Monthly Archives: December 2013

101 Travel Blog Names to Help You Find your Ideal Name

Choosing the perfect name for a travel blog can be an extremely time consuming and frustrating experience, but it can be a lot easier if you start off in the right direction by getting a good idea of what the successful bloggers call their blogs.

By examining names of the top travel blog sites, you will definitely get inspiration for your blog’s name by noticing the qualities of the well-named blogs and the variety of naming strategies that can be used to produce cool brands.

In addition, you will also note that there are quite a few mediocre names among the leading blogs in the travel sector, which should give you confidence in coming up with a decent name that doesn’t have to be perfect.

If you’ve been having a hard time thinking of, or selecting a name, hopefully this selection of 101 Names of Top Travel Blogs will get you closer to a decision so that you can start writing sooner.

  1. Desi Traveler
  2. What a Trip
  3. Traveling Canucks
  4. Everything Everywhere
  5. Travel Wonders Of The World
  6. Four Jandals
  7. The Aussie Nomad
  8. Hecktic Travels
  9. Vagablogging
  10. Finding The Universe
  11. Brendan’s Adventures
  12. Flip Nomad
  13. The Expeditioner
  14. Muza Chan
  15. John’s Adventures
  16. Plum Deluxe
  17. Time Travel Turtle
  18. Heather On Her Travels
  19. Adventures By Daddy
  20. Go See Write
  21. Ciao Bambino
  22. Practical Travel Gear
  23. Beers and Beans
  24. The Cranky Flier
  25. Virtual Wayfarer
  26. The Amateur Traveler
  27. Alex In Wanderland
  28. Mom’s Minivan
  29. Wandering Earl
  30. A Little Adrift
  31. Hawaii Vacation Blog
  32. My Beautiful Adventures
  33. Twenty-Something Travel
  34. Wild Junket
  35. Europe A La Carte
  36. Pause the Moment
  37. Travels of Adam
  38. Traveling Mamas
  39. Off Track Planet
  40. The Mother of All Trips
  41. Fearful Adventurer
  42. Delicious Baby
  43. Tourist 2 Townie
  44. Two Go Round-The-World
  45. Peter Greenberg Worldwide
  46. Just Travelous
  47. Almost Fearless
  48. Over Yonderlust
  49. The Road Forks
  50. Alaska TravelGram
  51. We Said Go Travel
  52. Yomadic
  53. Uncornered Market
  54. Go Green Travel Green
  55. The Everywhereist
  56. The Expert Vagabond
  57. E Tramping
  58. The Planet D
  59. Go Visit Hawaii
  60. Monkeys & Mountains
  61. Changes in Longitude
  62. Fox Nomad
  63. Legal Nomads
  64. InACents
  65. Have Baby Will Travel
  66. Beat of Hawaii and Beyond
  67. As We Travel
  68. Fluent in 3 Months
  69. Nomadic Chick
  70. Solo Friendly
  71. The Travel Tart
  72. Upgrade: Travel Better
  73. Practical Nomad
  74. The Q Family Adventures
  75. Medellin Living
  76. Travel Mamas
  77. Indie Travel Podcast
  78. Y Travel Blog
  79. Nomadic Matt
  80. Soul Travelers 3
  81. Out to Africa
  82. Never Ending Footsteps
  83. iBackpackCanada
  84. Musings on travel ecommerce
  85. Nomadic Notes
  86. Chris Around the World
  87. The Real Banff
  88. Runaway Juno
  89. Imperator Travel
  90. Isabelle’s Travel Guide
  91. Nerd’s Eye View
  92. Mom Most Traveled
  93. Europe Up Close
  94. Inspiring Travelers
  95. Inside the Travel Lab
  96. Around the World in 80 Jobs
  97. Landlopers
  98. OttsWorld
  99. NYCity Mama
  100. Our Oyster
  101. World Heritage Site

[Edit] Here are a couple of good names shared by a contributor (thanks to TheSunbakedBlogger):

  • Exile Lifestyle
  • Fearful Adventurer

Now it’s time to let yourself loose.

On your digital or traditional notepad, make a list of any name that comes into your head, however silly it may seem. Jot down keywords you want to include in the name. Adapt any of the naming styles above in a unique way to make it your own. Try modifying phrases or words in clever, funny or quirky ways. Above all, have fun wordplaying and you should find a name you’ll love.

Can Blogging really Pay for my Holidays and Trip Around the World?

A lot of successful travel bloggers make a fairly decent income from their blogs. Some even manage to travel 365 days a year, where blogging and online projects enable them to make money while travelling. So does this mean that writing a travel blog can give you free vacations and fund your globe trotting adventures?

No, it doesn’t. Yes, you can make money by writing a travel related blog, but the key question is how much.

It Can But Will It?

Of course it is theoretically possible to pen a successful blog that earns enough to pay for a holiday or covers your tightly budgeted backpacking journey across the world. But that requires a great deal of ability, dedication and effort to get the blog popular first.

A well-written travel blog that has been nurtured for some time to build a decent readership can certainly cover most of the costs of a short getaway, or help to supplement a backpacker’s income, but to think that you can start a blog in order to give you free flights, hotels and spending money is a little far fetched.

Blog for the Right Reason

To get a blog off the ground and into the realms of being a top travel blog, a lot of passion is needed to fill it with awesome content, as well as to love, engage and connect with readers. If you think it’s an easy way to make money, you’ll find it hard to persevere when you only earn a few dollars a month.

But if you do it because you love to write, share stories, help people discover things, or to meet new people online to exchange travel experiences and knowledge, you’ll be starting your blog on a firmer foundation for success. As the saying goes, “Do It for the Right Reason”, and “The Money Will Follow”.

Ironically, the person who starts a blog to make money will normally fail at it and have a miserable time doing so. In contrast, someone who blogs because they love to create content and share their travel findings, will do it more naturally, have fun doing it, and may end up making more money along the way.

Passion before Money

So, while it is possible, try not to base your travel blog’s goal around money. Income may be one of the secondary reasons to motivate you to blog, but it shouldn’t be the primary objective, especially at the start anyway.

And even if you have your eye on the financial benefits of travel blogging, you shouldn’t set such lofty aspirations as to have it pay for all your travel expenses. You’ll only end up being disappointed.

Investment & Expectations

However, all this depends on how much you are willing to invest into your blog in the first place. For example, if you have additional help (such as paid writers) to assist in content generation, or a sizeable budget for advertising and promotions, you’ll be able to grow your blog more quickly than someone who is doing it all themselves.

At the same time, a lot also depends on the scope of your travel itinerary, and what you mean by “pay for your travel”. For instance, some backpackers try to stay with friends for free, where most of their daily costs are quite meagre. In this scenario, it may be possible for a blog’s income to cover simple food and living expenses. But if your travel costs include hotel accommodation, then it’s a totally different picture.

Unlikely but Possible

All in all, it’s probably fair to say that the answer to the question of whether a travel blog’s income can pay for your trips, is no, it definitely can’t pay for all of it, but it depends on how much you invest into the blog in the first place, your competence in writing and Internet Marketing, what your travel preferences and requirements are, and how long you intend to publish the blog before expecting it to fund your travels.

Indeed, there are many stories and examples of people who do manage to live off their blog, but they are the outliers and what you may not know is that they’ve put a lot of effort into honing their skills as a writer and invested hundreds or even thousands of hours into their blog for it to produce a decent income.

Buy your Travel Blog’s Domain Name vs Using a Free Web Address

Even though it is possible to use a free web address (such as http://yourblogname.wordpress.com) from an online blogging platform, there must be good reasons why the majority of successful travel bloggers buy or register their own domain name (ie http://www.yourblogname.com) to use as their blog’s name and URL.

Some of these top bloggers may have started out using a free service, along with the blog address provided on a sub-domain of the service provider’s main domain, and then subsequently purchased their own domain name, or they may have started their blog on a domain of their own and hosted the blog independently right from the start.

Blog Names vs Domains vs Web Addresses

A blog’s name is extremely important, and as a result, so is the domain name or web address that is commonly thought to be the blog’s name.

Actually, a blog’s name and its web address can be different (for example, a blog may be called ‘Mind Your Own Business’, but the domain name may be abbreviated to http://www.myob.com in order to get a domain that is shorter) but it is always better to ensure they are the same to avoid any confusion and to preserve brand coherence.

Most blogs are started on impulse where the blogger doesn’t have huge aspirations and simply wants to test it out without spending any money. As a result, the free blogging platforms are an ideal fit, as they provide a total solution together with a usable and acceptable blog site address. Who cares if it’s a sub-domain, as long as it’s free right?

Domain Name Cost is Negligible vs Benefits

But a great deal of effort and investment needs to be made to turn a blog into a success, and along the way, the $10/year cost of a domain name (and the $10/month cost of hosting) becomes negligible compared to the amount of time dedicated to the publication and once the blogger takes his or her blog more seriously.

This is when blog owners using free services like WordPress or Blogger discover that the free URL is not good enough and they want to have a more professional address for their site, and try to register the domain name equivalent to their blog’s name.

Domain Name Extensions for Travel Blogs

The best option is to get a domain in the most popular and recognized dotcom (.com) domain extension, but in many cases, it has already been registered by someone else, and the blogger opts for a dotnet (.net), dotorg (.org), dottv (.tv), dotme (.me) or one of the many global top level domain names.

At the same time, a country level domain extention may also be used, such as .co.uk for bloggers in the UK, .ca for Canadian bloggers or the respective CCTLD for the country where the blogger is from.

Acquiring the Ideal .com Domain for your Blog

Alternatively, in pursuit of the ideal .com extention, the blogger may also try to acquire the .com domain that matches their blog’s name from the existing registrant. This usually involves finding the contact information of the current owner from the whois records and getting in touch with them to make an offer. Or, if the domain is already offered for sale through a domain name marketplace, to make an offer accordingly.

If your blog’s domain name is available to be registered, the cost is only about $10 to register it, and $10 a year to renew is subsequently. But if it is already taken and you want to acquire it from the owner (in the aftermarket), you may have to pay a few hundred or even up to tens of thousands of dollars to buy it.

No, it is not absolutely essential to publish your blog on the .com domain name that perfectly matches the blog’s name. But if possible, it is best if a blog that is called ‘The Wandering Nomad’ is located at http://www.thewanderingnomad.com or http://www.wanderingnomad.com, and ideally, the blog owner should own both these domain names and direct traffic from the one that is not used to the one that is used.

Yes, a blog can still be hugely successful by using some other domain name extention such as a .net, or a .co.uk, or a range of other possibilities. A lot of bloggers who do not appreciate or see the value of a defining dotcom domain prefer not to spend hundreds or thousands of dollars for sake of blog naming vanity, and go with some other extention.

But for those who want to make things perfect, and only want the best for the blog that they’ve invested so much into, only a dotcom will do.

Get your Blog’s Domain Name Now!

Why not check to see if the name you’ve chosen for your blog has been taken by someone else already, and if it is still available, you can register it immediately so that you will always own it.

You can do this at www.GoDaddy.com, which is generally regarded to be one of the best domain name registrars in the world.

Even if you have chosen to start your blog on a free blogging service and are happy to use the blog address they provide, there is no harm in owning the perfectly matching .com equivalent so that you can use it as the official name and internet address for your blog at any time you wish in the future.

Blog Hosting is Easy to Setup and Costs Less than a Cup of Coffee a Month

A lot of people prefer to use services like Blogger and WordPress to host their blogs because it’s free. Unfortunately, others limit themselves to what these blog platforms offer because they are worried that web hosting is complicated and costly.

Well, it’s not, and there’s a good reason why most of the leading travel blogs do not rely on free hosts and be constrained by their limitations.

No Need to Know How It Works

If you try to understand what web hosting is by delving into the technical details of how servers are structured and setup in data centers etc, you’re going to want nothing to do with it. There’s so much jargon and confusing terminology that makes you think you don’t have the ability to comprehend or afford it.

The good news is that you don’t need to know most of the geeky side of it to set your travel blog up on a hosting service that allows you (or your webmaster) to do almost anything you want on it. After all, do you need to know the inner workings of combustion engines or how your car’s transmission works to drive it? No.

Benefits of Getting your Own Hosting

By getting your own hosting service for your blog rather than relying on the free blog platforms, you will have full control of your site and have complete flexibility in terms of the technical and creative design, the content you want to publish, and the advertisements that do or don’t appear on your blog.

Once a web hosting service is set up, most of the time, you won’t need to touch it at all for months or even years. There’s just no need to, unless you are going to do extremely complicated enhancements to your blog, in which case, the web designer or developer who is helping you out will know how to deal with the hosting provider.

So, this means that all you need to do is set it up and then pay the small fee every month, which is automatically charged to your credit card. How difficult can that possibly be?

Simplified Setup with Great Help/Support

The setup process is very intuitive and you will be walked step by step throughout the process, and in case you encounter any problems, there is a live support chat to guide you in detail. And if all this is even too much for you, there are lots of freelance service providers who will willingly assist in setting it all up for a tiny fee.

Unless your blog has an extremely large following already, all this will only set you back less than $10 a month, but most of the time, it’s less than the price of a cup of coffee (in case you’re wondering, we’re talking about the cost of a Starbucks in San Francisco and not a road-side brew in South East Asia).

Choosing the Right Web/Blog Hosting Company

There are lots of companies offering web hosting services, and if you choose the wrong ones, you may be sold a more advanced and expensive package that you don’t need, so be careful and do a bit of research first.

If you don’t want to waste time digging around, and just want to know the ideal solution for your requirements, then Hostgator.com or BlueHost.com are probably the best options, assuming you’re just starting out and have a small to medium sized blog.

These two web hosts offer the most affordably priced packages and are targeted at novice users who do not have overly complicated hosting requirements. As such, they have great customer support service with live online chat and a very responsive technicians to solve any problems you may have.

Need some feedback, assistance or have a question to ask about getting your blog hosted properly? Post your message below and we’ll point you in the right direction.

10 Top Travel Domain Names that Sold for a Total of $205,145

Most new travel bloggers don’t know much about the importance of choosing a great name that makes sense and resonates with their blog’s potential audience.

They know even less about internet domains and why it may be worth paying a few hundred bucks to buy the perfect .com domain name.

If the domain name you want has been taken and you feel that the current owner is unreasonable in asking $500 for it, just take a look at these 10 travel-related domains that sold for an average of over $20k each.

  1. worldwidetravel.com $27000
  2. traveljournal.com $25000
  3. travelvietnam.com $25000
  4. travelzoo.jp $24000
  5. discounttravel.co.uk $21765
  6. travelandusa.com $20005
  7. travelmatch.co.uk $17365
  8. itravelmag.com $15010
  9. travelmiles.com $15000
  10. travelzone.com $15000

There is a great deal of value in high quality domains that are meaningful and memorable, so choose your blog’s name wisely and always try to make sure you get the matching .com domain name if you can.

You may not have $25k to acquire a category defining name like TravelVietnam.com or Travel+(Any Country or City you like).com, and a top domain like TravelJournal.com may be totally out of reach, but as you can see, it’s possible to add modifiers such as an ‘e’ or an ‘i’ in front of 2 perfectly matching words too.

So if TravelCambodia.com is taken and too costly, you could go for something like iTravelCambodia.com or MyCambodiaTravels.com.

Alternatively, if you prefer a more creative, witty, and non-descriptive name like most of the ones chosen by the top bloggers, then get your thinking cap on and start playing with relevant puns and clever word-smithing to craft a name that’s funny, cute, quirky or simply awesome.

Source – Namebio.com (The domains listed were transacted privately and on public domain name aftermarkets from 2006 to 2012)