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How To Make A Travel Vlog – 8 Tips for Beginners

How To Make A Travel Vlog – 8 Tips for Beginners

Sunny beaches, breathtaking peaks, and gorgeous river views. Travel vlogs are those epic super-cuts that capture a trip and help your audience feel like they were right there with you.

Whether you’re trying your hand at a travel vlog to remember a fun trip, or intend to be a travel vlogger full time, we’ve got some pointers that can help.

This type of content appeals to casual watchers as well as locals and even tourists looking for spots to visit on their own trip. Not only do travel videos perform quite well, but if you play your cards right, there’s a good chance your content may get picked up by the algorithm.

However, what if we told you you don’t have to be a seasoned travel vlogger to create eye-catching travel videos?

In this post, we will walk you through how to make a travel vlog that drives traction to your Youtube channel or brand. Even if this is your first ever travel video, we’ve rounded up some tips that will help you nail it from the conceptualization to the edit stage.

Eight Tips To Make A Great Travel Vlog

Determine the goal of your travel vlog

As we often say here at ChopChop, the purpose of making your video decides the final output. And it’s no different here.

Travel vlogs will contain different shots, narrative structures, and accompanying details depending on whether you’re trying to educate, inform, entice – or all of the above.

Once you have figured out your location and travel plans, the time has come to determine what you hope to communicate or achieve with this vlog.

Do you want to deliver purely information, like details of itineraries, stay, budgets, and the like? Or, do you want to weave a narrative around the trip and just catch your audiences up with what you did? Or perhaps it’s a bit of both.

Select a niche within Travel Videos

Since travel videos are a dime a dozen on most social media platforms, it’s important that you do everything you can right from the conceptualization stage to stand out from the competition.

Some examples of niches could be solo travel, female solo travel, eco-tourism, backpacking, etc. Find the lifestyle and niche that aligns with the kind of trip you will be taking.

Remember that a travel vloggers’ job is to deliver a new perspective that shows people undiscovered areas and/or activities.

And if you’re highlighting a very popular site/area, your personality must shine through enough to make the audience stick around.

Find Your Audience

This tip follows from the previous one. Once you find the kind of audience you want to attract, say, first-time solo travelers, you can begin filming and editing in such a way that it covers the important questions and key concerns they would need answers to.

The ratio of cinematic content to informational content, voiceover portions, length, cutaways, etc. will be determined by the type of audience you are trying to reach.

Leverage Competitor Research

Another tip that can really help here is to do some competitor research. And with no dearth of great travel content out there, you can really get granular with what to look for. You’ll never run out of travel vlog ideas if you just take a quick look at what’s trending.

Try watching videos in your niche, those likely to be watched by the audience you’re targeting. In fact, you can even check out other travel channels shot at the same location you intend to visit. Check out travel guides made by fellow vloggers. Be sure to include in your video the things they may have overlooked.

This will allow you to study what kind of information is already available for audiences and what further queries you can address through your videos to really drive value through them.

Now that we’ve covered the ideation stage, let’s move on to some travel vlogging tips and how to shoot the best shots.

Don't Think of Equipment At The Start

When it comes to travel vlogging, your smartphone’s camera is all you’ll need to get started. If you have a vlogging camera or DSLR already, even better. If you’re doing adventure sports or activities like diving, then getting your hands on a GoPro would be great.

However, don’t let equipment be the reason you delay your travel vlogging journey. What’s important is that you explore the full range of whatever kind of camera is available to you.

There are tons of resources online that will help you figure out how to customize your camera settings best for the type of shot you want to capture.

Structure Your Footage With Mini Montages

When you’re sitting down to do video editing sifting through all the amazing content you got for your YouTube vlog channel, it’s easy to get overwhelmed.

That’s why, right when you’re filming, it can help to think of large chunks of footage involving a single activity or area as a mini-sequence or montage of its own.

Essentially, your vlog will then be a bunch of mini montages strung together.

You could even prepare a rough script based on the list of activities you have on your itinerary for that day.

Conceptualizing it in this manner will help you break activities into specific sequences and use that to create self-contained stories wherever possible within your vlog.

Remember we want a healthy mix of show and tell.

Don’t be afraid to break down the video by day/area visited if there’s a lot of material to cover like Lois You does.

Make the video easier for the viewer to navigate too by adding things like chapters.

Include Insider Voices

Something that travel vloggers often miss out on is incorporating local residents and voices into the mix.

While you are the main protagonist of the video, having a great supporting cast will help you unearth nuggets of insider information that audiences would not find elsewhere. That’s exactly what YouTuber Kristine Caaloa did for her vlog in Nepal.

Plan Your Content & Optimize

This advice applies to all types of videos, but especially travel vlogs due to the volume of content out there. Use keyword search to plan video titles and some more secondary research to get a sense of the popular types of thumbnails.

Keep optimizing and tweaking based on the kind of response you get. Remember to keep doing you, but also incorporate trending formats or styles to rack up the eyeballs.

Try ChopChop for fuss-free, block-based edits

Part of making a travel vlog successful is cross-posting content from it across platforms.

With ChopChop, you can import your vlog footage and easily condense it into short, snackable videos for social media. Our card-based editing system comes with virtually no learning curve and is super intuitive to use.

We’ve got all the features you’ll need from basic edits to voiceovers, an audio library, and more.

Are You Ready To Make Your First Travel Vlog?

Now that we’ve given you our top tips on how to kill it at the travel vlog game, get out there and start making movie magic. 

You can sign up for ChopChop here. Remember to also check back on our blog for more actionable advice to improve your video creation efforts.

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