We were lucky to catch up with Sam Kaiser recently and have shared our conversation below.

Hi Sam, thanks for joining us today. Let’s jump right into how you came up with the idea?

Becoming a travel blogger didn’t happen overnight, but looking back on it, the progression was clear. In first grade, my parents enrolled me in a Spanish immersion. In reality, this is where my story starts as a travel blogger. Becoming fluent in Spanish opened up opportunities to travel internationally and sparked my cultural curiosity. I continued my Spanish education into college, and I eventually studied abroad in Spain and got my master’s degree in Intercultural Communication.

First off, I had no idea where this degree would take me. Ever since I was a little girl, I loved writing. Deep down I knew that it was what I wanted to do for a career. I didn’t know exactly what that would look like, but I had faith I would get there somehow.

In 2019, I attended a conference that led me to self-publish a book on the benefits of studying abroad. It was my first book and I published it during the pandemic, and it didn’t yield the success I was hoping for, but I got a taste of what it would be like to write for money. During my graduate program, I started a blog (as a hobby) in a different niche. While it was mostly for fun, I taught myself the discipline of writing consistently.

Fast forward to 2022, and something clicked for me. I was enjoying blogging, but somewhere deep inside, I knew I could monetize off of it. I was ready to take it seriously and wanted to make it about something I could write about forever: traveling. I invested in a travel blogging course, learned about SEO, and began strategizing my new blog for the first time.

Anyone will tell you that blogging is not an overnight endeavor. It is an art that requires patience, discipline, and effort. I was used to not making money. I enjoyed writing, so it never felt like work to me. I was ready to put the work in and was in no rush to make it big overnight. I also had a full-time job, so I wrote on my off days and when I had time. I knew I could succeed because I had a strong work ethic, writing came easy, and I believed in it.

After fourteen months of writing for my travel blog part-time with a strategy, I made my first affiliate sales. Once you make one affiliate sale, you can make ten more, so it was a glimpse into what travel blogging can provide. Like anything, if you put your head down and work, you’ll reap the rewards tenfold.

Great, appreciate you sharing that with us. Before we ask you to share more of your insights, can you take a moment to introduce yourself and how you got to where you are today to our readers.

My name is Sam Kaiser, and I am the owner and author of the travel blog The Lifestyle Travelers. My parents enrolled in a Spanish immersion school in first grade that ignited my cultural curiosity and gave me the skills to travel internationally. I’ve always loved to write, and after college, I knew that sharing travel information with the world was the way that I could serve others.

Through my experience and education in Intercultural Communication, I provide travel advice, gear recommendations, and destination-specific tips to my readers to make their travels meaningful and memorable. The main topics I cover are couples travel, hiking, and road trip itineraries. Currently, my content focuses on US travel (with the majority in Arizona and the East Coast). However, with my upcoming travel plans, I will soon include international content (in Europe, Central, and South America) on backpacking and budget travel.

In October 2024, my partner Dylan and I are heading to Ecuador on a one-way ticket to become full-time digital nomads. In addition to my travel blog, Dylan is a transformational travel coach. His approach is to help entrepreneurs utilize the benefits of travel to eliminate burnout. Additionally, we have a YouTube channel (@thelifestyletravelers) where we will be uploading videos of our adventures on a biweekly basis starting in August.

We both believe that travel fosters our understanding, creativity, and explorative selves. We want to share what we’ve learned with the world and hope to connect with you soon!

Any advice for growing your clientele? What’s been most effective for you?

As a blogger, the most effective strategy for growing my online readers is the proper SEO strategies. The most important thing is to write content people need and are searching for. A blog is a business, and like any business, you’re satisfying a need for your customers. Identifying off the bat what that is was the first step to succeeding in getting people to my website.

A good starting place I always go to is thinking about the questions that I had when I first started traveling. As a blogger, it’s sometimes easy to get hyper-focused on increasing your page views. However, when you focus on pageviews, you forget that there are people behind those pageviews, and your audience is what drives your business. Ultimately, I started travel blogging to provide helpful information to other travelers, so keeping that in mind is imperative.

One thing I’m trying to focus on is building my email list. Even though I’m grateful that people are finding my posts on Google, I now want to focus on creating a personal relationship with my readers. I hope to create a community of travelers where we can all learn and grow from each other. I also believe this would help me better serve my audience by learning about the content they find most helpful. Overall, blogging is really about community.

Any stories or insights that might help us understand how you’ve built such a strong reputation?

The one thing that helped me build my reputation within the travel niche is authenticity. Traveling the world (and the US) is my passion, so it doesn’t feel forceful for me or my readers. I’ve built my travel experience, reflected on it, and used what I’ve learned to help others who want to experience something similar.

I also focus on what I know and build my expertise in those areas. My blog posts on Arizona rank high on Google because I write a lot of content about traveling the state. I live in Tucson, so my travels lately have been around the southwest. My content is about what I’m currently experiencing, and that builds my trustworthiness in the topic. I can still write about other locations, but it’s all about keeping things timely and relevant for your audience.

If you don’t know what you’re talking about, it will be hard for people to trust you. You need to walk the talk if you put information out for the world to see. I would never recommend a product or service I don’t believe in myself. Transparency is essential for building a brand reputation, and I wanted to put that into practice in my business from the get-go. I value integrity over making a profit any day, and helping people is more important than making a sale.

Contact Info:

• Website: www.thelifestyletravelers.com
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/thelifestyletravelers/
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100088332994176
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@thelifestyletravelers
• Other: TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@thelifestyletravelers Flipboard: www.flipboard.com/@LifestyleTravel