This post is all about my first year of starting a family travel blog. From the goals I set, what blogging resources I used, and the things I suggest for anyone wanting to start a family travel blog.
How did I decide on the “family travel” blog niche?
Have you considered starting a family travel blog? I was in your shoes in early 2023, thinking about how I could take my passion for travelling with my family and turn it into a creative outlet. I have spent a lot of time reading blogs in all sorts of niches including, health and fitness, family, food and lifestyle. When deciding on my niche, I thought about what space I actually had a unique perspective to offer. When my first son was born, my husband and I had been in the habit of travelling internationally every other year. Travel was something we loved to do together, and didn’t want to lose the opportunity to do that with children.
We luckily work for corporations with generous maternity leaves (12-18 weeks) and so before our our son was born, we set a goal to take a trip with him before we went back to work. As we started planning, we decided that trip would be to London – a favorite international destination of ours we had already visited a few times together. Our goal was to go somewhere we would be excited about, but felt familiar and didn’t required extensive planning (like changing locations or making a flight connection).
That trip turned out so be full of so many learnings, but the biggest was that we gained the confidence to keep travelling with our kids. We may not be the most adventurous of travelers, but we focus on consistently pushing ourselves to do it and in a way that balances and brings a lot of joy to our family. We now have two kids who are 3 and 5 years old. Every trip we take learnings from our prior experiences, and also take on something new. My hope is by documenting these things in a blog, I can inspire other families to keep travelling in a way that brings them joy too.
What were the first things I did to start a family travel blog?
I have always loved watching YouTube and had considered one day I would love to share about our travels on that platform. However, I knew that I would eventually need a landing page outside of YouTube and many of the creators I follow, also have a blog. I figured I could start with a blog and expand to YouTube later if I ended up being consistent and had the time. I also work full-time for a corporation in accounting so this blog is only run with a few hours a week at night or on the weekend.
Through YouTube, I found a blogger who started By Sophia Lee. Sophia has quite a few YouTube videos on how to start a blog, as well as a comprehensive blog post all about how she suggests you get started. After spending a few weeks reading up on her site, as well as watching a few more videos on YouTube, I decided to go for it! Here were my first couple steps that I did around April 2023:
- Set up my domain and hosting through BlueHost, making sure to get a self-hosted WordPress site (do not go through the WordPress website)
- Bought a website design from Etsy – I spent about $30 USD and installed it myself
- Wrote a short About Me page and published my first post!
- Changed my Pinterest account to a business account and started playing with making pins with products
- Applied for the Amazon Affiliate program**
**I do not recommend doing this as a first step. I ended up getting paused after the 3 month review period because I did not have a social media account (e.g. Instagram) where I was driving traffic. When I first started the blog, I was excited about affiliate programs but after getting started and doing some more research, I realized I would rather focus on driving traffic to my website so I can join an ad agency.
How I am maintaining and trying to grow my family travel blog?
Almost a year later, here is my basic strategy:
- Write two blog posts a month – more, if possible.
- Post 1 pin to Pinterest per URL, and plan to post a few more in the coming weeks. Utilize free Canva to create pins.
- Utilize Google Search Console to make sure my pages are getting indexed on Google. Analyze this data to see what keywords and posts are gaining traction.
- Spend time learning about SEO (search engine optimization) and other blogging topics through free resources like YouTube and podcasts.
