Being your own boss, as either a travel blogger or running your own business, has a unique set of challenges. Ensuring you’re prepared and know how to handle the challenges of being a travel blogger can help you overcome them. Here are a few things to look out for.
Money worries
When getting paid on time by your biggest clients can mean the difference between your business surviving or failing, and having to give up your love of travel if things go wrong, it’s enough to distract you from what you love about your work, preventing you from creating your best blog posts. Using templates by FreshBooks to create invoices makes this easier. These high-quality templates are the quickest way to send out accurate, professional-looking invoices, helping you get paid faster and giving you one less thing to worry about.
Another way to deal with money worries as a travel blogger is by planning ahead as much as you can. Although you can’t predict your earnings, you can have several ‘what if’ plans and use the one which closely matches the outcome for your business.
Overcoming distractions
Looming deadlines, financial worries, the temptation to explore new locations around you, and random ideas to improve your business, don’t help when you should be focussing on a specific task. It is very important to form good habits. To reduce these, you can do the following:
- Create your own workspace wherever you end up staying, even if this is just a corner of your hotel room.
- Remove any distractions and try to get on with the task.
- Have post-it notes nearby to write down any ideas for later, then get back to work.
- Put on noise-cancelling headphones if you’re staying in a noisy location.
Feeling isolated
Feeling isolated is a common problem if you’re thousands of miles from home, especially if you work alone. Although this can help complete tasks, it also means you have nobody to share your concerns with. It can help to join networking groups in person or online. These will have like-minded members who have experienced similar problems. One advantage is you can work from anywhere.
It’s also important to make time for family and friends. Thankfully with technology, they are just a video call away.
Long hours
Long hours are inevitable when you’ve just launched your own travel writing business. In the long term, you should be able to reduce the days you work long hours, and spend more time exploring new locations for pleasure and not just related to work. There will always be times you need to work early, late or both. That’s why it’s important to take advantage of the quieter times and catch up with your personal life and family when you can.
If you can overcome some of the biggest challenges associated with being a self-employed travel writer, you’ll gain more appreciation for the rewards. Remember: being your own boss has plenty of advantages too.
