Dan Flying Solo. Dan has become one of the most influential and inspiring travel bloggers of this generation. With his passion for traveling, photography, travel writing, and videography, Dan has been able to build a career from restaurants to capturing the world.
“I’ve been lucky enough to turn my passion for travel and photography into my job, and spent four years traveling full time before settling down in Portugal – a far cry from the life I thought I would have when I left my London restaurant managers job.”
So, how did he get started with this business?
“For me, I think I got lucky with the right place right time, which got me into some cool positions with travel brands and companies and helped me build a blog from there.”
Since starting, Dan was on the road for 1,467 days between 2014-2018 before making some permanent homages from his travels to Portugal. While all those adventures were being written about on his blog, it seems like a lot of other work was going on outside of his blog as well. “Personally, most of my ‘work’ is actually outside of my blog (photography and writing assignments), and my website makes some good money through advertising thanks to having a decent amount of traffic these days.”
When I asked Dan about any advice he has to give to someone starting out their travel blogging career he said, “It’s a hard one to give advice on travel blogging as it’s such a random industry. But, a lot has changed since then 7 years ago [when he first started]. Nowadays, understanding SEO and applying that to a blog is perhaps the best advice I would give to grow traffic and be in a position to monetize the website.” Reading his answer made me realize how many other things go into travel blogging than just traveling and writing about it.
“There are so many ways to be a ‘blogger’ as a career, from never leaving the desk and just writing well-researched and SEO-optimized text, to taking on paid press-trip style assignments to write about those destinations, or focusing more on social media and getting partnerships there, and all of those come with a different set of advice, aims, and goals. It took me a long time to work out what was most important to me and which direction to head. So, I guess I’d say once you’ve worked out what kind of travel blogging (and most importantly, type of travel) you want to do, then you can find bloggers who have a similar ‘business plan’ and get their top tips.”
“Travel for me is about education and the people I meet always make the trip, that’s why I usually like to fly solo…”
If you’re someone who is interested in this type of career but doesn’t know where to start, I highly suggest taking a look at Dan’s website. Find your ‘business plan’ or niche and go from there. There are so many opportunities within the travel blogging world.
