Tips for aspiring travel bloggers: how to take your content to the next level?

What most people consider a vacation, others make their profession. As a travel blogger, you’re constantly on the road, visiting the most interesting places in the world, being invited to fancy QLD hotels and exciting events. It’s a dream job. But the job of a travel blogger also involves a lot of hard work.

What is a travel blogger?

A travel blogger is a mixture of different professions. First of all, they are self-employed. At the same time, they are also bloggers. A travel blogger has their own blog, writes posts, takes photos, and makes videos. They also do self-promotion and use various social media.

So, as a travel blogger, you need to know how to write, promote your social media, work with images, and edit videos. If written content and photos for a blog are nothing new and pretty easy to master, videos are totally different. 

There are not many topics in travel content: everything revolves around the same countries and beaches – popular tourist destinations, which are looked at from all sides. But video blogging gave a new life to all these destinations. Videos have really taken off in recent years, but their creation requires knowledge that most people simply do not have.

What should a video for a travel blog look like

Despite the common opinion, you don’t need professional equipment to get started. It doesn’t really matter what camera you use. Many popular bloggers started out with their smartphones. Virtually any device with the ability to record more or less decent video is all you need as a travel video blogger. So use what you have. When the number of viewers starts to grow steadily, you can acquire high-quality equipment: a camera with Full-HD resolution support, a good microphone, specialised software for video editing, and everything you might need.

Good lighting is also important. When you shoot indoors, you can use ordinary diode lamps of white light, photo umbrellas, or homemade reflectors from foil and cardboard. Professionals sometimes use LED panels and soft boxes. For travel bloggers, all this equipment is not necessary, but if you are planning to do some videos from home, it is definitely preferable. 

How to edit videos

Any graphic or other elements in the frame that are not originally present are referred to as an effect. A video where you just walk around will be pretty boring, so effects are used to capture the attention of viewers and convey important information. The following are used in most modern videos:

• Time acceleration/slow-motion. Used to slow down or accelerate what’s happening in the video to focus attention on an important moment or to make a particular scene or action more expressive.
• Picture-in-picture. Used to emphasise the parallelism of events occurring in different places at the same time.
• In-frame text. Explanations, exclamations, important thoughts, or advertising messages are placed right in the video.
• Colour correction. When using multiple cameras, shooting from different angles or at different times, the contrast of the video changes as well as its colour. The colour correction allows you to make dull colours richer, remove acidic shades and make the video calmer.

Of course, these are only a few effects that you can use, but before you start to learn more advanced tricks, it is recommended to master the basics. Do not be afraid to experiment, use different combinations of effects, filters, and text styles.

For those asking about how we edit our photos, we use a background remover from Adobe on our photos!

Working with sound

The future video must be good not only in terms of visual design. Sound plays no less important role.

A soundtrack is usually created after the video sequence is ready. The soundtrack is not only music, but you can also add voice to the video, explaining what is happening on the screen and giving viewers interesting facts about a place you are showing.

If a voice was recorded along with the video, it could also be edited. Some video editors allow you to work with the audio track from a video directly.

It is best to create several audio tracks for each video. Put your voice on track one, background music on track two, and sound effects on track three. And so on. It’s critical to synchronise video and audio. There is nothing more annoying than a lagged sound. Or when the sound is ahead of events.

Conclusion

Creating quality content is hard, but in the long run, it is what makes an audience watch more. Do not rush the editing process, take your time and make a video that you can be proud of.

Even though the content is important, it is not everything that a travel blogger needs. Bloggers need to love their audience and communicate with them constantly because the video is interactive content that allows you to stay in touch with your viewers. Read the comments under your videos and answer the questions, if possible. Focus on their interests and advice: sometimes ordinary viewers can suggest a topic for your next video or interesting places to visit.

Regular posting is a necessary component of the success of any famous video blogger. Some bloggers recommend announcing the release date and topic of the next video at the end of a current one. That way, your subscribers will know when to expect a new episode.