Tips for Editing Travel Footage: How to Be a Travel Vlogger

To become a successful travel vlogger, you must love to travel. The glorious views, amazing, hikes, weird food, crowded airports, and overbooked flights. Once you get on the road, the next thing you need to do is start filming.

Don’t Wait for the Perfect Shot

The trick to taking great photos and videos is to take lots of them. Great photographers know that it’s by doing that you learn, so really terrific photographers take loads and loads of pictures. As a videographer of your travel life, you need to do the same. Be prepared to generate a lot of footage and select the best to share with your viewers.

Show the Messy Stuff

Some of the most fun you will have when traveling is when things go wrong. Caught in the rain in NYC so you can’t get a cab or a rideshare? Point to your destination and start walking. Check out how quiet the streets are and study the color of the light. Stand in the middle of a concrete canyon and get images and videos of the square of sky above you. If your trips work out perfectly as planned, every time, you’re probably over-scheduling yourself. Stay flexible and show off what you can enjoy when you do!

Don’t Overbuy

People who study travel vlogs really don’t care about your camera. They care about your destination. Travel vlogging isn’t the easiest way to make money, so start small and use what you have. Great cell phone video can be captured, edited, and turned into something remarkable.

Edit Effectively

Put your videos together with an eye toward

• capturing potential viewers with music to start
• don’t worry about polish
• capture your adventure from both fixed and moving points
• use speed to depict some longer stretches without extending the length of your video

You can add variety to your videos by bumping up the speed up a video online. Proper editing means that you can show the important stuff to great effect, lose or speed up the parts that are interesting but don’t require a lot of detail, and focus on the part of the story that you think is most important.

If you’re showing a video of a wonderful hike, do be willing to show some shaky footage of the climb. In addition, set up a quick trail cam to show your travel clan heading up to and away from the camera. Share the great views from the top and show off any extremely helpful travel gear.

Include the Travel Tribe

Traveling in isolation is nearly impossible. You will almost always run into others who are also on a travel adventure, so share your experiences and be willing to get other input. Find out how other travelers make getting on the road an effective option and ask them for tips and tricks. Remember that your viewers are probably looking for a vicarious experience, but many are also looking for pointers. Be honest about what doesn’t go right, but if you see a terrific trick as practiced by another traveler, get permission, and share it.

Protect Your Income

Travel vlogging isn’t easy; you need gear and your trips will require you to take and edit video. To avoid being demonetized as a video producer, make sure that you follow copyright rules. Use only music that is either public domain or that you have rights to. After that, publish nothing that includes

• nudity or sex
• dangerous or threatening content
• violent or hateful content

You can appeal a demonetization, but even if your appeal is accepted, you will have burned time in the filing that you could have spent making more videos.

Keep Advertisers Happy

To make money on your travel vlogging videos, you need to get advertisers to want to insert their commercials before or in the middle of your videos. Without advertisers, you don’t make any money. Offensive or hateful content will leave you without sponsorship. Be open about your travel experiences, but keep things positive.

If you want a life of travel, be aware that you can make money. It will take time to build up a following and making videos is still work. Consider starting a blog and a website as well as videos to attract viewers.