Marty's tips on travel blogging
Trip Start
Jan 23, 2009
1
6
19
Trip End
Jan 30, 2009
Dhaka,
Bangladesh
Saturday, January 24, 2009
My friend, Marty, is a tremendous travel blogger. So far he has written 2 travel blogs and he motivated me to start travel-blogging. I am publishing his letter containing tips on travel-blogging for other interested bloggers. So here is the letter:
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Dear Niranjan:
A few things that took me awhile to learn with the blog are:
It took me awhile to realize that what I was blogging would not only be of interest to people during the trip - but that it would hopefully become a useful educational tool to others (particularly university students, etc) for years after my trip. This is turning out to be the case - as I am contacted with appreciation and/or questions from people I have never heard of or met.
Be aware that the search engines will pick up on your blog - so be sure you understand that the blog is not private. I think you can choose to make it private - but that is not what I did.
The paragraph you send out at the end (the paragraph in your message below) is not retained within the blog and is not available for instance to someone who may just go to your blog either during or after you trip - including you. Therefore - anything that is really fundamental to your blog and you want to live on - needs to be in the blog itself. You may want to add yourself to the distribution to be able to see and retain what you sent out yourself - including this paragraph.
I tried to keep each blog focused on one visit/company or for the more significant visits - such as I had with you I did a couple or three blogs - one focusing on our personal time with your your family, etc, one on Nirantara, etc. This proved quite useful when I wound up with 64 blogs entries and realized that if my blog was going to ever be historically useful - it would need a Table of Contents by Topic. I think you have seen my Table of Contents (all links). In the end I posted the Table of Contents as the first blog entry.
You can always go back and edit a blog entry, add pictures, video, etc. I have done a considerable amount of that since I have returned.
You have no doubt seen that when you send out the blog you can choose to send it out to everyone on your distribution or only the people that you have checked the box for. I added people to the distribution (particularly the people I visited) as I went along. I wound up with 80 or so people on my distribution. As I got nearer the end it became clear to me that different people were interested in different things (i.e. personal/travel things vs Business things, etc) and I tried to adjust the distribution accordingly.
There were times when I was posting several blogs in a day (trying to catch up - particularly on times when I had not had internet availability). Most of them I would publish (put on the blog) without sending the e-mail out to the distribution. The last of such blogs I would send an e-mail out to the distribution and might let them know that I had posted a series of blogs and encourage them to look at them. I did not want to bug recipients with a number of e-mails on the same day.
Hope there is something in all this that is helpful.
Marty
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Marty's Bangladesh Travel Blog (November-December 2007)
Marty's Indonesia-Indi-Bangldesh Trvel Blog (August-September 2008)
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