Yes! I know it has been a minute! I will try as much as possible to post more than once a week! 🙂 Today, I spoke to 6 wonderful ladies in the travel industry, and I asked them to share with you why they started travel blogging.
I thought this might either inspire you or give you the push you need to make a decision on starting one yourself, there is enough space for more people to join!
So sit back, relax, take a pen, and jot down the key points from this article, and let me know in the comment section if this post was of any help to you! 🙂
The Ufuoma – www. theufuoma.com
@TheUfuoma
1.) I wanted to get more creatively expressive through my writing.
2.) I had done a lot of travel in the past and continue to do so, I thought it will be great to share my experiences with family and friends and anyone else who wanted to be a part.
3.) Travel has blessed me in so many ways so I thought I’d pay it forward by documenting my experiences in hopes that it inspires others to seek their own travel adventures.
4.) I wanted to share my tips and advice with my readers to help them make better travel choices and make travel more attainable.
5.) To spread the word that travel isn’t just for a certain class of people, a certain skin color, a certain passport color, a certain gender. Travel is for everyone who wants it badly enough & willing to make it work[/vc_column_text][vc_column_text]
Nnenna Fakoya-Smith – www.nene-uwa.com.ng
@AjalaNene
I actually started blogging in 2010 to document and share my various interests and to also inspire those who read it.
However, I started my Travel Blog in 2017. And these are the reasons why:
(1) To have an online dairy to record all my travels experiences. I am a ‘Dairy person’. So having a blog is like my online diary to write about my travel experiences ?
(2) To share my insights and tips about places I have visited. People usually ask me for information about places I have visited. So my blog is like a go-to-place to answer these questions
(3) To inspire others to travel and explore! Most people don’t explore places they visit. So my travel blog aims to inspire people to explore and give people tips on what they can do in the places I have visited.
(4) To make money! ? Blogging is a profitable online business. If you know how to navigate your way around it, and you patiently build it, you can make some good cash from it. That’s why I decided to have a separate blog for my travels. READ THIS POST.
(5) To spread the word about Sustainable Tourism. I am passionate about using Tourism as a tool for making impact. The Sustainable Tourism Movement is one of my major reasons for starting my Travel blog. I use it to share different things relating to Sustainable Tourism and being a Responsible Traveler.
Diusor Odiakosa – www.diusorodiakosa.com
@diusorr
I started travel blogging for the following reasons;
1. To document my race of visiting 25 states in Nigeria before I turn 25
2. To share my travel experiences with others.
3. To inspire people to travel more especially within Nigeria
4. To promote tourism in Nigeria
5. To simplify travel planning for others
Funmi Oyatugun – www.funmioyatogun.com
@funmioyatogun
- My most natural means of expression is writing. As a child, I traveled quite a lot with my family and one of our traditions was to write essays about our trips for our parents to review. In a sense, they were helping us become better writers and in another sense, they were teaching us to travel with our eyes and minds open. When you know you have an essay to write, you learn to become more observant and engaging with the destination. So, long after my parents no longer required these essays, I continued to journal my experiences and share them. This is what evolved into my travel blog.
- I want to tell the homegrown stories that were missing. As soon as I realized that there was a gaping hole where stories from young, African female explorers belonged, I was more inspired to keep writing intentionally and consistently. As a geographer, I am eager to explore how people influence their environment with culture and travel, vice versa. I want people to see the world through a different lens, perhaps a surprising one. Also, I bring a new voice to the conversation with my colorful and interactive travel maps.
- Running a business in Nigeria can be an excruciating and exciting process and writing allows me stay in balance. It is amazing how much of my writing serves as therapy for me. I learn and unlearn so much every day as I build a business in Nigeria. Writing allows me engage with other entrepreneurs and innovators. We can share insights, discoveries and publish data from our daily operations. In fact, we can also empathize with one another over the intricacies of business that are peculiar to our country. TVP Adventures is an online platform where young people can book travel experiences and bring their travel dreams to life, without the hassle of planning these trips. As I share my experience from building quality travel solutions, younger people are inspired to go for their own goals.
- My blog is a great way to create a buzz about my work and projects. I am still learning PR but when you’ve got a vision, you’re the best person to tell about it. People love to read personal stories that will engage them or provide them with fascinating information. This is what I do on my blog. I share personal stories about my work at TVP Adventures as well as our NGO – Wahamba! If people can connect with me through travel, they are likely to become interested in the other projects I am involved with.
- To earn some money. I started earning money for my writing after consistently sharing travel information and successfully getting my stories featured on renowned publications. These days, I am thankful for the opportunity to write for entities whose visions align with mine.
Funmi Ajala – FunmiAjala.com
@FunmiAjalaTravels
1) To tell the story: There is the saying that if you don’t tell your story, another person will tell their own version of your story. It is the urge to tell the Nigerian and African story in the real sense of it.
2) Showcase the beautiful landscape: As a travel and documentary photographer, I want to show the beauty of our country in ways we do not get to see it always. Nigeria is so beautiful but we don’t get to appreciate that even though some of us see it daily.
3) Learning of our History: Traveling educates in the way of history. Most of the young Nigerians do not know much about where we are coming from which led us to where we are now as a people. Writing about historical events and people is a way of sharing what I find during my travels.
4) Sharing and learning: I blog to share my experience of places and people with others and to learn from feedback I get from my community. It is always interesting when people share stories about where they come from.
5) Change the Tourism landscape: I hope through my stories to change the tourism landscape in Nigeria. Make people want to travel within Nigeria, explore the beautiful scenes i have encountered and thus be able to affect policies in its own way positively towards tourism.
NaijaNomads.com
@NaijaNomads
It’s actually a funny story, an online travel journal is always something I’ve wanted to do all my life and one morning, I heard a voice from God telling me I had to wake up and begin to write! Lmaooo just kidding…if I’m being brutally honest, there’s no super exciting plot to it. It was literally an accident. I didn’t start out always wanting to have a online travel journal.
1. An outlet to share my unusual travel experiences with friends and family: I’ll like to think I’m an adventurous person…actually I am a very adventurous person.
With my friends and family I was the one constantly going to seamingly unusual countries…
They wanted my stories, they wanted to see places I visited, things I did, food I ate, where I stayed etc. during and after each trip I’ll create a word document and send out to people interested in everything I got up to. One day one of them said to me “why don’t you start off a blog. Your story telling us amazing”. And that’s how it began….
2. An outlet to share other people experiences with fellow Nigerians: this came right after I shared a few stories of mine.
I began to attract people with similar interests who had been looking for an outlet to share their stories with everyone, specifically Nigerians. Our main goal was to encourage Nigerians to MOVE, literally.
Be it local, international, far or near…just move! Our first guest post was from a friend of mine who spent 28 days in Thailand and it was epic story telling!
I still remember this day publishing that article off the blog cos it was pretty amazing. More people wanted to share and we have almost a 100 guest posts on the blog.
3. To create a community of people with similar interests: mahnnnn the Nomad fam is a FORCE…A Force! They always come clutch with the tips, ready to engage and give constructive feedback.
The community we’ve created has been amazing. People have made friends and travel buddies of life! In a typical Nigerian friend circle there’s always one person who is the traveler.
She plans trips for her friends and half of them don’t show up. Our community focuses on bringing all these travel lovers and enthusiasts together. Forget drake, who says you can’t make new friends! It’s very frustrating to be in that circle, I know exactly how it feels cos I’ve experienced it time and time again.
4. Have an online travel resource for Nigerians BY a Nigerian: Until I started out I didn’t realize the lack of information for the Nigerian traveler out there. There was literally no platform that had any information.
Our passport struggles are different and Nigerians want to know the simple things to make travel more seamless; how do I get there (airline), do I need a visa (visa free country), how do they treat Nigerians at immigration etc.
So we began to provide this information via our story telling format
5. To debunk all the stereotypes of Nigeria; it’s people and the country: yes we know we don’t exactly have a great reputation and the optics are pretty bad.
However, we’ve tried to debunk every single stereotype of a Nigerian out there. We are not all “princes or princesses”, we can do legitimate business transactions.
Every guide, tour operator, hotel chain or transport company we have worked with have said they’ll definitely work with us time and time again and we have formed lifetime partnerships with them. We also try on our group trips to educate people we meet in our host country about our culture.
We speak great English because we were colonized by the British, Nigeria is more than “lahhhguss”, we have over 500 tribes and there is no language called “Nigerian”, finally we do not know a Kevin from Kenya, Africa is not a country ?
Fisayo Olayinka-Bello: TheFisayo.com
…I hope they all INSPIRED YOU! It is interesting to note that there is a common factor as to WHY they all started TRAVEL blogging, what do you think that common factor is? Leave it in the comment section below!
And yeah, I know you are wondering if I am going to share my reason for Travel blogging also, so, in A PREVIOUS ARTICLE, I wrote about how I started blogging, the struggles, and what kept me going, it was after a while I decided to major in travel blogging.
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Discussion:
WHY DO YOU WANT TO START TRAVEL BLOGGING?
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