How To Become A Full-Time Travel Blogger

There are a million articles like this one. Quitting the 9 to 5 life to live more freely and make money doing something you truly love is the modern day fairytale, and everyone is interested in how full time bloggers manage to do it. In fact, this is my most requested blog post, so I decided to share my insight into how to become a full-time travel and lifestyle blogger.

Here’s how I turned my blogging hobby into a job and managed to leave the 9 to 5 life behind. I’m now completely location independent (which basically just means I can work from anywhere that has a Wi-Fi connection) and live mainly on my travel blog’s income.

While many bloggers happily balance their blog with their day job, I know a huge portion of bloggers dream of taking their blog full-time so I wanted to share my experience.

How I turned my blog into my full-time job

Here’s my personal journey to becoming a full-time travel blogger. It’s a long story, so settle down with a brew and a biscuit!

The early days: starting a blog as a hobby

When I started blogging almost seven years ago(!), the industry was very different to what it is today. Now, everybody and their dog has a blog and thanks to super successful ‘uber bloggers’ and the rise of influencer marketing, young kids actually aspire to be professional bloggers.

When I started my blog, it wasn’t a cool thing to do – mainly because there was very little to be gained from it. In fact, I kept my blog secret for quite a while!

I started this site while I was at university because I wanted to do something that involved using my words when I graduated and I figured I should have some sort of online proof that I could string a sentence together. I wrote pure drivel for a while, and then I went backpacking for three months and when I came back, I started sharing my experiences here. My blog became a retrospective travel diary.

At the time, I didn’t realise that what I was doing when I was supposed to be studying was travel blogging. I just wanted a place to document my drunken travel stories alongside all the dodgy pictures. (I’ve since had to go back and edit those posts, because they were only useful for my own nostalgia and definitely weren’t going to get me taken seriously as a travel blogger.)

Things have changed a lot since then. When I first went backpacking, I didn’t even own a smartphone and Instagram was just a photo sharing app (as opposed to the influencer marketing platform it is today). I didn’t even have an account!

Discovering professional travel blogging

I soon realised that travel blogging was an actual thing that people did. That I was doing. I stumbled upon blogs like The PlanetD, The Travel Hack and Vicky Flip Flop Travels and was hugely inspired. I wanted to offer readers the same inspiring, useful content these guys did – but I wanted to keep my writing as a reflection of my personality, too.

My three-month backpacking adventure meant I’d well and truly been bitten by the travel bug, and reading travel blogs made me realise that there were other lifestyles out there, not just those we’re taught to covet from birth.

I spent my final year of university reading every article I could find about making money online, becoming location independent and eschewing the 9 to 5 lifestyle. I saw that quote about how we pay big money for homes only to leave them empty and spend our days at work, with a car that we paid a shedload of money for only to use as a means to get to the job that paid for it. It terrified me.

The articles I was reading showed me that there was a better way to do things, and I began to focus on finding a way to carve my own path. Of course, I also got a ‘real job’ after uni. Unlike many ‘full-time bloggers’, I wasn’t born with a silver spoon up my bum.

I genuinely loved travel blogging, and that’s what kept me working hard at it for years with no rewards.

Growing a blog while working full time

For the next few years, I balanced various full-time jobs in the digital marketing industry with growing While I’m Young.

I worked on my blog every spare moment I got. I came home from work every night and wrote blog posts, read articles about SEO and Pinterest strategy and social media updates and – still my most-loathed job – edited photos. I said no to social events because I had work to do, and that was hard to explain to people because hello? I wasn’t getting paid for it. I know that most bloggers balance their blog with a ‘real’ job, and it’s tough.

Learning your trade so publicly is a bit disconcerting and I did (still do) a million things wrong, but I slowly gained an understanding of how to build a brand, find a niche, maintain a search engine optimised website and manage social media channels. My day job definitely helped!

Finding a blogging niche

In 2015 I got a fabulous job that meant I had to move to Dubai. Living there meant that I suddenly had an *interesting* life. I had the opportunity to visit lots of different countries, and then come home and write about them on my blog.

I suppose those destination guides are the building blocks of my blog. My website became useful to people because I was writing about things that they wanted to do, and my views slowly increased.

People want to read about other people’s lives when they’re filled with unusual things, but that’s not the only way to be a successful blogger. You can focus on beauty, parenting, whatever floats your boat.

Learning how to get paid for blogging

I can’t actually remember the first paid piece of work I got through my blog, but it was probably a sponsored post for a pittance. Offers trickled in, and I saved every extra penny I made.

Unfortunately, I said yes to work that I shouldn’t have said yes to, purely because I was flattered to be asked. There’s a big difference between blogging as a hobby and turning your blog into a business, and I learned that the hard way.

Eventually I started seeing my blog as a business and began to turn down opportunities that weren’t worth my time.

I never set out to write for other bloggers, so I won’t detail the monetisation strategies I use too much. There are plenty of amazing blogs that can teach you how to make money from a blog and I never wanted to be a meta-blogger, I just want to inspire other people to travel and to entertain them with my words and delight them with my pictures.

I will say that if you’re looking into monetising your blog, you should first focus on building something useful and entertaining, and people will come. Your views will increase and sponsored post opportunities will follow.

To kick off your monetisation strategy, I recommend signing up to an affiliate programme like AWIN and looking into placing ads on your site. To do this, your website will need to be self-hosted. I’m hosted by Bluehost and though I’ve had issues with them a few years back, I feel they’ve improved their service in the past year or two.

How to know when it’s time to quit your job to blog full-time

As with any dream that people quit a ‘real job’ to pursue, the long and short of it is that I threw caution to the wind. I decided to just give it a go. For that reason, I suppose the title of this post is a little bit sensationalist. Sorry!

The time came for me to leave Dubai, and I returned to the UK planning to get another ‘real job’. But then the press trip invitations began to arrive, and I had no time to get a job. How would I ever fit all those press trips in to my annual leave? I decided to just go with it, but that wouldn’t have been possible had I not saved up beforehand.

It’s essential to have a financial safety net in place when you take a risk like leaving your job to be a blogger, and my savings were the only thing that gave me the confidence to attempt blogging full-time.

It might surprise you to learn that I actually wasn’t earning much from my blog at all when I left my day job. I didn’t need to take on paid blog work while I was earning in Dubai so I just prioritised making my blog good. I knew I’d be able to make money from it when I had more time to focus on making it profitable in the UK and it worked.

Read about how blogging has changed my life

The best things about being self-employed

What to know before you become self-employed

How to become a digital nomad

How to get a job in digital marketing

Weird things about working from home

Now, I get paid to work with travel brands and when I’m at home I work on my blog all day, as if it’s a regular job. I have a home office and everything! I try to only work from 8am until 5pm and close my laptop when my boyfriend comes home, otherwise I’d have no structure to my day and we’d both struggle.

For now, it’s working out okay. I don’t feel that it’s anyone’s business what I earn, and money-wise I have good months and bad months, but that’s all part of freelance life. At first it was exhilarating, but now it’s just a stressor.

I’ve also started offering freelance social media management and content writing services, and that pays the bills when blogging doesn’t. I didn’t realise until recently that most full-time bloggers have a side hustle (or rich parents).

My future plans: will I be a travel blogger forever?

Some days I have to remind myself that if it all goes tits up, I can just find a new job. I’ve had an angry boss shout in my face that I’d never get anywhere if I kept just doing whatever I wanted (this was years ago and I was quitting the low-paid graduate role he offered me to move to New York), and I proved him wrong.

I got a job at the best airline in the world, and a huge part of my interview was centred around my love of travel and previous experiences abroad.

The truth is that for employable individuals in not-completely-awful economies, there will almost always be an exit route. My worry is that I’m so used to being my own boss now that I might struggle to go back to a normal job!

My freelance work is my safety net. I’m not interested in backpacking with a baby, but I do see my website – and audience – growing up with me, so we’ll see.

I should state again that there was no eureka moment. I became a full time blogger because of years of hard work, the eventual aligning of circumstances and a hefty dose of pure guts.

There were many tedious nights of working on my Pinterest strategy and editing images while my eyes glazed over and it wasn’t very glamorous, but I reckon it was all worth it. If nothing else, I’ve had a year of living my dream and I’m satisfied that I’ve at least succeeded in blogging as a job for that long.

I don’t know if I’ll want to do this forever, and I do sometimes wonder how I’ll handle buying a house or having babies without the luxury of maternity leave. But for now, this is what I’m doing. And it’s fabulous.

Do you have more questions about being a full-time travel blogger, or requests for more blog posts? Leave me a comment and I’ll get back to you!

You can follow me on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and Pinterest. I also have a travel Youtube channel.

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