Great reads from February 2011

February, I’ve noticed, is a short month. Now that it has whizzed on by, it is time for another round up of some awesome travel writing from around the web.

Even though the month was short, the content has not been sparse. I have nonetheless managed to whittle down my favourite bloggers to these five posts.

Each of these posts really shone through for me, raising themselves above their brethren in some way or another. Perhaps they made me laugh. Maybe they tore at my heartstrings. Maybe there were great tips, or ponderings on the inner wonder of life. Whichever of these they were, I hope you enjoy reading them as much as I did!

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More lakes and mountains in Tongariro

Our time in the Tongariro National Park – the spectacular dual world heritage site on New Zealand’s North Island – is dwindling to an end.

The four months we’ve spent here have been fabulous, and now that the end is in sight, with a new adventure on the way (more on that in a later post), we’re doing our best to finish seeing all of the sights in the area.

In the last couple of weeks therefore we’ve been swimming in a volcano crater, peered at the awesome Tama Lakes, explored some silica coated river rapids, and even ventured a little further afield into the stunning Kaimanawa Mountain Ranges. Here are the stories to accompany these adventures, with some photos to boot!

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How to increase your Alexa rank

Alexa is a widely used metric for measuring a website’s popularity. Websites are assigned a score, which starts at 1 for the most popular (currently Google), and then increases in number as sites are deemed to be less popular.

Today, in one of my rare technology themed posts, I’m going to share some thoughts and tips on how you can improve your site’s Alexa rank.

First though: what is Alexa rank, and why is it important?

Why is Alexa rank important?

Alexa rank is one of the metrics that is visible to the outside world as a measure of how popular your site is. It is but one of many metrics, alongside ranking data such as Google’s Page Rank, which measures how important Google thinks your page is, and Compete, a US only measuring standard.

Alexa is important because it demonstrates to others what your site is worth in a relative sense, which is particularly useful when you want to negotiate a deal with advertisers, or if you are trying to demonstrate your value to a third party in exchange for a product or service.

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Travel blogging tips from the experts: Traveling Canucks

Today, in the tenth (I know, how did we get to ten already!) post in the series where I probe the minds of experienced and knowledgeable travel bloggers for their travel blogging tips, I am delighted to be interviewing Cam and Nicole, better known as the Traveling Canucks.

Hailing, as you can probably tell by the name, from Canada, Cam and Nicole spent a year travelling round the world between 2009 and 2010.

Unlike many of the other travel bloggers who have featured, Cam and Nicole have no desire to live as digital nomads. They aim to prove that it is possible to travel the globe and still have a home base and career. Their site shares their travel stories and tips, as well as stories and notes from other travellers on the road. Lets see what they have to say!

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Encountering racism on the road

The thing about travel is the wealth of experiences that accompany it. We meet new people, see new sights… and are exposed to all manner of different world views.

Some of these world views don’t quite gel with our own. Some jar. And some are just plain wrong.

This was the case when travelling around Australia. Don’t get me wrong. I met incredible people. I had an amazing time. The whole trip was extraordinary in many, many ways. But every now and again, I would run into some seriously off kilter behaviour that just didn’t seem to fit into my view of what Australia was about. And that behaviour was what I came to refer to as casual racism.

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Great reasons not to travel

I’ve been travelling for over two years now, but it took me a while to get round to getting started on the long term travelling jaunt.

It was always something I wanted to do, but at a point in the future when the time seemed “right”. So I would put it off.

The issue with this approach is that the time may never actually seem right, and suddenly you realise that the right time was at any point in the past.

So here are some great reasons that you can give yourself not to travel, and even better reasons why you should ignore them and just go for it!

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Travel blogging tips from the experts: Go, See, Write

This week’s travel blogging tips article features Michael Hodson, author of travel blog Go, See, Write.

Michael has been blogging for nearly four years – practically forever in blogging terms. When not blogging or travelling, he splits his time carefully between smoking cigars, watching Casablanca and playing Bocce on his full size court.

Michael’s site is focused on round the world adventuring, and he writes his stories in an inimitable style accompanied by wonderful photography.

As well as his own travel blog, Michael has recently launched the Ultimate Train Challenge – which looks like it’s going to be a hell of a ride. Today Michael shares his tips for improving your travel blogging.

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Photo theme - holes

Following the positive reception of one of my shots on the site’s Facebook page, I was inspired to continue the theme I started there with a selection of shots on the subject of holes.

By holes, I don’t mean holes in the ground, although I do have some shots like that, instead I mean holes that you can peer through to create an interesting photographic effect.

Holes can be found all over the place, from gaps in shrubbery, to open window frames, to corroded metal. These photos are all taken through holes of some sort, for your delectation and delight. Let me know what you think in the comments box at the end!

A miniature piano at an outdoor art exhibit in Hobart, Tasmania

Looking through an old piece of rusted metal girder at the algae covered rocks beyond. This is the same shot as the first image on this page, just focused differently.

Looking through a rock arch near the town of Kalbarri in Western Australia

View from the inside of a sea cave on one of the beaches of New South Wales, Australia

Peering out of a lava cave in South Australia

And finally, the photo I posted to the Facebook Page – peering through the decaying wreck of a ship on Fraser Island, Queensland.

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The awesome problem

I have a problem. Well, it’s not really a problem. Ok, it’s a bit of a problem. The thing is, I’ve been travelling for a while. But even when I started travelling, the problem raised its ugly head. Allow me to explain.

I was in Australia, with my travelling buddy at the time. We had spent a few weeks on the road. We had seen some pretty amazing things. We were delighted with ourselves, and wanted to share how happy we were with our trip so far with each other.

Our conversations would therefore be peppered with happy adjectives, along the lines of “that tree was amazing!” or “did you see that 90 mile beach? Amazing!”.

After a few weeks of this, we started to get a bit concerned. What if the “amazing” tag wore off? How would we be able to differentiate between say, Uluru (amazing) and an experience camping under the stars in the outback, with no people within at least 100km of us (also amazing). What if amazing just became, well, the norm?

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Travel blogging tips from the experts: Adventures with Ben

This week’s travel blogging tips interview is with Ben Reed – president and chief adventurer of travel blog adventureswithben.com.

Ben takes his adventuring seriously, with the aim of ensuring that travellers focus on one key goal – that being to have fun whilst on the road.

Ben’s site aims to inspire, motivate, entertain and amuse. He has nearly two years of travel blogging experience under his belt, and has recently launched an online store selling travel products. Today he talks about his approach to travel blogging, how his store has helped him start to get an income from his site, and what travel blogging success means to him.

Tell us a little bit about Ben, and your site, Adventures with Ben

adventureswithben.com is my travel blog where I write about “Making Travelling Fun”.  What does that mean? It means I avoid writing about things that are boring and ordinary. Let’s face it, a museum is a museum. They may be interesting and different, but not necessarily fun.

Everything I write about makes me smile, laugh or scream in delight. Since its humble beginnings I’ve written almost 400 articles, won a social media travel competition to Thailand and have been featured in a major, national news outlet. None of which I ever imagined possible.

What drove you to start writing a travel blog?

I travel a lot for business and wanted to keep in touch with family and document my travels to look back upon them later. So in June of 2009 I started adventureswithben.com. What began as an exercise in writing for myself, quickly grew into a full-fledged business writing for others.

How do you define success in terms of your travel blog?

I think it’s easy for beginning bloggers to get discouraged because their traffic and income levels aren’t where they’d like them to be. I’ve always focused less on the quantitative data and more on the qualitative – which is why most of us started blogging in the first place.

I define success by the number of relationships I have built, the experiences that travel blogging has enabled me to have and by the number of readers who have done something differently as a result of reading my blog.

It can’t be about money and traffic right away – the community is too big and those benchmarks too overwhelming to accomplish right away.

Through comments and emails, readers have shared anecdotes of new experiences they’ve had and places they visited – all inspired by the site. That’s how I measure success.

Which, if any, metrics do you follow in terms of traffic analysis / site ranking, and how important do you think these are?

I follow Google analytics and alexa. But if you focus just on the numbers, you can lose sight of the vision for your site. That being said, I’m most interested in Bounce Rates and Page Views. They are strong indicators to me that once people arrive they are enjoying what they are reading and continue to return.

Metrics are important indicators of whether or not your blogging style and efforts are getting the desired outcomes, but it’s not the only measurement tool. Whether 10,000 people visit my site or 100 people visit, what’s most important is that I’m enjoying travel blogging.

What have you found to be the hardest thing about running a travel blog, and how do you overcome this?

If you approach blogging as a business you’ll quickly find that you’ll have more goals you want to achieve than time to do them. I’ve been busy building an online store, writing travel guides, starting a Travel Blog Exchange Chapter for Central Florida, interacting with the travel community, writing an e-book and publishing my regular posts. There’s more on my plate than I can manage at once.

I learned in 2010 that I can only do the best that I can with what I’ve got. Progress on my site is always slower than I’d like it to be, but once you accept that realization, you can breathe easy as you approach your work. It will all get done – it just takes time.

If there was one thing you wish you could have known before you started writing your blog, what would it have been?

You’ll be entering a field that is constantly changing. Like most of us, I don’t have any formal education in social media, so in addition to managing my site, I have to continually educate myself on new social media tools, plugins, programs and conversational spaces that are emerging. Once you think you’re caught up, the world changes and you need to start running all over again.

What have you found to be the best way to go about generating an income from your blog?

It depends on how you define “best”. There are plenty of networks that will buy text-links on your site. You can make some nice pocket money for sure, but I cringe every time I see ads and posts that are irrelevant or irreputable on great blogs. I think it cheapens the look and diminishes the value of the writer. The integrity of my brand is more important than the money. I stay away from sponsored posts, banner ads, affiliate links and text links that I don’t trust or wouldn’t use myself.

Where I have found success is through my online store. Growth of my site in 2011 will come from finding and marketing unique, fun travel products that fulfil the mission of my site: making travelling fun.

There’s more maintenance in managing inventory and shipping products, but retail products are valuable to readers, offer bigger returns and have a lasting impact after they have left my site.

How do you go about promoting your travel blog?

I have been working hard the past several months in aggressively seeking out Guest Posting opportunities. I’ve also found a great collection of travel bloggers at the “Social Media Connect Group” at Travel Blog Exchange. It’s a mutually-beneficial relationship where we promote each others works through comments, tweets and other social media tools.

But one of the best ways I promote my blog is through promoting others. I offer bloggers the opportunity to Guest Post on my site, as well as answer a monthly travel question intended to revive old blog posts we have sitting in our archives. I’ve also made inroads to promoting my blog in physical spaces by giving talks at the local library and writing a travel column for a local paper.

The short of it is, people aren’t going to find your site unless you find people. The best promotion of your site is to promote others. 

How do you see travel blogging developing over the next few years?

I see 2 trends:

1. The Travel & Tourism Industry will figure out a way to incorporate travel bloggers into everything they do. We’ll be seen as a strategic partner in accomplishing their goals.
2. Travel Bloggers will work more closely together. Instead of being seen as an individual contributor, bloggers will become a growing cohort of  writers. Professionalism and accreditation will become the norm.

What sort of time commitment do you put in to your travel blog on a weekly basis?

In the morning I review my comments and statistics from the day before and catch up on new stories in my RSS Reader. After work, I write tomorrow’s post, and after dinner, interact with the community and finish up my long-term projects. I put about 4 hours of work each day into the site, Monday – Friday.

And finally, what key advice would you give to people running, or thinking about setting up, their own travel blog?

Travel Blogging is work. It’s fun, but if you want to be serious about it, it’s also work. You’ll be tempted to give up. But in life you only have 2 choices: Quit or Try Again. Keep trying and success will come when you least expect it

As always, tremendous thanks to Ben for taking the time to answer my questions! You can find out more about Ben on his website, plus you can keep track of his adventures on both twitter and facebook.

For more travel blogging tips from the experts, have a look at the rest of the series. To keep up to date with upcoming posts you can subscribe to the RSS feed or join in on the site’s Facebook page.

Next week’s interview features Michael Hodson, author of travel blog Go, See, Write. In the meantime, if you have any questions or thoughts on this post or the series thus far, the comments box awaits!

Thanks for reading! Feel free to drop by the site for more @ Finding the Universe. You can also join in on Facebook and Twitter

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Birthday notes

The celebration of another year spent hurtling round a fiery ball of nuclear explosions occurred recently in my life. Quite why I spend the day celebrating when really the hard work and effort was my mothers is unknown, but that is just the way life is.

Looking back upon my birthdays over the years, they have not always been the wild and crazy events that you might think.

My eighteenth birthday, for example, largely seemed taken up by a three hour maths exam. My twenty first also featured an exam, this being four hours of complex computer science that I can barely remember. Many other birthdays between then and now have been spent in various office blocks doing various fairly unexciting tasks.

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Essential free software for travellers

These days, a laptop is almost as essential a piece of travelling gear as a backpack or passport. The thing is, after you’ve bought the hardware, you then find yourself having to pay more for all the software you want to load up on it.

With this in mind, I have compiled a list of essential, high quality software, which has the huge advantage of being free. Because more money saved is more money for, well, travelling!

One quick note – these programs are all for Windows based PC’s. There may well be Mac equivalents, but I’ve not got a Mac, so I have no idea. Mac fans, let me know in the comments what your favourite free tools to travel with are!

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Carrots, waterfalls and Gollum

I have been doing my homework recently on this whole blogging thing, with particular focus on the mystical world of SEO.

SEO, for those of you not in the know (turns out I can rhyme too), is the art of optimising a site so that it is friendly to search engines, and by search engines, I mean Google.

The idea is that people go onto the web searching for something, and as a writer, I pre-emptively figure out what this is, and optimise my posts accordingly.

This, dear readers, is the zenith of that optimisation. Keywords are key, and as you can see (I promise I will stop doing that), I have absolutely filled the title of this post with them. Now I can rest easy, knowing that lord of the rings fans desperate for information on carrot waterfalls will be flocking to the site in droves. Hurrah. Beers all round.

Ok, so perhaps this particular market is somewhat niche. But still. The post title most accurately reflects what I’ve been up to recently, so damn SEO to hell. And now, for an SEO friendly header.

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Travel blogging tips from the experts: As We Travel

Another travelling couple take centre stage for this weeks travel blogging tips interview: Nathan and Sofia of travel blog aswetravel.com.

Nathan and Sofia have maintained a travel blog under various guises for a number of years now, with aswetravel.com launched a year ago.

The main focus of the blog is to provide travel tips for fellow travellers, as well as city guides and observations from the road.

Today, Nathan and Sofia talk about why they started a travel blog, the importance of finding the right name, and how to juggle writing and travel.

Tell us a little bit about Nathan and Sofia, and your site, aswetravel.com

Nathan comes from New Zealand and Sofia comes from Sweden - we met while Nathan was in Sweden, and after dating for a while decided to travel around the world starting by flying to New Zealand from Sweden and over a 8 month period through NZ, Australia, Vanuatu, South East Asia and Europe with a budget of roughly 6,000US each - for the whole trip.

That was back in 2008/2009 - As We Travel was started in February 2010 while we were spending a winter skiing in Switzerland.

As We Travel shares travel tips, discusses different topics and shares city guides. We're now also working on an online travel show which follows us as we travel through different countries.

What drove you to start writing a travel blog?

On that first trip together we had set up a weekly travel blog called nathansofia.com - on which we wrote in English and Swedish only for our friends and family.

When we started getting a few comments from other people who had randomly found our blog and thanked us for the information, we thought that setting up a real travel blog might be a fun project.

So we got a new domain and started to build a blog - with no real knowledge of blogging or what was going to happen...

How do you define success in terms of your travel blog?

When we get emails from people who either ask us for advice or just want to sincerely thank us or tell us that they enjoy our site and content.

Knowing that our site has helped and made such an impression that they send an e-mail thanking you is to us a fantastic feeling.

Which, if any, metrics do you follow in terms of traffic analysis / site ranking, and how important do you think these are?

Yeah - we think these are important, not for others but more for ourselves, so we can see whether or not the current content we are posting is helping us build a better more solid blog or not.

Alexa.com, Compete.com etc are a waste of time, those sites have no real access to the data from blogs, and make everything up based on tracking a few sites and assuming the rest (they pretty much told us this, when we asked for an explanation).

What technology do you use to host your blog, and how much technical know-how do you think is necessary to run a blog like yours?

We use bluehost, and wordpress and a few other paid plugins. Technical know-how is important if you want to get your site exactly how you want it.

Most of that will be learnt by trial, error and time - we can’t count how many times we lost our WHOLE site due to simply pushing the wrong button... so now we backup everything!

What have you found to be the hardest thing about running a travel blog, and how do you overcome this?

We never thought it would be this much work! It's all the small details which don't seem like much but put together takes up a lot of time.

When you're running a travel blog your juggling many things at once: first and foremost you're travelling, but also writing, taking photos, filming, staying up to date, reading other blogs etc.

We try to create a steady work schedule, we also settle down every few weeks for a few more days to do the extra work - we hate "catching up" on things.

If there was one thing you wish you could have known before you started writing your blog, what would it have been?

Make sure you pick the RIGHT domain name - so many bloggers out there have picked domain names which might sound fun and nice at the start - but you never know what is going to happen if you build your site up. We went from nathansofia.com, nathansofiatravel.com to finally aswetravel.com.

But this also depends on what you want out of blogging - if you just want to have a nice personal site then pick something personal - but then in the future that might hold you back from expanding. Take the time to know what you want from this, and build your site around that dream.

What have you found to be the best way to go about generating an income from your blog?

Focus on building a solid travel blog which shares great content etc. and you will get advertisers contacting you and trying to work with you - that is our main source of monthly income.

We also released an eBook last year called the Pre-Travel Guide which has helped many people around the world prepare for their rtw trips.

How do you go about promoting your travel blog?

We don't actively promote our site, but you will find us active daily on twitter (@aswetravel), facebook etc. connecting with our readers, and building those relationships.

If you share great info, others will share it with their friends, and their friends-friends - that builds your readership up without you needing to do extra work.

How do you see travel blogging developing over the next few years?

We think that more and more travel companies will come to bloggers, and try to form relationships - they will start to realize that customers want a real face, real experiences to products, destinations etc.

So what better way to give that than to connect with travel bloggers like us who are actively out there travelling the world and sharing our experiences.

What sort of time commitment do you put in to your travel blog on a weekly basis?

For us travel blogging is our full time job - so dependent on the week, situation etc. we can work from 2 hours a day to 7+ hours a day. It is our passion and our life - so the more we work and the more we build aswetravel.com - the more freedom we can create for ourselves.

And finally, what key advice would you give to people running, or thinking about setting up, their own travel blog?

Know WHY you are doing it - do you want to have a place online to share your travels, do you want to make money, do you want to help others - what is your focus?

Otherwise you might find yourself 3-6 months later wishing you had done things differently like we did.

Do your research before you set up the blog. Read, Watch and Learn from those who are already doing it. That way you can avoid many mistakes, you can learn from their mistakes so you won't have to do them yourself.

As always, tremendous thanks to Nathan and Sofia for taking the time to answer my questions! You can find out more about their travels on their website, where they have recently published an article about what a year of travel blogging has taught them. They can also be found them on both twitter and facebook.

For more travel blogging tips from the experts, have a look at the rest of the series. To keep up to date with upcoming posts you can subscribe to the RSS feed or join in on the site’s Facebook page.

Next weeks interview features Ben Reed, President and Chief adventurer of adventureswithben.com. In the meantime, if you have any questions or thoughts on this post or the series thus far, the comments box awaits!

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