There are two types of travel bloggers, full-time travel bloggers and part-time travel bloggers. I have done both. Right now, I am a part-time blogger; I have a lovely full-time job as a journalist that pays the bills, I take long trips off between work to travel and I work on my travel blog https://maxtravely.blogspot.com/ after work.
The blogging part of travel blogging is a full-time job. Even if you are doing if part-time, it is still a lot of man hours especially if you are one-man show. Besides the actual writing, bloggers have to manage the photography, video editing, marketing, social media, monitor growth, branding, partnerships, attend press events etc. Of course you can just blog for fun and not worry about any of that, but successful travel bloggers who get loads of sponsored trips and millions of followers treat their blogs as a business.
When you are a travel blogger, travelling because less of a personal holiday and more of “work”. Every trip become something like a writing assignment - you are constantly looking out for interesting story angles, making sure you take a tonne of photos for the blog/social media, and you may need to do social media updates of your trips. This is especially true if it is a sponsored trip. You may be in an amazing holiday destination for free, but you will feel the pressure to churn out a great story that your clients will be happy with. I personally enjoy sniffing out stories and taking photos on holidays, so its not really “work” for me. Although, I will admit that I hate social media so I typically ignore doing social media posts at the expense of my online presence.
Long story short, it’s not as glamourous as you think it is. Behind the glamour we show you on Instagram and on the blog, there are a tonne of blood, sweat and tears that goes behind the scenes. It takes me a week to write a story on my solo female travel blog, edit it, and prepare the photos. It is also a very crowded space as there are a tonne of travel bloggers vying for attention and sponsored trips, so it is equally competitive as well.
Another thing to note is that travel blogging is not a job that will make you rich. In fact, it may not make you any money at all. Brands do not want to pay for bloggers to write about their products, hotels or destination, they usually offer free stuff in exchange for a blogpost/social media posts. That often means more work but no income for the blogger. At the same time, maintaining a blog can be very expensive because you have to pay for hosting, domain name and other costs. To afford life, many bloggers have full-time jobs (like me), or have freelance jobs like consulting, freelance writing, sell merchandise, affiliate marketing etc.
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