Posts tagged ‘blogging’

June 14th, 2010

How Travel Blogging Has Benefited My Life

I was feeling a bit philosophical lately after doing some of those recap posts, such as the Story of Brooke vs. the World. My mind got to thinking about why I’m even in this whole blogging business, and if it is worth continuing (not that I could really give it up). There’s a mad rush in the travel community to build up followers and get the hits and become a bigger fish in a huge sea of dreamers – and I can understand why many people strive for this: they want to make money.

As much as I love to make a buck or two off this site, it doesn’t really happen often enough to pay for the time spent fiddling around. Perhaps if I plastered ad blocks everywhere (I’ve been tempted on many occasions), I could probably make that change, but at the same time I hold back a lot (not completely mind you) because of the fact I don’t want this website to stray too far from its original purpose of sharing my personal story and experiences (and hopefully inspiring and entertaining a little in the process).

In that sense, it makes me sometimes wonder whether or not caring about stats and readers is worthwhile. I’m often torn between letting things just roll on their own and trying to instigate growth (because it’s a challenge?). It does make for a good hobby at least.

In the midst of all these thoughts, I was able to see the light. Travel blogging has impacted my life in several ways throughout the years for the better. It may not pay the bills, but it does have other benefits.

The Outlet

It hasn’t been the place where I divulge all my deepest and darkest secrets, but it does help with the venting and sharing process regardless. Really, I try to stay away from too much *emotion* in general, but that doesn’t mean that I didn’t write it down. There have been a few occasions where I’ve deleted entire paragraphs before publishing, yet still felt better getting it out in words before doing so. Being able to share stories with others that can relate and comment is also a major bonus.

The Inspired Emails

The emails I get from people asking me how I did it, or how they’ve spent hours trolling the site in awe are some of the best reasons to keep going. It makes me feel good that others can benefit from my own experiences, much like I was inspired by many other bloggers back in the day. It sort of makes it feel as though I’m paying that motivation back.

The Jobs

Believe it or not, this blog has been a factor in getting a few of my previous jobs. Blogs are big business nowadays, and if you can show you know how to write for a web audience, you could be on your way to a few of your own. It’s hard to think about how something that seemed so trivial in the beginning of my travel infatuation could result in the amazing, awesome position of guide writer for WhyGo Australia (part of the BootsnAll Travel Network). It’s definitely one of those things I couldn’t have pictured four years ago when I was working the IT help desk at Caterpillar. No way.

The Introduction to Twitter

If I hadn’t been in the business of travel blogging, I probably would never have gotten into Twitter. To be honest, my first impression of the social media tool was a bit on the negative side. However, time let the benefits of Twitter show themselves, and I am hooked to say the least. Without those tweets, I wouldn’t have met some super cool people, been introduced to the Sydney Travel Tribe and made numerous other connections.

The People I’ve Connected With

Beyond Twitter, the blog itself has paved the way for connecting with some amazing people around the world. One contact in particular goes back to the early planning stages around 3.5 years ago – Bethany of Beers and Beans. It was through my blog that Bethany found me, and even though we’ve never met in person, she is someone that I still to this day share most things about my life with, and vice versa. Pretty cool, eh?

What about you guys? How has travel blogging impacted your life for the better?

October 1st, 2009

New Look, Same Great Taste

Here I am! Not too shabby, eh? I’m still working out the kinks and attending to the details (like re-tagging all my posts), but I’m very happy to have gotten all cleaned up. What do you think? Yay or Nay?

brookevstheworld

May 5th, 2009

Getting Caught Up: Part 3

Now for the final part in the series of “Getting Caught Up” by Brooke vs. the World.

The Entrance: There’s a fishing town up north actually called The Entrance that a bunch of my friends here go to. Someone has a shack up there (basically a run-down tiny house) with loads of beds that everyone can sleep in, so it ends up being tons of fun. Unfortunately, when I arrived on Saturday the weather turned to crap and decided to be super windy with rain. Boo!

The fish weren’t particularly in a biting mood either. This is all Honky caught:
honky-and-fish

I did finally learn what a refuge island was. Do we have these in the States?
refuge-island

Third Job: Third job finally came through! I am now working with The Furnished Property Group in Sydney and excited about it. Part of the job will include building and writing a company blog for them – Life in Furnished Property. If anyone is thinking about coming to the Sydney area and needing a place (minimum 1 month stay) let me know and I’ll hook you up!

I’m very excited, especially because I have left the tutoring job and my evenings have now opened up. Life is good here!

Moving Places: I have also moved out of my shoebox International House room to a much larger and nicer one on the corner of Redfern and Surry Hills. I love my new place. It is of course with The Furnished Property Group, but I was looking to rent with them with or without getting my new job. I WISH I had known better before I started looking for places on my own because this was an easier route to take that would have saved me many headaches when leaving.

MacGyver Skills: Even though the circumstances surrounding the discovery of my MacGyver skills were unforeseen and stressful, I’m somewhat proud to announce that I am officially awesome. I went back to my room last weekend to clean up and prepare for inspection. I hung my keys on the hook inside and ran downstairs to throw away my coffee cup. Low and behold, the wind, for the first time in nearly two months, actually blew the door to my room shut, which automatically locks it. All my important things were inside – my laptop, purse, money, keys to new place, etc.

The landlord -surprise, surprise- was not answering his phone, so I was stuck. Of all days! My house mates got their laptops and found me the numbers of various locksmiths, but I was determined to figure it all out in some other way. I know the crack at the bottom of the door is very large, but it was still too difficult to get to the key hook way high. So I went through the tiny crack at the top.

I grabbed a metal hanger and straightened it out. After sliding it through the top crack, I bent it and started swinging. It wasn’t doing much at first and Emi was standing behind me dictating the locksmith’s number because she didn’t see this going anywhere. “Ten minutes!” I shouted.

Finally, I did it. I hit the keys and knocked them off the hook to the floor. I pulled my hanger out from the top and twisted the end into a hook. I got down on my stomach and hooked the keychain from under the door. I. was. successful. I. rock.

To make the day even more unbelievable, I was able to use my amazing MacGyver skills to hook the keys stuck in the back door. We have two back doors – one door and one gate like 7-8 feet apart. The gate is locked with a bike lock and the backdoor with a key, but both are one the same keychain. Someone left the keys in the backdoor and proceeded to lock the bikelocked gate door. I attached two hangers together and latched the keys from the lock in the backdoor to save the day yet again!

Thus concludes this three part series on getting caught up. I’m sure I’ve left out loads, but at least now I can start talking about the rest in their own posts. Happy reading!

February 19th, 2009

Viscape's Travel Writer Meet-Up

Viscape is hosting a virtual travel writer meet-up on March 2nd, so hurry up and get involved! I was supposed to run on the panel of travel writers and bloggers, but alas, I had to back out. Unfortunately (or fortunately!), I will be on the road on that date and am not sure how the hostel situation will work out. Anyways, readers, here is the information on the event!

Travel Writing: Penning Your Way to a Career : Virtual Travel Writer Meet-up of the YEAR!

March 2nd : 7:30 PM EST

This virtual meet-up will cover the do’s and do-not’s of getting into a travel writing career.

Panelists include:

Debbie Dubrow from Delicious Baby.

Claire Walter from Travel Babel.

Shannon Lake (aka Cajun Mama) from the Traveling Mamas.

Shawn Bradford from Olga the Traveling Bra.

Beth Blair (aka Desert Mama) from the Traveling Mamas.

It should be quite the experience! If interested, check out Viscape University for more details, and RSVP today!

February 1st, 2009

Setting Goals Part 2: Start something.

My nickname around this part of the world has become Artsy McCrafterson. I have a knack for making something from nothing, and I LOVE doing it. This is nothing new for me, but for Tanya… well, she seems amazed at all my little creations. She actually said I should start a crafting portfolio from just around our apartment. Interesting idea, eh?

Anyways, some of my creations have involved the following:

1. Making a Christmas tree from a house plant and doing it up right with gummy bears on a string for that extra burst of color it needed.

artsy mccrafterson

2. Making party decorations out of old colored papers we both had.

jess and shatan

3. Making birthday party hats and a sceptor out of The Economist and old newspapers.

party hats

My mind constantly radiates creative ideas (hopefully that’s not a Chernobyl-related thing now), and if I don’t put those good ideas to use, I start to go a little crazy. This might be why I love playing around with my websites so much. I love colors, creating, and design, so this is where my next goal comes to play: start something you can continue to be creative with.

Over the past couple of years, I have been playing around with different web-based business ideas that I can really focus on and grow with. During this time, I have realized how much I really love building websites/blogs, so I think I finally figured out that a great idea to appease my creative mind and build a business is brought to you in the following form: Free Custom WordPress!

Yes, I will set up your WordPress blog, and you won’t have to lift a finger! I know, I know, a WordPress blog setup can be done for free, but what if you don’t have the time or know-how?! I’ll do it for you in a snap with that little extra bit of love that you won’t get anywhere else ;) I’ll even help you customize your template to fit your blogging needs. All I ask is that you buy your hosting through my partner, GoDaddy.com (who I’ve been using for years now!), and we’ll be square.

Sound cool?

I’ve done this before for a few people, as you can tell from the website, and I really enjoyed the process. I am also constantly giving little tips and whatnot to other readers who send me emails. I’m sure they can attest to my abilities, right? ;) Really, I want to take this seriously because it will 1) allow me to be creative, 2) force me to learn more about it all, and 3) help me get a little extra cash now and then. And as for you, you receive your own blog at your own domain with no fuss! Nice.

Thanks again, everyone, for reading, and I hope you can help me spread the word. We’ll see how this goes!

Yours,

Artsy McCrafterson

update: this venture has stopped. internet access was poor when arriving in Sydney and i needed to work a lot to pay rent :( but, it was a great idea!

January 6th, 2009

Well hello there, 2009! Guest blogging, travel planning, and more!

With only one word to describe 2009, I think I would have to go with sneaky. Yes, 2009 – you little sneak, you – you are definitely here now in full-force, but only after giving me quite the impressive surprise party on New Year’s Eve. Thank you, Kiev, for that one. The twenty minute fireworks display and the free concert thereafter was amazing!

Sure, it was never my plan to stay in Kiev for New Year’s, but now I’m glad I did. We had a lot of fun running around downtown, which was probably helped by the Ukrainian approach to vodka we decided to take in the process.

Yep, we took shots of vodka on the escalator… (please don’t mind the hideous picture of me)

escalator vodka

In the phone booth…

phonebooth vodka

In the bathroom…

bathroom vodka

And then some…

and then some

Luckily, it was still a memorable experience for me :-)

So, here we are in 2009. It’s hard to believe that I actually started blogging about travel planning back in 2006, but my archives tell all. Actually, travel planning has been a huge part of my life since I can remember. Whenever I learned about a family trip when I was younger, my suitcase was always packed at least a week in advance in anticipation!

I recently wrote a guest blog post for Viscape about such travel planning experiences and New Year’s travel resolutions, which was just published today. Make sure to check it out here:

I Want to Leave in 2009? New Year’s Travel Resolutions!

And, as for my New Year’s travel resolutions…?

I don’t think I want to spoil all the excitement just yet, but you know me – I usually have something up my sleeve. Let’s just say I see 2009 getting very interesting ;)

Happy New Year!

November 20th, 2007

Upgrade Extravaganza

I spent most of the day upgrading my website. I was running an older version of wordpress for this blog because I wanted to use the fold page list plugin (it didn’t like the newer versions we tried before). Luckily, I found the collapsing page menu plugin from sporkfancier.com. It does basically the same thing, but lacks the ability to exclude pages in the process (drat!). So, I decided to get an upgrade overwith while I have the time and internet connection to do so.

For the most part, everything went alright. I even found a new photo gallery plugin in the process that I am very excited about. I liked the lightbox gallery I had before, but it just looked too cluttered. The NextGEN gallery is much more streamlined, as you can see from my Spain galleries.

Speaking of upgrades, I recently upgraded my itty-bitty jump drive to an 8gigger I found on Ebay for $27. I downloaded the VeohBeta viewer from veoh.com and have been dowloading various episodes of tv shows onto the jump drive. I also plan on putting a few movies on it for rainy days when traveling. It’s a great way to save space on your laptop.

September 1st, 2007

How To Make Your Own Travel Website

When I first started building oldsite, questions came rolling in as to how exactly it was done. Not being a typical format made it stand out a bit (just a little) amongst other travel sites. Oldsite was a bear, but also my baby, as I spent hours in front of the computer trying to fix all the fun issues Microsoft left behind. Now the era is over, and newsite has prevailed, bringing much joy and simplicity into my website building life. I have seen the light and would now like to pass a little gift onto others in similar need of a website with travel in mind: a guide to making your own travel website.

Being on the go, you want a website that is easy to access and update from random places across the globe. Your best bet for ease of use is a blog format since you can update the site from any Internet cafe, meaning you don’t need to be tied to a computer. There are plenty of resources for free blog websites from blogger to travel specific bootsnall and world nomads. However, maybe you don’t want a standard cookie-cutter blog. How would you go about making a great travel blog?

  • First, you need to purchase a domain name – something catchy and definitive of your trip plan or purpose. You can get domain names for fairly cheap through GoDaddy.
  • Next, you need to purchase a hosting plan (yes, it is starting to sound expensive, but if you take a look at GoDaddy, you’ll see they have different plans and prices to suit your needs. The hosting can also be used as a way to back up pictures, software, and other documents along the way.) I know I keep saying GoDaddy, but I have been using them for some time now. I enjoy their ease of use and features for a cut under the rest. GoDaddy.com Hosting Plans
  • Now that you have your site name and hosting account, it is time to install the blogging software. I use and recommend wordpress – they are free with great support. You could also go with something like these guys. If you are a little afraid of the wordpress software/installation, let me know. I just may be able to help you out, especially if you have already done the first 2 steps above.
  • The fourth step is to find a wordpress template (if you decided on wordpress – otherwise that specific software’s template). This will be the look and design of your new travel site. If you are having trouble finding a wordpress template you fully enjoy, let me know. Again, I would be happy to help you modify a template for your site.
  • That’s it! You are all set up. Now just add a couple of plugins and become a diligent blogger, and you’ll have yourself a great travel website, too.

Tips for Great Travel Blogging:

  • Use photos as often as possible. A post without a photo is like a huge open field with nothing that draws the eye!
  • Post often. Going too long between posts will let readers give up on you, to say the least.
  • Focus on quality, rather than quantity. Your post may be long, but it might not really say much. Make it worth the reader’s time!
  • Gain readership. Add in calls to subscribe along with RSS icons so users will have constant contact without having to always check the site.


www.godaddy.com