But for now, let\u2019s get back to the nuts and bolts of travel blogging.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
So you want to be a travel blogger?<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
Who wouldn\u2019t want to be a travel blogger, right? \u00a0You get paid to write<\/strong><\/a> about exotic locations, stay in luxurious hotels, and eat at Michelin-starred restaurants.\u00a0 You wake up late and take your laptop and Campari cocktail to the pool to quickly dash off an article or two for the editors at Conde Nast,<\/em> who are eagerly awaiting your next paragraph.\u00a0 Sounds about right?<\/p>\n\n\n\n Uhh\u2026no. Not even close. If you want to know the truth, it\u2019s a lot of hard work with very little promise of reward. Furthermore, there\u2019s a lot that goes into writing a travel blog, much of which has surprisingly little to do with writing. To break it down for the sake of discussion, we could separate the overall activity (blogging) into three general parts.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In my mind, you need to know something about: 1) writing, of course; 2) technical\/computer skills; 3) marketing\/social media. Good travel bloggers possess all of these abilities, but usually they arrived at blogging from one of the three (and if you look closely at their blogs, you can usually tell which one). But of these three overlapping components, which one is the most crucial in terms of attracting readers to your website? Tough to say, because they are all important. Maybe the technical skills are less advantageous today than they were four or five years ago. Google has really tightened up their algorithm to weed out spammy sites. Still, if your site isn\u2019t coded well and optimized for search engines, you\u2019re going to have a tougher, slower road ahead of you.<\/p>\n\n\n\n I\u2019ll try to touch on some of the technical stuff in the next post, but today let\u2019s talk about the writing part.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The first thing you need to decide upon is your general theme\u2014and then you should probably try to narrow it down as much as practically possible. Not too much, because you don\u2019t want to run out of things to write about. But don\u2019t be another generic \u201ctravel\u201d blog, or even \u201cItaly\u201d blog, at least not in the beginning. There\u2019s just too many out there and you\u2019ll never gain any attention.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Instead, be the \u201cSingle mom travelling Italy with three kids\u201d blog.\u00a0 Or focus on a specific area, and be the \u201cBaroque Sicily\u201d blog.\u00a0 Mine started as the \u201cAmerican teaching English in Rome\u201d blog, but honestly that was WAY too niched down.\u00a0 So I gradually \u201cniched out\u201d to be the \u201csnarky malcontent ruminating over culture idiosyncrasies\u201d blog.\u00a0 But even this has been done, and done much better by the likes of my COSI friend, Elizabeth Evans of Surviving in Italy, for example.<\/p>\n\n\n\n A college kid backpacking across Thailand? Not so special, there are literally hundreds of those blogs. But how about a transgender couple living in an igloo above the Arctic Circle with their pet walrus? Now THAT\u2019S a blog that I would follow. OK, you don\u2019t have to be that<\/em> unique, but you see what I mean.<\/p>\n\n\n\n This brings me to the most important element, at least from the writing side: finding a distinctive voice. Even if you\u2019re talking about the same things as the 900 other Italy bloggers (like me), you must at least \u201csound\u201d like you\u2019re saying something different. And the only way to do that is to cultivate the written version of a consistent and identifiable personality. You don\u2019t need to have a \u201cbig\u201d personality, just a unique one. <\/p>\n\n\n\n If that\u2019s the \u201cwho,\u201d then let\u2019s talk about the \u201cwhat.\u201d Of course, your topics will be dictated to a large degree by the theme of your blog, and you should try to stick to that as much as possible. You want to become an \u201cauthority\u201d on something<\/em>, whether it\u2019s Umbrian hill towns, Sicilian cuisine, or the best camping sites in Northern Italy. That doesn\u2019t mean that you can\u2019t wander off topic occasionally, but try your best to find a tie-in to the overall theme of your blog.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Once you\u2019ve become an authority, and you start getting a fair amount of traffic to your site, only then can you consider gradually zooming out. Again, using my blog as an example, it was originally a resource for folks wanting to teach English in Rome, and for expats who needed some advice on fighting their way through the dense jungle of Italian bureaucracy. \u201cPermesso di Soggiorno\u201d is still one my biggest Google search terms, even though I haven\u2019t written anything about that subject in over a year and a half.<\/p>\n\n\n\n As I expanded my writing topics, people started finding my site by searching for the cultural idiosyncrasies like Italian superstitions<\/a>, dating Italian women<\/a>, and dressing like an Italian<\/a>. Lately, in the last six months or so, my site is being noticed as a resource for travelers looking for vacations spots in Italy that are not<\/em> part of the Rome-Florence-Venice itinerary.<\/p>\n\n\n\n But even from there I wander off topic occasionally. This past summer my family and I traveled outside of Italy, so I had to find a way to connect these trips back to my blog. It was easy in Switzerland, since we were in the Italian-speaking zone. I wrote a post comparing the lifestyle in Ticino<\/a>, Switzerland to Sicily\u2014two places that speak (sort of) the same language but with completely different social structures and cultural norms. Then we went to New York City, and I wrote about our day in \u201cLittle\u201d Italy<\/a>. Again, a very loose connection, but still it fits the current theme of my blog.<\/p>\n\n\n\n OK, we\u2019ve got our \u201cwho\u201d and \u201cwhat,\u201d so it\u2019s time to figure out \u201chow.\u201d How do we relate our experiences to our audience in a way that feels personal to them?<\/em> I have really come to dislike all the \u201clists\u201d out there\u2014\u201cTop Ten Gelato Flavors,\u201d or \u201cTwelve Reasons to Visit Puglia.\u201d This trend has created a cacophony of information on The Web, and practically removed the personality of the writer from the writing, making him\/her an anonymous entity, not unlike an encyclopedia.<\/p>\n\n\n\n My first choice is always to tell a story.<\/p>\n\n\n\n But NOT the kind of story that reads like a twelve year-old\u2019s diary: \u201cI had pasta for lunch\u2026it was SOOOO delicious!!! Then we saw Saint Peter\u2019s\u2026it was SOOOO incredibly beautiful!!!!\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n It doesn\u2019t matter how many exclamation points you use, punctuation can never replace genuine emotion. Sadly, we all use them too much, including me, especially in our social media updates. Just before you publish a blog post, go back through it and delete 90% of your exclamation points. A good rule: allow yourself ONE per 1,000 words. (I just made this rule up, but it sounds about right to me.) They\u2019re OK in Twitter, I guess, but leave them out of your blog\u2026.for the love!!!!<\/p>\n\n\n\n Try to \u201czoom in\u201d and focus on details. If you want to transport your readers to the place, you must activate their senses. However, avoid the trap of breaking out a thesaurus and merely listing adjectives, especially the hackneyed ones (beautiful, wonderful, incredible, and the undisputed king of all overused adjectives: amazing<\/em>\u2014if everything is “amazing” what’s left to be ordinary?). No, you have to try a little harder than that to convey emotion, and that\u2019s what good storytelling will accomplish.<\/p>\n\n\n\n It\u2019s also important to get into the \u201cmeat\u201d of the story as quickly as possible. Blog posts are short and people\u2019s attention spans are shorter still these days\u2014don\u2019t waste time with a lot of background.<\/p>\n\n\n\n One trick that I use occasionally is to introduce dialogue within the first few sentences. Now your reader feels like he\/she is right there, eavesdropping in the middle of your conversation. And that\u2019s another point: don\u2019t start with the beginning of the conversation; drop in on the most interesting part of it. Here\u2019s an example from my blog.<\/p>\n\n\n\nFind your voice<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
![\"to](\"https:\/\/rickzullo.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/09\/1roma.jpg\")
<\/a><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\nTell your story<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
![\"La](\"https:\/\/rickzullo.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/09\/sicilyboat.jpg\")