How to help a travel blogger to succeed

If you’re reading this post, chances are you either like me as a person or my blog, or both. You may have found your way here through me sharing a link to this on my social media, or you may have been searching for information on a trip, found Inside Laura’s Head, enjoyed that post and started clicking around to read more from me. However you found me, I’m super grateful to have you here.

Anyone who takes their travel blog seriously will have some sort of dream for it and for me, my big dream is to blog full time-I might never get there, but it would be incredible to me if I did. My partner freelances now which gives him a lot of freedom and I’d love to have the same. Being able to travel whenever without worrying about annual leave, working from cute cafes in new cities, having whole days dedicated to whatever I’m in the mood for whether that’s writing, social media, photography, planning, would bring me so much joy.

What’s the aim?

I did actually do this full time for 6 months in 2018, after a job I hated ended with no notice. In that time I built up to earning about 45% of what I’d need to live, and it was growing steadily, but I wasn’t in a position to carry on without a full time income, so I chose to go back to a full time job. Today, I work 9-5:30 Monday to Friday with a one hour lunch break, which leaves nowhere near enough time for Inside Laura’s Head as I’d like. As well as my full time day job I run three times a week, I go to the gym twice, I have season tickets for Burnley, I do pet sits, I prioritise quality time with my partner, and I also need to sleep. Most, if not all, travel bloggers are in the same boat-not enough time to do the amazing work they want to, to create the content they know they’re capable of.

My medium term goal is to drop one day a week from my day job, and use that time to work on Inside Laura’s Head. It would also mean I had a day I could catch flights without needing to book annual leave, as I can work from abroad if I need to. To do that, though, means I really need to be earning 25% of my wage from this site, to justify the 20% drop in salary. That is quite a lot of money, far far more than I’m earning as it stands, and this is where support from readers comes in.

How can readers help?

There are many ways you can support your favourite creators, most of them won’t cost you a single penny, and if you’re enjoying my work I’d love you to read the rest of this post and then send a bit of support my way too.

If you’re spending money anyway…

I, like many bloggers, have agreed to be an affiliate for some companies I use myself. What this means is if you use my link and buy from them, I get a (very) small percentage of that sale. If you buy an eSIM with Airalo, book accommodation via booking.com or hotels.com, or book activities with Klook or GetYourGuide, please consider doing so using my links. It doesn’t cost you anything extra but it shows the brands that my readers trust my recommendations, and helps me to cover the costs of this blog. The more I get covered, the more I can invest in learning new skills that will improve my writing going forward, and that benefits both myself and readers.

If you don’t yet have a bank account that gives you fee free spending abroad, signing up to Monzo via my referral link gets us both a reward of £10, £20 or £50 once you’ve made your first transaction. It’s just a debit card, so once your card arrives, use that instead of your normal account next time you’re in a shop, and we’ll both get the reward.

If you don’t want to spend money…

There’s loads of ways you can help me succeed, even without spending your hard earned money. Reading this post is helping me, because that’s an extra pageview, and the more pageviews I get, the closer I am to my next goal, adding ads to my sidebar so I’m paid per pageview.

As well as reading the post you’ve come to my blog for, reading some others too, whilst you’re here, shows the search engines that my content is valuable, which leads to it ranking higher when people search for things I’ve written about. That leads to more people choosing to click through to my content, and that helps me to grow overall.

Following my social media channels (I’m on Facebook, X, Instagram, Pinterest and Tiktok) helps me to grow there which leads to more people seeing my content, which feeds in to them choosing to click through to this blog.

Sharing links to post you’ve enjoyed reading, either directly with a relevant person (the person you’re booking a trip with, maybe) or on your own social media channels helps to grow my audience. Liking, commenting on or sharing my social media posts helps those platforms to grow too.

Thank you, again for your support. I appreciate you!