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This is not a how-to guide. I have no frickin clue what I’m doing and I’m so tired of watching influencers and content creators tell me it’s easy.
Maybe reading about my struggles will make you feel better about yours, so here is everything I know about how not to start a travel Website.
First of all social media lies, nothing is ever as simple as the internet gurus tell you.
“How I reached 100,000 website visitors in my first week with 3 easy steps”
“How I’ve Gained 900% Traffic in 10 Minutes”
“94.6 Million Web Visitors! 5 Free Website Traffic Sources”
“Get 10,000 Instagram followers in 24hrs”
“Next time you’re in Canva, just create a $2000 product and sell it to 1000 people”
F*#k off.
Social media is the most discouraging place on the planet. Everyone is better than you and everything is easy, except for it’s not.
And honestly, that’s ok, I don’t mind hard work. But you can’t spend more than 10 seconds on any social platform without being told you’re doing it wrong and that you’re only one click away from millions of followers.
I’m highly confident that I don’t always do things correctly and I have a habit of just starting things without a fully fleshed out plan. I also know that sometimes you just have to start or you never will.
So, in January of this year fresh off a month-long trip in New Zealand I told my wife that I wanted to start a travel website. She’s a graphic designer so she knew this was going to be her problem.
What kind of travel website, she asked? One that is going to replace our income (eventually, I am a realist) and allow us to travel whenever we want.
Obviously not a very structred plan but I know the end goal and now I just have to work backwards right?
So where do you start?
You need to build a website.
There are a million ways to do that, where in lies the problem. I think that is society’s problem right now we are spoiled for choice in everything, there is just so much information out there that we all have ADHD trying to sort through it all.
Unless you want to pay $5k-$10k for a custom website with a developer you’re probably going to use a page builder.
Long story short, I ended up using Elementor, its still a page builder but with more customization and future growth options on WordPress.
Ok great, every YouTube video says Elementor is easy to use.
Spoiler alert its easy if you are a techy developer type. I’m not and at the start, it was incredibly difficult and the process was so slow. I have a more than full-time job and family so trying to learn this stuff was painful.
Here’s my first and only Pro Tip. Get help.
I’m very lucky because my wife is a talented graphic designer. If you’re not married to one, then you need to find one. We live in a highly visual world and a great graphic designer can bring your ideas to life. Start out by having just a few pages created. There are lots of ways to do this whether its on Elementor its self or in Figma etc.
Fiveer is a great resource to find whatever skill you don’t have. I always try to use “High Rated”sellers or Pro’s. We love Ali and can’t recommend him enough.
While my wife was making things pretty, I tried to find a name for the website.
You probably didn’t know this but every name you can think of is already taken, so that’s cool.
What’s more annoying is that out of the 1.1 billion websites in the world only 17% are actually in use. So there is a chance that the name you wanted was bought by some dude named Greg in 1998 and he posted one photo of his dog on a hike and then never again. The domain is probably on auto-renew and frickin Greg has no idea and he doesn’t answer his email.
Or someone bought it and they will let you purchase it for an un godly amount of money.
Godaddy has a “Broker service” that claims to help you buy a domain if it’s taken. All you have to do is pay them up front, everything I read claimed it doenst work. We got so desperate for a name we tried and paid $100 for the service and guess what? It was useless.
Fast forward, you have a name and you figured out a hosting service.
“Now you need content someone will care about and you just realized that everything you want to write about is already on the Internet and done by people who are better writers, better looking and have abs.”
Why am I even doing this?
You push through the self-doubt partly because you already paid the Fiveer guy.
Now you have a website and it hopefully looks good. Remember how there are 1.1 billion websites, now there’s one more. You connect Google Analytics and realize that no one knows your website exists.
Then you learn about SEO and realize your website is nowhere near complete, FML.
You struggle through weeks of SEO, keywords and alt image text and still no one knows your website exists. I hate this. You also found out you need backlinks but not just a couple, like frickin 1000’s.
You hire another random fiveer guy and he crashes your site. It’s literally gone, months of hard work and the website is blank white.
“Then its fixed until you update a random plugin and it crashes again. Your wife hates you.”
It’s fixed again but now you realize that you need to change a bunch of stuff on your site because it wasn’t well thought out. Good thing you have no visitors anyway.
Website is done for now and is sorted out.
Now you can just start an Instagram account and watch your follower count grow daily and that will drive traffic to your site.
You look at some of the travel bloggers, photographers etc that you like. They have a gabillion followers and they are far more talented than you.
Remember how there aren’t any good domain names left, try finding an Instagram handle. The worst.
You finally found one and quickly set up your Instagram account but you do it wrong and the algorithm hates you but you won’t know this for weeks possibly months yet. You make a post and nothing happens. My wife doesn’t even like the post.
Every guru tells you to make reels. Fine, you post a reel. Zero views after 24 hrs.
This is where I am now. I want to tell you it gets easier but I have no idea yet.
Nothing is easy and everything is annoying, hope this helps.