Rarely there exists a day without someone asking me how I am able to manage my travels and the business that I am doing, simultaneously. Where the heck, I get all the money to waste on travels? Frankly, these questions haunted me before I decided to become a full-time blogger. I was never so confident to write blogs and make a living from blogging, but by some rare combinations of my lucky stars, I am here. As a travel blogger, a long way gone, but there is a longer way to explore.
Getting straight to the point, this is not a travel blogging guide that takes you through a few easy and short steps to make you a rich and famous travel blogger. I am sure you will find plenty of those articles online, but for me the truth was far dull from those sexy Instagram posts and exciting tweets. So here, you will find a truly uncensored raw experience of a travel blogger who struggled to meet the ends.
Make sure to have a travel-loving companion
Let me start from my college life where I decided to travel for saving my love life. I completed my Masters in Business Administration from Utkal University in 2000. I was aimless after my studies, but my need for earning to support my love life was quite unavoidable. In India, falling in love is not easy. It is not just the man and his woman, but the whole society has to accept the proposal after several criticisms and negotiations. For me, I felt it was easier to elope her and live a free life with Key. The reality was tougher. In fact, eloping was easier, but living a hidden life was quite impossible. So we started traveling from one place to another, hopping between several cities, states, and countries in Asia and Africa.
Take your travel away from the crowd
Part of our travels were filled with haunting experiences like that we had in Kolkata. While Kolkata is popular as the ‘City of Joy’, we lived in a single room of that bursting city, coinless for almost a week. The only money that we had was spent on a plate of stale samosas (an Indian snack). We borrowed food from a street vendor, and that too at a discounted price, until Key earned her first salary as an Office Administrator. We stayed in Kolkata with bare minimum for almost 3 months. We could stay there for a whole life, but our protective family and relatives didn’t let us.
From Kolkata, we moved on to Hyderabad where we were robbed by an electrician whose service we took to fix an electric fan in our furnitureless accommodation. Soon, we were chased by our relatives and we took abode in Somalia through a friend.
Experience the culture with locals
Each travel taught us a lesson or two. Each place shared a lot of stories with us. Many people asked how my experience was with the pirates of Somalia. Some of them were curious about the Gorillas of Uganda and Rwanda. Yet others wanted to know how Ethiopians could eat those extremely sour Injera. To answer most of their questions, I started blogging on travbuddy.com in 2009. TravBuddy is a large community of travel enthusiasts. I enjoyed the companionship of other travelers. I started mentioning myself as a blogger and enjoyed that extra piece of attention from the world. However, my blogs on TravBuddy never earned me my daily bread.
Being with the travelers community only inspired me to hunt for something more realistic. My search for money making blogs ended up with Triond. Triond surely offered a bit of monetary benefits to me, but it did not last longer. In 2012, I had to join a full-time job, but my desire to travel bubbled within my mind. While continuing on the job, I set out with a troupe of pilgrims to explore Ethiopia until its ancient kingdom that built after the famous queen Sheba. While enjoying the rich traditions of Ethiopia and Egypt, the bliss that I experienced was quite unique and different from the glee I gained while interacting with the lemurs of Madagascar. Snorkeling in the colorful world of Maldives was an experience that could not be diluted by the hot air balloon cappadocia.
Do not expect green meadows always… be prepared for the dry deserts too
Finally, in the year 2016, I grew bolder to start a blog of my own, Jaunt Monkey, to share my travel and food stories. Jaunt Monkey was growing faster with new posts and videos. I was getting calls and appreciations too. Things went on well, until I lost all my posts due to a wrong step that I have taken on the backend. An ordinary human being in me was heavily demotivated and left blogging for several months until April 2017. It took several weeks for me to get things back to the way I wanted it to be. After all these years of traveling and travel writing, I got a paid offer only on 12th July, 2017.
Well, what I have for you in this article is my true experience as a travel blogger. A few things that you must know while you go for travel blogging.
1. Do not quit your full-time job, until and unless you are confident to handle the monetary requirements.
2. Do not start your travel blog for money. Be passionate about travel writing, money will come.
3. Be genuine… do not write anything from your imaginations. Write your real experiences because your readers love to know the truth.
4. Expect to get out of your comfy zone.
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