If you’ve decided to embark on an adventure around the world, you may be wondering how you can create a travel blog. A place to store your most-loved memories, your collection of incredible photos and a platform to share your everyday activities with the world. A travel blog soon becomes your library of experiences and trust me, once you’ve created one, you’ll never look back.

Many people have come to me over the past few months asking my opinion and advice about travel blogging. Do I think it’s worth it? Was it easy to create? Does anyone actually read it? Quite simply, YES it’s worth it. YES it’s easy to create. And YES people actually read it.

What you will find is that people are interested in what you’re doing. People LIKE different, no matter how well they know you. People that you haven’t spoken to for years will come to you and tell you they’re following your journey and they’re inspired by your adventure. And that feels amazing.

So, if you’re wondering how to go down the blogging route, here are my 4 simple steps to create a travel blog.

Step 1: Decide what type of blog you want.

It’s good to have an idea of the type of blog you want. Do you want to simply update your friends and family on your location, photos and recent adventures? Do you want to take things to the next level, customize, potentially make money and make it pretty snazzy? If you have no idea, that’s fine. I didn’t either.

Keep it easy by creating a WordPress.com account to begin with (it’s free and takes a few minutes) and get to grips with the way it works. If you later decide you want to take it further and make your blog a bit more complex, use WordPress.org. You can transfer any content over, but my advice to blogging newbies is to keep it simple to begin with.

I recommend using a web host to get started with WordPress.org. I use Bluehost, which is so easy and fairly cheap. The host will make it really simple to download the WordPress software which you can use pretty much instantly, and you can get a personalized domain for free (i.e. the web address). With WordPress.org the possibilities to customize are endless, and you can really make it your own. The downside is that this comes at a cost, so it depends if you’re willing to pay. You can find more information on First Site Guide – they have a great little post with in-depth info about hosting that will guide you through.

Step 2: Choose a name.

This is a million times harder than step 1. It took me a good few weeks to decide on a name, so just be patient. There are many websites that can help you to decide (such as name generators) if you’re completely stuck. But just keep it simple and don’t over think! Name it after you, the continent you’re visiting, or relate it to something unique about you or your journey.

Step 3: Customize your blog.

See, this is the fun part. If you’re anything like me (i.e. indecisive, perfectionist) you’ll probably spend hours tweaking your colours, themes, fonts, menus, everything, until you’re happy with it. Go with whatever feels right. The good thing is that you can change it as you go along. As you get to grips with WordPress you’ll soon discover new ways to tweak your blog, and remember, there’s a whole bunch of information available on Google. It’s free, so use it!

Step 4: Start blogging!

Now it gets REALLY fun…you get to share your experiences with the world! By this point you’ll probably be scared about writing your first post and getting yourself out there. It’s daunting, yes, but you’ve got to start somewhere. The first thing to do is just forget about everyone else and what they will think. Your travel blog is for you, and for you only. It’s for other people to opt in and share your journey. Speak from the heart, write about what interests you and don’t try to be someone you’re not. Let your personality transmit through your blog, discover what you want your blog to be and your followers will love living the experience through you. Oh, and don’t forget to share it on social media!

So why did I create a travel blog?

My primary motivation for creating a travel blog was to document our adventures. Of course, there are many experiences that you’ll never forget, but when you’re travelling for months it’s nice to have a way to record those memories. My secondary motivation was to create a virtual scrapbook of photographs. I didn’t want to bombard my Facebook page with 1001 travelling pictures (which to be honest, I probably did anyway, but never mind) so it was nice to store our photos elsewhere and keep a backup.

My tertiary motivation was to create content. After all, what’s a blog without content? Sure, I wanted my friends and family to know what we were getting up to, but I also wanted to help a different audience with travel guides and backpacker tips. It was nice to connect with a wider community through my blog, and i’ve definitely learnt so much since my early blogging days.

I hope these 4 simple steps to create a travel blog have given you some clarification, and perhaps inspiration, to create your own blog. I found First Site Guide to be a really good tool too as they have loads of info for creating different types of blogs. Let me know if you found these tips useful and if you have any extra tips or questions please feel free to shoot them my way. Good luck!