Are You Thinking About Becoming A Travel Vlogger? Read This!
People think becoming a travel vlogger will be the answer to being able to fund your current travels and your future travels. But it’s not as simple as filming a couple of places and boom! An income for life. There are many struggles, including costs for setting up, confidence, dealing with failure and trying to film when you have nothing to film.
How do I know all of this? Well, I have been a travel vlogger for 6 years, Let me tell you my journey.
What is it like to be a travel vlogger?
I started out as a travel vlogger like many people, in the hopes of making it successful and funding my travels. I planned to set out to monetise on YouTube within a Year of Making videos.
Before I started I read the stats that it takes YouTubers on average get of a year to 1 and a half years to get monetised. But the problem with this statistic is the fact it comes from a small data poll of people that actually get monetised. It doesn’t take into account all the channels that fail. Most of the channels that get monetised aren’t the person’s 1st channel. You learn quickly when you have been on YouTube for years, that most channels that are older than a year stop posting videos and give up. This makes the statistics look better.
The first year, I posted bad travel vlogs, then moved on to travel challenges in the next year, then sketches then a mix of sketches and travel vlogs. After 4 years of trying to make content for YouTube, I stopped trying to make the content that I thought YouTube wanted and started making content based on my life.
For 4 years, I tried to become successful on YouTube for the money and ended up putting myself in debt. My channel bearly grew. I just made it to 100 subs.
2 years ago, I decided to give up on making successful travel vlogs and actually try and live the travel life I wanted (what I could achieve without a YouTube Channel). What would you know, I was able to get out of debt and make travel vlogs on this lifestyle. My channel is sitting at 613 (at the time of writing). I Have a great travel life and none of it is down to being a travel vlogger.
How Much Does It Cost To Be A Travel Vlogger?
The Question of “How much does it cost to be a travel vlogger?” is a hard question to answer, because you can be a travel vlogger with what is in your pocket. Just a Phone, But It’s roughly £3000 to get to a good standard of equipment.
Let me break down the costs using my own equipment ;
- My Laptop (£1000)
- Editing Software (Vegas Pro) (£150)
- A New Drone (£800)
- A New Gimble (£260)
- My Mics (£130)
- Cooling Mat To Stop My Laptop Overheating (£22)
- A place to design graphics (Crello Account) (£50 a year)
- Licence Free Music (Epidmicsounds) (£120 a Year)
- A Website (£150 a Year)
- A Podcast Provider (RSS) (£120 a year)
- A Bag for All My Equipment (£70)
( This includes Amazon affiliate links, which I receive a commission on. With no extra cost to you)
But this is just the equipment! This doesn’t include the travel costs! Even on a budget, it will cost you £1000 a month to travel to make the content!
Let’s say you want to make travel vlogging a business, you are looking at £15,000 for the first year, ouch! This doesn’t even mean you will be successful!
Can You Be A Travel Vlogger On A Budget?
Yes of course you can be a travel vlogger on a Budget, As I said you can just use your phone and YouTube is free to sign up for an account.
The only problem with this is the fact you will get greedy for success and blame your lack of equipment on the lack of success. You will end up building more and more equipment the longer you try and become successful, so beware.
How much money can you make as a travel vlogger?
The money you can make as a travel vlogger is endless but there are very few travel bloggers that make enough to fund their lifestyle alone. But as a rough guide;
Moneytised travel vloggers with 1000 subs will make around £30 – £50 a month if the content is long-form videos. If the travel vlogger makes short videos and has 1000 subscribers, it is unlikely they will be monetised.
The number of subscribers you need to be a successful travel vlogger is around 50,000 to 100,000 Subscribers to fund your travel lifestyle. (£600-£1500) A month. But this is normally from long-form videos on YouTube. Shorts or TikTok You Need around 50/100 times more views.
But there are many other ways Travel bloggers make money online, ranging from merchandise to writing travel itineraries.
Tips for people who want to be a travel vlogger
Start Small
Don’t go out and buy fancy things! You need to practise making videos, just using anything and getting the videos on YouTube and looking at how they perform (over time) will teach you to become better and what you need.
Be Patient
This is a two-parter, be patient with your growth, there is a lot of learning. You will believe you are amazing at the start and your videos should be doing better. Your not, you need to learn why you suck (sorry). The second part is not to delete all your old videos off YouTube, Leave them up and active, and you can learn from the statistics.
Grow
Confidence is a massive part of being a travel vlogger, you need to learn how to film in public, talk in public and get used to your face and voice on camera. Slowly build all these skills and find your own style.
Don’t go out of your way
Don’t film for YouTube, Film for a past version of you. The one that could use your tips or guide to an area, make the video for you before you learn what you are sharing, there are many people looking for the same questions as you.
Did you skip ahead because it looks like too many words?
Well luckily for you, I have made a video on this Subject, just for people like you.
Still want to start a travel Vlog?
Well, where better to start by doing research on people who are currently travel vlogging?
Here are a couple of different styles of travel vloggers;
- Funny Backpacker This is my travel vlog, it tries to show you how to travel on a budget and even how to save to travel and the struggles
- Backpacking Bananas She is a solo female backpacker and has been successful for many years
- Live The Dash More into short-form videos, blow up quickly due to their short-form videos but trying to get into longer videos with their “challenge style” videos
- How to fund your travels This is my second channel, Which highlights ways to make money when you travel the world.
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