Whether you are taking a gap year, spending a year abroad during university, or doing an internship in another country, working and studying abroad are wonderful ways to broaden your horizons, open yourself up to new challenges, and gain new experiences. Taking a year abroad could be the start of a lifelong love of traveling, and perhaps even a career as a travel writer. Documenting your year working or studying abroad through a blog will not only enable you to look back and reflect on your experience in the future, it will also teach you useful online marketing, writing, and web development skills. Here’s how you could turn your year abroad in to the first steps of a new career.

Know How to Create a Website

By creating a travel blog to share and record your adventures, you will learn basic web development and design skills. Knowing how to create a website is a lifelong skill that will boost your CV and is applicable to many different industries, so even if you don’t decide to become a travel writer for the rest of your life, you will have acquired the fundamental skills to work in web development, content creation, and many other industries. Creating a website isn’t as difficult as it sounds, even if you don’t have experience of coding. There are plenty of templates from a variety of providers, such as web hosting company 1&1, which help you create a professional looking site. If you are feeling ambitious, though you could even teach yourself how to code, using online tutorials like Code Academy.

Develop an Audience

Once you have learnt how to create a website, the next step is to attract new readers to your blog and keep them engaged. To do this you will need to learn online marketing skills, such as SEO to increase your visibility on search engines, using social media, and understanding what constitutes good content in the world of online marketing. The Moz Blog is a great resource to help you in this regard. Again, these are skills that you can apply to other jobs. No matter what industry you work in, online marketing skills are applicable for any business, and will look impressive on your CV.

Learn the Art of Travel Writing

Writing about traveling is a unique skill; describing a place to evoke an accurate picture in the readers mind requires the ability to write detailed texts that are well structured and interesting to read. Studying abroad is a great opportunity to develop a blog and, if you discover travel writing is something you enjoy, you could even join our Wandering Educators Youth Travel Blogging Mentorship for young aspiring travel writers. Participate in a community of like-minded young adults, learn travel writing and photography skills, and find out how to monetize a blog.

Embrace the opportunity to travel whenever it comes and use that opportunity to acquire new skills and experiences; who knows, you could find yourself becoming a professional travel writer.