If you are like me you are always thinking about your next adventure. You can be physically at work but mentally and emotionally in a whole other world all together. I think I spend almost too much time escaping reality with images of travel flickering in my mind and it made me ask the question, if I had the opportunity to travel all the time forever, would I?
Its a hard question to answer, on one side you would always be seeing and learning new things, which is my favorite reason to travel. However on the other side a new thing might be slowing down and setting up shop permanently in one place, no longer traveling.
If you had the option to travel forever would you take the offer? Or would you saviour your rare beautiful escapes as a once in a blue moon occasion?
We had some major problems with our server over the past week, but everything is back to normal! So fear not we are still alive and kicking and will have some new blog posts over the next few days!
There is no greater treat than reading a well focused blog. A well focused blog entry is when you pick one or two topics and writes about them in depth. Talk about your bbq squid lunch at a stall in the middle of downtown Bangkok and the sights and sounds around that meal that made it a special even worth writing about.
Or talk about your day on the waves learning to surf and everything leading up to the one time you were really riding the wave.
Blogs that are scattered and unfocused aren’t interesting to the reader because it takes a lot of effort to read and understand. Smooth one or two topic posts are fun to read and let your readers feel like they are living the same experiences. Readers check blogs to connect to the material, so let them! There is no way you could pack even one full day in to a blog post, it would be information overload for the reader and would take a very long time on your part to write. So pick your favorite parts of the day and make your readers feel like they are there!
Appeal to your reader’s senses; smells, sights, sounds, feels and tastes. This really gets the reader into your writing and into your blog, pictures really work well in backing up your sight descriptions. Focused detail in blogs keeps me reading and it can keep your readers hooked too, give it a shot and let me know how it works!
Blogging your trip can be a vault of ideas and memories, sharing your blog can be extremely rewarding especially if you have readers who comment and are eagerly awaiting your next entry. Readers are great to keep you going, you know you aren’t just writing and spilling your heart to an empty place in cyber space.
A high number of readers and traffic also means more money. Making a profitable blog will allow you to travel longer, and do all the things you want to do. Imagine traveling and checking your accounts online and the money keeps rising; wouldn’t that be a change!
Getting readers isn’t the easiest task in the world, but like any task there are ways of increasing your success rate. First off readers need to know that your blog exists, they won’t just come out of the blue and land on your page; trust me I learned this the hard way!
Get links to your blog from other sites, blogrolls, directories what ever just have the links linking to your blog. Also the more links you have the higher you can be listed in search engine results. Ask bloggers who’s blog you read to swap links, both parties benefit from this!
Have a link to your blog in a signature on forums you participate at and in your personal email that is attached to all outgoing mail.
Participate in forums, be active make connections. If you are real and help out someone with a problem, you would be surprised what people will do for you. It’s called karma, so start earning those karma points!
Comment on other travel sites and blogs. Real genuine comments not just promoting your site with a link to your blog, no one likes seeing in your face solicitation.
Spread the word! Tell your friends to tell their friends, this does actually work!
When you have enough readers to make the New York Times jealous, don’t forget who got you in the know!
I came across an a superbly layed out and interesting blog this week. The layout is so clean and user friendly and the posts are as well thought out, making this the blog of the week. Although their journey appears to be over, the info, photos and videos make it timeless. Check it out now! Click here to visit Thirteen Months
Photography while traveling tells the story of your travels a thousand words at a time. It can also bring to life a person you met or a sight you saw. Make sure you tell the story that is true, and don’t leave out anything. This article from Digital Photography School helps you do this.
Today I want to continue with the themes of Travel Photography and adding Variety to your Shots in a post with one on mixing up your shots when you travel.
I recently had a friend take me through the shots that they took on their latest trip away (all 600 of them) and was amazed to see how many of his shots were of largely the same thing - buildings. Not only that all the buildings were photographed in much the same way in terms of framing and composition.
Now to give him credit - he had been traveling in Europe where there are some marvelous examples of architecture, but I came away from the experience of viewing his shots wondering a few questions that I would have thought his photos might have answered like:
• Who did you travel with?
• Where did you stay?
• What did you eat?
• Who did you meet? etc
Travelling is my favorite past time. New places mean new smells, sights and sounds which lead you to a new way of thinking. Traveling is education; it gives you a new respect for other cultures and different ways of life.
Just entertaining the thought of traveling to a new, unknown destination sends a chill down my spine and the goose-bumps follow shortly after. The unfamiliar sounds of a bustling city to the refreshing native fruit that you never knew existed. Everything is new and waiting to be forged in to memories and new ideas. What do you love about traveling?
Embedding youtube videos into wordpress blog posts is much more difficult than I thought it would be. I’ve done some digging around and found a solution so you can upload your travel videos to youtube.com and have them located directly in your posts on wordpress blogs in four simple steps anyone can do!
Step one: Sign up for youtube, and upload the videos you want to share. Copy the embed script by right clicking and selecting copy from the Embed box. Here’s a picture to help you locate more easily.
Step two: Go in to your admin area in wordpress and click on the users link, scroll down to the personal options and uncheck “Use the visual rich editor when writing” option.
Step three: In wordpress begin writing a post as you always would, you will notice the area where you type feels a little different (this is the rich text editor being turned off), paste the embed video script you copied from youtube and paste it where you want it in your post.
Step four: Save, publish and voila you now have your own video right in your post.
Here is an example I have embedded. (Note: this is not my video).
I will be posting one blog a week that I think stands out from the pack. This week I was reading quite a few different travel related and tech blogs, however one stood out in my mind and I find myself checking back every few hours to see if there are any new posts.
The is well written, and funny at times. Makes me wish I was in Hong Kong’s Kowloon harbour watching the nightly light show. The blog is definitally worth the click!
Awesome blog post from the digital photography school. Have you ever wondered how to create breathe taking sunrise and sunset photos? Well look no further Blogging Abroad found this informative post for you:
No good travel photo album is complete without the token sunrise or sunset picture!’
This was the comment of a friend who recently took me through some photos from his recent trip overseas. He obviously strongly believed in the above mantra because there were ALOT of sunset shots in his album - but unfortunately most of them looked very similar to one another and while they were beautiful, they didn’t really end up being the highlight shots he’d anticipated them to be.
Here are a few tips for making sunrise and sunset shots the best that they can be:
