Travel influencers could be one of the professions to consider if you love travelling.
Imagine making money by sharing your thoughts about places you have visited and tips about how to travel.
Who wouldn’t want to become a travel influencer? This gig affords one the opportunity to travel to exotic places, and generate money from the lifestyle. Successful travel influencers are even courted by airlines, hotels, as well as luxury brands who offer their goods and services for free, in exchange for a good word from the influencer.
If you already have a love for travelling, and you already spend a lot of time on the internet, then you may already have all it takes to become the next big celebrity.
Contrary to popular opinion, becoming a travel influencer has very little to do with gender. With the proper methodology, anybody can leverage the fame that comes with having thousands of adoring fans, and so earn a living from his travels.
How To Become A Travel Influencer: 9 Ways to Start
1. Discover Your Niche
For the average person; a travel influencer is a travel influencer. However, like everything else in life, there are niches to the business of travel influencing. Therefore, a person needs to discover his niche in order to know the best way of going about it.
A Travel Influencer may be a luxury influencer, a health and wellness, adventure, hiking, or an influencer touring winter destinations. Any niche mentioned above will have its own audience, in its own geographical location. Every niche will also have its own market, as well as financial rewards.
2. Start Taking Pictures
Taking pictures is at the very center of working as a travel influencer. Therefore, you want to invest considerable money, time and effort into taking pictures. This also means learning how to identify spots that can generate stunning pictures, and also learning how to combine colors and take very good pictures.
Taking very good pictures will help you to attract eyes from all over the world to your posts.
Please keep in mind that while you will need to have very good equipment to take great pictures, you will not really need to buy any large and heavy equipment. A travel influencer does not need heavy equipment because such would add to his travel baggage. A good smartphone or a small camera is usually enough; especially if you already have a flair for taking pictures.
3. Show Your Perspective In Videos
“Show Your Perspective” is a carefully chosen statement; it indicates that your videos can be more than just ordinary audio-visuals of the places you have visited. For one thing, many travel influencers strictly post pictures of the beautiful places they have visited, so it is not exactly necessary to go through the trouble of posting videos.
However, one could spice things up by posting the occasional video to go with all the pictures. While the pictures can do the main work of showing your adventures, the videos can show perspectives of aspects that may be difficult to capture with pictures. For example, a picture can show how beautiful the snow is, but a video of you shivering will explain that beauty comes with a cold.
Your videos can therefore show important perspectives of how to deal with the cold, or how to do anything else that may be necessary to enjoy travels to any particular region.
4. Create A Brand On Social Media
Creating a brand on social media channels will help you get the attention and recognition of people. Your brand is that thing that will identify you, and when people see it, they immediately think of your adventures and the pleasures of watching your travels.
As an individual showcasing his travels on Social Media it is advisable to use your face. This will help to maintain the social aspect of your efforts; people tend to interact more with social media posts when they believe that they are talking with a person; rather than a corporation.
Branding also means that you must remain true to your niche; a user who clicks on your profile or blog must get that which he came for, or he will be disappointed. If you disappoint your followers, they may lose interest, and may not come back to your page or blog in the future.
That means you must be consistent. Make sure you only post travel-related content; as that is what your brand is all about.
Some of the social media channels I will recommend are Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, Snap Chat and YouTube. With these accounts, you can share your experiences and help people map out the best hotels to lodge and beautiful places to visit in the world.
5. Share Travel Tips and Answer your Followers’ Questions
You can share your tips on how to travel to certain countries or places you have been to, airlines to use, restaurants to eat and hotels to lodge. The reason your followers are attracted to you is that they need to get first-hand information about places they haven’t been to, but it’s on their list of places they would like to visit. You can do this by creating video content or through downloadable guides.
Additionally, you need to answer their questions. Answering your followers’ questions about their concerns they have about places you have been to gives you a leg up. You become an expert, the go-to person they can always count on. So, share what you know about places you have visited. Give your followers a reason to stay with you.
Kesley, a Uk travel influencer, has used this technique to grow her brand and retain existing followers over the years. Start making posts about a subject you feel your followers need.
6. Go For Collaborations
Collaborations will help you get fresh eyes on your blog. This is especially important as a new travel influencer because the people you collaborate with probably have their own audience, and by working with them you can get to share their audience, and get some of the people to like your work as well.
Collaborations will also help you to gain fresh insights on how to do things.
By working with other travel influencers you have the chance to gain a few fans from here and there, from which you can build your own audience.
7. Use Trending Hashtags
On your social media platform, you will need to use hashtags to draw traffic to your posts. Every blogger or content creator understands that these hashtags help the platform curate the content, and also help users find related posts which may be of interest to them.
The hashtags will help people find your content, and will even help fellow creators find your work.
However, you do not have to use the same old hashtags with every post; you can experiment with different hashtags, and even invent new ones. As your brand visibility increases those new hashtags may lead people solely to your content.
8. Rinse And Repeat
Having come this far; you just have to find a good balance between posting pictures and videos, and doing collaborations with other influencers. You need to find the right frequency with which to post new content, and you also need to decide whether or not to leave comments on posts made by other creators.
By consistently repeating the processes outlined in this article you can be on your way to establishing yourself as a travel influencer with a large sphere of influence.
9. Reach out to Brands for Sponsorship
The whole essence of wanting to be a travel influencer is not just to visit places, take cool pictures for your followers, and share your travel tips, it is to make money.
If you have successfully influenced a good number of people, and you have new and returning followers or subscribers engaged with your content, you should reach out to brands for partnership: hotels, resorts, Airbnb, including airline companies. What these brands are after is your engagement, not numbers. They are not interested in your thousands of followers if no one likes or comments on your content.
You can also follow these brands, and engage with their posts by leaving positive comments or genuine reviews about your experience travelling with their airline company or staying in their resort or hotel if it’s a hotel.
Social Media commenting may be the most overlooked strategy for indirectly getting recognized by brands and increasing your brand awareness.
I always advise that you make a list of your favourite brands (brands you would love to engage with) and brands you have had a good rapport with and start tagging them on your photos and videos. This strategy, my friend, is how to quickly get the attention of brands.
How to be a Travel Influencer: The Bottom Line
Becoming a travel influencer does not need to be a difficult process, especially if one already has a love for travelling, and has made the lifestyle adjustments necessary to facilitate such.
You will need to have an eye for beautiful pictures. For starters, it is advisable to use phones with amazing cameras until you grow to the point where you can hire a private photographer; there are phones that can produce stunning images without the need for any special editing. One only needs to make research about the type of equipment to use.
Pursue your passion for travelling and turn it into a full-time job.
