Step One for Travel Blogging Success: Find Your Niche

If you’ve been travel blogging a few years and success still feels elusive, you might just need to narrow your focus and find your niche. As strange as it may sound, it’s often easier to build traffic by thinking smaller than it is by going broad.

It’s hard to create an entirely new market in this travel field, but it’s not all that hard to focus on one thing and do it better than anyone instead of trying to be a generalist. This is kind of true in freelancing, but it’s looking less and less debatable every year with blogging on any subject. Just being a general “travel writer” puts you in a bloody pool and you’ll have a hard time getting higher wages than anyone else doing the same thing, whether that’s writing for others or writing for yourself.

Becoming known as the expert on independent boutique hotels in Italy is a different story. You can count your competition on one hand. The same goes for single-track biking in New England or kayaking in Belize.

Brad Olsen of CCC Publishing has published multiple books with Sacred Places in the title. He owns that market. Joan Petersen has a dozen Eat Smart In_____ books that cover Mexico, Peru, India, Sicily, Brazil, and other great food destinations. She certainly doesn’t have to prove to anyone that she’s an international cuisine expert and she has parlayed that into a culinary tour company as well.

The Handicap of Being a Generalist

While being a jack of all trades can make sense for some people, especially part-time freelance writers, not having at least one specialty can be detrimental in the long run. If you write about anything or any place, you are putting yourself into a very big sea of similar writers and the only way you can stand out is to be a far superior or more professional writer. Online, it’s hard to outresearch other bloggers either when everyone is using the same keyword tools and writing about the same angles, the same places.

I know a few successful feature writers who get away with this as freelancers because they are so good at what they do and have such a great track record that they are able to be generalists. Whatever assignment comes their way, they can cover it well: luxury Caribbean this month, budget Bali next week, the architecture of Barcelona next. They are curious enough, observant enough, and talented enough that they can make any of these stories sing. Even for them there are some assignments they just won’t take though because they’d be too bored with the subject matter or it’s too complex. They know their skills, but also the limitations of their interest.

Many beginners make the mistake of looking at the most popular blogs, some of them very general, and thinking that’s the model they should follow. But those popular ones that are personality-driven blogs were often started years ago—in some cases 10 or 15 years ago or more—when the field was less crowded (and we still used RSS readers). Those bloggers have 10,000 hours of work put into their sites already. They’re the Microsofts and Coca-Colas of our world. Do you want to compete on that playing field?

“Find Me an Expert on This Subject!”

For most of us, we need to be identified with something specific to get assignments from editors, to sell books, or to build up a following on the Internet. This can be as general as European train travel or as specific as wine tourism in France on the destination side, as general as family travel by RV or as specific as kite surfing on the West Coast of Mexico on the “how to” side. The more general the subject, though, the harder it is to stand out.

As the media gets sliced and diced more ways and also gets more competitive, most readers aren’t looking for articles from generalists unless they’re very new to the subject. With the rise of full-sentence voice searches, queries are getting more and more specific. “The Long Tail” was once where new bloggers went to get started. Now it’s what any deep-diving blogger aims for in their “content clusters” around a subject.

This doesn’t mean that a wine tourism in France specialist can’t write about B&Bs in Vermont or a windsurfing expert can’t write about a hike in Ecuador, but neither one can switch specialties every two months, continually ditching the old one for good. It should be a side trip, a diversion from the main subject. I can write about luxury travel just as easily as budget travel at this point in my life, but with books out about cheap destinations and living abroad, I have a much easier time getting noticed and quoted in the media for those niches.

Editors actually call me with assignments sometimes, solely based on my visibility in this subject area. I recently got assignments for five articles from a major $1-a-word magazine without sending a single query. If they want an article about kite surfing, however, they’re going to call that specialist instead. For my one site that covers luxury travel in Latin America, I actually use a pen name. The man of mystery editor is an expert in that area, and that one only.

What Is Your Niche?

So, what are you an expert at, or in what area could you easily become an expert? Think long and hard about this and make sure it’s a subject or place that you care enough about to cover in detail for years on end. Turn off the electronics and take a hike—literally. Get out of the office and find someplace quiet to think. Take a lesson from Pixar: they didn’t come up with all those terrific movie ideas sitting around a conference room. They always headed to a cabin 50 miles out of the city to do their most important creative thinking. When they were working on Coco, they went to Patzcuaro, Guanajuato, and Oaxaca in Mexico.

This thought process is important because the focus needs to connect. There’s no sense in becoming the European river cruises expert if you don’t like ship cabins or hanging out with retired people. You don’t want to become the Minneapolis travel specialist if you hate the cold and want to move south as soon as possible.

Specializing is especially important in the blogosphere. Starting a blog today about general family travel or things to see in Paris would be an exercise in futility unless you already have a huge following as a book author or TV show host. It’s too hard to stand out from the pack. Find a niche that’s not so crowded already or choose a truly unique way to cover that place/subject.

Darren Rowse, who runs the popular ProBlogger site, succinctly explained in one particular post why a niche is so important. I’m paraphrasing a bit here, but these are the key reasons:

1. A niche blog attracts more readers naturally. People come back because they care about the subject and want to learn and interact.
2. A niche blog is easier to monetize. Specific topics draw specific advertisers and those ads get a more favorable reaction from readers.
3. Niche blogs do better in search engines. If you’re all over the map, Google doesn’t know what your site is about. If you specialize, it’s more likely to be seen as authoritative.
4. Niche blogs build credibility and profile. Experts draw attention from the media, from people who want to hire experts. Who has ever said, “Get me a generalist on the phone”?

Recently, as more money has flooded into the online publishing space and multiples have gone up, there’s another reason to run a niche site instead of one about you: you’ll earn far more money when you sell it someday. Sites about a specific subject are much more attractive (and less risky) to buyers than one tied to a specific person and their experiences.

In its most obvious form, a niche site can be about a place. You can see interviews we’ve done in the past with bloggers who cover one state or city in depth, such as Pittsburg or San Diego. Almost every blogger that has appeared here comes up short when compared to the traffic generated by the Disney Food Blog.

Modern Hiker is a popular site that’s mostly about hiking in and around the major cities of Los Angeles and San Diego. National Parks Traveler covers—you guessed it—traveling in U.S. National Parks.

How do you know if you’re onto something? Try the old entrepreneur’s trick of condensing that specialty or angle into a short “elevator pitch.” If you can summarize your specialty or your blog’s slant in a couple of sentences at a cocktail party, you’re probably on the right track. If it can fit into a slogan that goes into your design or on the About page of a website, even better. If the name of your site says it all, like 2 Travel Dads, Authentic Food Quest, Foodie Flashpacker or The Cheapest Destinations Blog, you’ve nailed it.

If you search variations of that subject area on Google and have a hard time finding good information—but search volume research tells you there’s real demand—you know you can zoom to the top of the search rankings rather quickly. Go full speed ahead.

Sure, it’s fun to write about everywhere you go, about completely unrelated places and angles you experienced on a press trip or while roaming around the world, but for most travel bloggers, that’s the toughest path to success. Stake your claim to one corner of the web, find your tribe, and answer their questions. Tell them what they need to know, help them discover aspects related to what they’re already interested in, and both they and Google will reward you.