Hello, I'm co-founder of the popular female travel community We Are Travel Girls. We collect and publish stories from women traveling all over the world. We promote women's blogs; we host meetings and events and are getting ready to launch our Travel With Us trips in Bali, Japan and Malawi.
Before I started We Are Travel Girls, I had a successful 10-year career in finance in London, where I advised private clients on their investments. Having always had a huge love for travel, I finally took the leap and left finance to pursue my dream of starting a travel company.
For as long as I can remember, I wanted to be a travel writer. Before blogs existed and everything we read was online, I would go to travel writing seminars by writers who were published in travel magazines. I was desperate to write for one of those magazines, but didn't know how to break into that industry. After university, I ended up working in finance, but always had a desire to travel and write about it.
In 2015, I was looking at ways to leave finance, and my best friend Vanessa, who grew up on a ranch on the Central Coast of California, suggested starting a blog. But when we started creating it, we realized that was the same thing every girl was doing. So we turned our attention to creating a community among these women. This led us to start We Are Travel Girls, which has now grown into a community of over 200,000 followers.
To anyone thinking about becoming a travel writer, I would suggest they first try and look for a unique way to enter the industry. There are a lot of travel writers now and it can be hard to stand out from the crowd, which is really why we started We Are Travel Girls. Be prepared to work hard if you want to turn it into a full-time business, and try not to rush to selling advertising spaces before you have created a dedicated audience. The size of your audience doesn't necessarily need to be huge, but you want them to be engaged. If you post too many promotions early on, you will turn many people off.