Defining Your Travel Website Niche: BITW 163

This podcast shares day two of my newly revised (for 2021) E-book entitled 30 Days to Launch a Travel Blogging or Writing Career. This episode shares tips to define your travel writing niche.

Break Into Travel Writing: A podcast and website designed to help you build a travel blog your readers love as well as help you achieve your goals as a travel writer or blogger.

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30 Days to Launch a Travel Blogging or Writing Career E-book Day 2

Listen to today’s episode where I share day two of the Ebook series to launch a travel blogging or writing career. Day two focuses on the benefits to creating a niche travel website instead of a broad travel site.

Listen to the full podcast; click here!

Defining Your Travel Website Niche

Day 2: Defining your writing niche and choosing which corner of the travel writing world you would like to occupy.

Defining your place in the travel blogging world can be hard. As a traveler and travel writer/blogger your tendency may be to write about every travel experience you have and every destination you visit.

The bottom line is, if you write about everywhere in the world and every type of travel, you will most likely have a hard time building website traffic, growing an audience and landing media trips.

But, look at it from another point of view. If you build your website with a focus on adventure travel, road trips, luxury travel, the chances of building traffic faster are much greater.

The bottom line is that once you build your traffic, the PR companies & the visitors’ bureaus will seek you out beyond your honed in niche because they know you have built an audience and traffic.

As you become more successful, you can broaden your niche if you choose. Let me give you one of my favorite examples; Howard Blount from Back Road Planet. His site initially focused on road trips across America. I first met Howard in person on a Viking River Cruise media trip. I hope you get the point here! He built his site traffic and followers to a point where he got invitations from a European river cruise and expanded his site topics to road, river and rail travel.

You can also niche by location — focusing on one city, state, or country. You’d think these could be a bit trickier to expand on, but some examples are La Jolla Mom — Katie Dillon started her website focused on San Diego and La Jolla and as it became more popular she added additional sections to cover worldwide travel.

Santorini Dave is another example. He started his website with a focus on Greece and now he covers hotels around the world. My friend Maria Hasse, who was my guest on episode 124 where she shared Why You Should Buy an Established Travel Blog and how she built the traffic and income almost overnight now has a section called beyond Europe with articles about Asia, Caribbean and Africa.

Understand this! Your fastest road to success is starting with a focused niche.

Let’s take a step back for a moment and dive into the concept of niche and how to define your blogging niche beyond saying “It’s a travel website”.

A niche is an overarching topic your blog focuses on or an umbrella category every blog post you publish sits under.

Defining your niche blog turns a website with the broad topic of travel into a more purposeful blog. It will allow you to be true to your voice and still allow you to evolve as a travel writer or blogger.

Having a well-defined niche is one of the best ways to become a successful travel blogger or profitable freelance writer. Instead of trying to cater to every possible travel topic, instead, focus on one part of the world or one type of travel area.

Why is it important to find your niche? It allows you to specialize or be known for a specific type of travel writing. You want to find the perfect fit for your interests and writing style.

What Is a “Niche”?

Dictionary.com defines a niche as “a distinct segment of a market.”

Therefore, defining your writing niche means choosing which corner of the travel writing world you would like to occupy.

If you already have a blog or writing focus– could it be more focused or refined? Maybe you are ready to add a new sub-niche. Take some time to go through the process I’m outlining today as well!

Download the FREE PDF worksheet before you read on!

Having a hard time defining a niche?

Check out Reddit’s travel section. In Reddit, you can also do searches for a specific city, country or continent you want to focus your writing.
Check out Google Trends and search for travel, locations or types of travel.
Check out Instagram, Flipboard and search for travel-related topics, locations or types of travel.
Look at hashtags for topic ideas.
Search in Google for any travel terms and explore the different websites for the search.

Once You’ve Done Some Research

Write down every travel niche you can think of that interests you.

Examples: family travel, ecotourism, sustainable tourism, medical tourism, luxury travel, food travel, wine travel, gluten-free travel, adventure travel, budget travel, pet travel. The possibilities are endless!

Create a Geo-focused list

Examples here could be a small focus such as your own city or state, it could be a section of a country such as travel on the East Coast of the U.S., Western Provinces of Canada, or broader such as travel on a specific continent. Choose all the locations you’d like to focus on.

Once you brainstorm answers for these two lists, it’s time to hone it in! As I said at the beginning of this show; Defining your place in the travel blogging world can be hard. As a traveler and travel writer/blogger your tendency may be to write about every travel experience you have and every destination you visit.

The bottom line is, if you write about everywhere in the world and every type of travel, you will most likely have a hard time building website traffic, growing an audience, and landing media trips.

I give you permission to choose your niche. I also give you permission to change it in the future. For the purposes of this exercise and to work through the remainder of the ebook and this podcast series, choose a niche and location/s you want to focus on.

Once you have made a decision, make sure you can answer this one question:

Can you imagine writing at least 100 articles on a specific travel topic or specific destination?

If not, it may be time to go back to the drawing board and pick a niche you have more of a passion for.

Have you downloaded the FREE PDF worksheet for day 2?

About The 30 Days to Launch a Travel Blogging Series

Once a month I’m going to share tips from my newly revised (for 2021) Ebook entitled 30 Days to Launch a Travel Blogging or Writing Career.

The entire Ebook is available as a downloadable pdf for purchase. The full 30 days shares the step-by-step to go from aspiring travel writer to travel writer or blogger with step-by-step instructions for each day can be found at bitw/30daysebook or from the courses tab on the navigation bar of my website.

The 30-day foundation course lays the groundwork needed to launch a travel blogging or travel writing career from the launch of your website to landing media trips or creating your own paid-for solo travel!

If you already have a website but are struggling to find your audience, build traffic and understand how to work with affiliates, this podcast series and e-book will be super valuable to you as well.

Maybe you have a blog and are ready to start relationships with PR and media and attend media trips. Or maybe you want to have a community of travel bloggers to connect with to trade PR and media contacts or have an article proofed.

If you are ready to take the steps to become a travel blogger or take your current site to the next level, to hone in your site, audience, traffic, social accounts, SEO strategy, and more!

Each of the tips from the Ebook, will be short and sweet and come with a bit of homework. In fact, I have a pdf worksheet you can download with the steps to work on for today.

Day 1 Listen to the Podcast | Day 1 Blog Post
Homework Day 1: Download the PDF!

Get All 30 Days Now! Purchase the Ebook for only $49

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