cuisines in your travels. You could write about food reviews and where to get the best meals when you’re in a specific country. Or you could create maps of food stalls and restaurants that people can go to when they’re visiting the places you’ve been to before.

Step 2: Create the Blog

Once you’ve decided what your travel blog will be about, the next step is to lay the foundation for the blog itself. This includes choosing a blogging platform or creating a website from scratch. Suppose you prefer to have everything customized according to your liking. In that case, it might be better to work with professionals from a web design agency who can visualize what you’re planning the blog to look like.

Then, you’ll have to make sure that your blog will be accessible to everyone online. This means that you must ensure that your website is SEO-friendly, easy to navigate and understand, and appears on the search engines. So, don’t be afraid to dabble in SEO strategies and how you can gain organic traffic.

Step 3: Do Affiliate Marketing

After you’ve started gaining traction from your audience, you should consider monetizing the blog using affiliate marketing. This will involve placing advertisements within your content so that you can earn a commission from the interaction every time a user clicks on the links and buys the product you’re advertising.

Affiliate marketing can help businesses or companies boost awareness for their brands while helping you earn money from the traffic you’re generating. So, consider joining affiliate programs in the companies that sell products related to what you do and work your way from there.

Step 4: Curate Relevant Content

Just because you’re writing about your travel experiences and documenting what you did on your blog doesn’t mean that your audience wants to read about everything that happened on your trip. Although this would be alright for a personal blog, it might not be appropriate for a travel blog that you’re monetizing.

That’s why it’s important to curate the content you’re posting on the blog. You must always check whether what you’re writing about is relevant to your audience and if it can add value to their lives. Suppose you’re ranting about how you missed the bus to a particular location without highlighting alternative routes or solutions that they can make instead. In that case, writing about it won’t help anyone.

Step 5: Grow Your Audience

The thing about making money out of travel blogging is that you’ll need to continuously grow your audience. It won’t be enough if you only have a handful of avid readers who don’t click on your affiliate links or earn you any money. If you want this to be your primary source of income, then you’ll have to reach a broader target demographic fast.

One of the best ways to do this is through social media. You can use paid and sponsored ads to expose your content to more people than you could have ever reached through SEO alone. Plus, you can interact with your audience through social media and use different kinds of content to increase your following.

But this isn’t to romanticize or glamorize travel blogging. While it’s a very freeing career, the job also requires a lot of effort because you’ll be your own agent. This means that you’ll have to pave your own path because no one will make it for you and that in itself could be a challenge you should be willing to take.