Travelling is less about discovering places and more about discovering yourself! When you go to a new place and get acquainted with its surroundings, you also get to see a new side of yourself which you would have never seen before. Travelling gives a person time to heal, reflect, relax and learn about things which no book can make you learn. “How to become a travel influencer?” This question must have crossed your mind at least once, if you are a huge fan of traveling.
People devoted to traveling say that it’s one of the best things you can invest your money on. The tight work deadlines and so much responsibility doesn’t always permit a person to dig some time out for traveling. Therefore, some people have taken a leap of faith, and have now chosen traveling as their profession! When something makes you feel alive and adds more meaning to your life, then why not do it full time?
Gone are the times when activities like traveling were merely seen as leisure activities. Traveling is something people are looking forward to making a career out of. They are in fact more than satisfied with what they do, working as a travel influencer.
We know that when you think about job switching, then your mind gets surrounded by many hows and what ifs. This happens especially when you are switching to something which is not a typical 9-5 job.
So if you want to ditch your monotonous job and become a travel blogger, then we are here to help you kick start your journey. This article will be your travel influencer guide and who knows, maybe your first step towards travel influencing?!
Step 1 To Becoming A Travel Influencer: Find a Niche!
To embark upon your journey of travel influencing, you first need to find a niche. There are many travel influencers already and you need to set yourself apart from them. Now why is this necessary? Doing this will help you in connecting you to people who might be interested in your niche. These people might become your audience or even biggest fans later on!
While you are finding a perfect niche for yourself, you need to be aware of a few things. Firstly, be in love with your niche. Just fall in love with what you are doing because you are going to spend a lot of time doing it. Secondly, your niche can be a particular place like a city, a state, a country or even a continent. Thirdly, your niche can be couple travel, solo travel or group traveling. Also, keep in mind that the niche you choose must be something that people have a penchant for!
If you are able to find a niche which fulfills all the requirements in the checklist mentioned above, then bingo! You just found the right niche for yourself!
Step 2 To Becoming A Travel Influencer: Create Valuable Content
Next very important thing which you must keep in your mind is to create valuable content. Now what do we mean by valuable? By valuable, we mean content that is entertaining, fun, inspiring, educational and informative. You need to understand what type of content the audience of your niche would love to see. As a travel influencer, you have to create content which moves people because they want to feel moved. You have to give reasons to people to follow you.
Work on creating something which gives you as well your audience a kick!
Step 3 To Becoming A Travel Influencer: Create Content Regularly
You know your niche and the type of content you have to create, now what? Now you have to step on to developing the discipline to create content regularly. Consistency is another thing which is essential if you want to be a thriving travel influencer. Begin by picking a day and time. You can work weekly, bi-weekly or even daily if you can. You can try out different timelines until you finally find a pace which works out well in your case.
Bear in mind, that consistency is one of the very important foundation pillars of becoming a successful travel influencer. Be regular, else people will lose a reason to follow you and you will start losing your audience.
Step 4 To Becoming A Travel Influencer: Build an Audience
After you start sharing content consistently and become worth following, you need to start building your audience. Building an audience is fundamental to start monetizing your work. Now you must be thinking that how many followers do you need to have to make money as a travel influencer? Let us clarify, that you don’t need to have millions of followers to be labeled as a successful travel influencer. Numbers don’t matter here. Your audience must be a bunch of people who have two characteristics. One, they should be highly dedicated people who engage with your content. Two, they should trust you enough to be influenced in terms of their traveling decisions.
Which platform can you build your audience on? For this, you must first think about where your audience is. You first need to know which platform is widely being used by your audience. After you identify the platform, start building content on it.
Long story short, building an audience is more about quality and less about quantity. You have to focus on building a healthy base of followers, rather than collecting people who are not even into your content.
Also Read: Should You Quit Your Job And Travel Too?
Step 5 To Becoming A Travel Influencer: Build Relationships
While you’re building an audience and credibility through your good work experience, ensure that you build relationships all along the way.
If you have a charming personality and it’s a pleasure to work with you, it won’t matter if you’re mediocre.
The business will always keep coming back to you simply because you are a delight to work with!
To build a network make sure that you leave strong first impressions on people. Also, be very flexible. If walking an extra mile strengthens your relationship then don’t hesitate to do it. Ask for feedback and ask to be kept in mind for any future opportunities.
Focus on engaging with people, who are big players in this field. For instance, pick 3-6 travel focused Instagram accounts which are 20-40% larger than your own. Then, start engaging with their content on a regular basis.
Doing this will help you in building a strong network of like minded people.
Step 6 To Becoming A Travel Influencer: Don’t Quit Your Job Yet!
Until and unless you have a concrete base for becoming a travel influencer, don’t quit your job. Bear this in mind especially if you are always in extreme need of money. If you don’t want your financial stability to stumble, you’ll have to work a little hard initially. Don’t quit your job until you start generating money from your work as a travel influencer.
You need to have a sound financial base, to begin working as a travel influencer because traveling demands money. Also, leaving a job might and the pressure of cessation of money inflow might keep you distracted. This might eventually hamper your work efficiency as a travel influencer.
Starting off as a travel influencer demands a lot of time, patience and peace of mind. All this will be impacted if the money inflow stops and you start worrying about your finances.
So unless you have a strong foundation for your career as a travel influencer, say no to quitting your job.
Step 7 To Becoming A Travel Influencer: Focus on Increasing Your Earnings
After you have successfully created a sound foundation for you as a travel influencer you need to start concentrating on making money.
There are a plethora of ways to make money as a travel influencer. You can either go for brand partnerships, start doing sponsored content, do speaking engagements, do webinars or create user-generated content. You can do any such thing which helps you in generating money.
Also, know that it’s time to raise your rates if you are experiencing any of these:
piling up tons of work on yourself,
saying yes to everything that comes to you and
you notice that your quality of work is suffering because you’re extremely overwhelmed by so much work!
Doing this will help you lessen your burden and add more value to your time.
Raise your rates, but simultaneously, don’t forget to raise your standards!
Step 8 To Becoming A Travel Influencer: Keep Innovating
Now that you have successfully established yourself as a travel influencer, just know that things do not stop here! To retain your position in your field and to be on the top, you have to constantly keep innovating.
Having a monotonous content strategy won’t help you grow. To keep growing, you have to keep innovating.
The travel industry has very bright future prospects. This is indicated by some travel influencer statistics by travelseewrite.com. The travel industry is valued at ₹900 crore, the industry is expected to grow at a CAGR of 25% to reach ₹2,200 by 2025. Travel influencers are dominating the digital arena very actively. As per the same source, in 2021, celebrities held only 27% of the market share of marketing campaigns. Influencers on the other hand held a higher share which stood at 73%.
Working as a travel influencer requires you to take a leap of faith. But, once you work out to have a strong base, you will see that it’s a very good career option for you!
Also Read: 8 Best Workation Destinations In India For Great Work-Life Balance
Some FAQs For You
Mainly travel brands work with travel influencers to promote their products and their services. Apart from this, fashion and beauty brands also like to collaborate with these influencers, if they think that collaborating with them will help them in generating good revenues.
It actually depends on how many followers you need to generate money from your work. The number of followers is not the focus when it comes to monetizing your work. What matters is how well engaged your audience is irrespective of the followers count. The only thing that matters is the balance between the followers count and the engagement rate. The key to make money is to have a good engagement rate and not to have a good follower count.
The platform you should choose to build your audience, depends on the audience of your niche. You will first need to find out which platform is widely used by the audience of your niche. Once you do that, you can stick to that particular platform to create content.
Emailing the brand you want to collaborate with is the most common and the most professional way to get in touch with brands. You can also directly message them on social media which gives the brand an opportunity to instantly checkout your page and have a glance at the type of content you create. This also helps the brand to make a faster decision if you will be of any help to them or not, when it comes to promoting their products and services. Some brands have their contact information available on their social media platforms, you can contact them through that as well.
When you are reaching out to the brands, remember that your pitch has to be very professional and persuasive.
