Narrow Your Blog’s Focus

You’ll recall from Chapter 3 that one of Mark’s favorite student bloggers wrote solely about where to find the best chicken wings in Boston. That may be meaty stuff (sorry), but it’s also so tightly focused that it doesn’t even take in the whole bird. One of Jerry’s travel writing students built a strong blog titled “10 from the T” that gave tips on the most interesting walks within 10 minutes of the Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority’s subway stops in the Boston metropolitan area. Boston is a city of neighborhoods so the topic offered lots of opportunities worth exploring. Its point, however, couldn’t have been more clear.

Focus was something Jerry struggled with in France because of what he came to realize was a flaw in his blog’s conceptual design. On the one hand, he wrote a series of “Letters from Provence,” posts about life in one of France’s prettiest and most easygoing regions. On the other, he wrote about “Slow Lane Travel,” places to go and things to see off the beaten path. He’d designed this duality because of twin sabbatical projects. But in hindsight, it was a mistake. He needed a single, fully integrated focus.

To help you establish a title and topic for your travel blog, we propose an exercise. Once you’ve chosen a blog topic, ask five people you trust whether they’d read it, why, and what they consider its biggest weakness. Then, research what other blogs have written on the topic using Technorati and other directories of blogs. Finally, force yourself to break your topic into three potential sub-topics. Ask yourself whether one of these alone might be rich enough for a blog. The tighter your focus, the better your odds of success.

Practice Close to Home

Writing a travel blog doesn’t mean you have to go anywhere. It means you need to interest others in something about a place you know well. And that’s likely to be close to home.

Just as reporters can learn the skills to cover Washington, D.C. by covering local government, travel writers can prep for that big journey by writing about things they know better than others. Like chicken wings. Like walks near the stops on Boston’s subway system.

So if you live in Rome, New York, instead of Rome, Italy, build your first travel blog there.

Take Wendell Jamieson. He published a piece titled “My Borough, Your Destination” about Brooklyn, the New York borough in which he’d lived for more than four decades. Jamieson didn’t write his piece for a personal blog. He wrote it for the New York Times travel section cover.

Travel blogging close to home costs a fraction of what you’ll pay to see the world. It gives you a built-in core audience of friends, neighbors, and relatives. It lets you think about something you know best.

That might be underground music stores or cool sites for hang gliding. It might be the best farm-to-table restaurants or food trucks with panache. Whatever your passion, turn it into a travel blog in your own backyard.

Choose Your Technology with Care

Jerry cut his journalistic teeth decades before the world turned mobile. He prefers to write on keyboards, not smartphones or iPads. But he neither wanted to haul around the 4.5 pounds of his MacBook Pro nor consume all his computer’s memory mid-journey. His solution was to buy a new MacBook Air (3 pounds for a 13-inch screen) and to pay extra for twice the memory. He carried it in a foam sleeve he could slip into a backpack.

Jerry had neither the money nor space to buy a big professional camera with multiple lenses. But he wanted to take pictures that captured culture and knew this would require a decent zoom. After talking to friends and looking over product reviews, he settled on a Canon SX50HS, which he bought with case, batteries, and two memory cards for a little over $500. Its best feature: an optical zoom lens with 50x magnification.

Think carefully before you hit the road about what equipment fits you best. Carry back-up batteries and memory cards. Be sure you have enough memory and the right electric current converters. Verify, too, that you’ve bought space on a reliable server and that you have enough space reserved to meet all your blog’s demands. It was here that Jerry ran into trouble. During his first few months in France, he battled problems with server space, blog speed, and spam, in part because his grad assistant also was new to the business of building and operating a personal blog. The lesson: It’s not good enough in today’s world to say, “I’m a writer, not a techie.”

Give Your Readers a Home Page Search Function

As a blog grows, the ability to search its archives becomes crucial. Be certain to install a home page blog search function that allows visitors to type in keywords to find past stories. In fact, explore whether this function can readily appear on every page. It helps hold readers.

Scout for Potential Allies and Audience on Social Media

Chapter 12 is devoted to “Building Your Blogging Brand.” For now, let’s just say scout early when entering new territory. Twitter, Facebook, and other social media outlets are natural allies in a digital world in which every blog has hundreds of direct competitors and millions of people competing for attention. Be sure to “friend” and “follow” influential or active users in the place or topic about which you will be blogging before you get there.

If you’re traveling abroad, seek out international online communities. Some bloggers specialize in making sites that index other blogs. Such hub sites can serve as a good source to see what’s written about an area, who is writing it, and whether you’d like to link to them. For example, Expats Blog (www.expatsblog.com/blogs) lists 2,492 blogs around the world by country and region within country.

A few other travel sites worth visiting:

• The Travel Blog Exchange (www.travelblogexchange.com). Among other things, this site offers a 30-minute video on how to build a travel blog.
• The Travel Writers Exchange (www.travel-writers-exchange.com). Offers travel writing tips, book reviews, and forums. You can also submit an article to the site.

Create an Email Newsletter

So you think email is old hat? Not so fast. Here’s what David Carr wrote in a June 2014 New York Times column on newsletters:

Travel bloggers can use newsletters to help identify loyal readers and converse directly with them, either as a group or individually.

Design a Blog That’s Both Attractive and Dynamic

Entire books are devoted to Web design. We’d recommend Beautiful Web Design, by Jason Beaird, since design isn’t the primary purpose of this book. But design bears mention. In planning your travel blog— or any other for that matter—find a balance between creating an attractive home page and one that’s easy to navigate. Ideally, you want your home page to be both.

Busy blogs that lack a clear, compelling title and cram too much on the home page can scare visitors off. They offer too many choices, provide no clear sense of purpose, and lack a dominant “entry point”— think of a sort of welcome sign in the form of a dominant photo or graphic element. They look cluttered.

On the other hand, pretty blogs that don’t give readers the chance to click through to enough different features, to access archives, and to interact run the risk of being too static, or just plain dull.

Prefab templates at places such as WordPress or Blogger work just fine to create your first blog. But if you’re in this for the long haul, either read a good design book before you launch or find a design-savvy friend who will help you build the right look.

Whether or not you’re the designer, you should make the final call. The blog’s look, its usability, and its content should complement one another.

Caz and Craig Makepeace

“Have a very clear vision for your blog and how you want to help your readers”

Caz and Craig Makepeace write that “we like to call the world our home.” They travel it for a living. Or, more precisely, they make enough money writing about it to support themselves and two young daughters, who go on the road with them. The Australian couple are the authors of y Travel Blog (www.ytravelblog.com), ranked third among the top 50 travel blogs by The Expeditioner in the third quarter of 2014. It’s a blog devoted to inspiring others and showing them that they, too, “can travel the world on little dime.” We caught up with the Makepeaces in Western Australia, which, their blog says, they’ve been traveling around for 15 months “with no end in sight.”

Caz and Craig Makepeace with their daughters, Kalyra and Savannah

What gave you the idea for your blog?

We had spent eight years living and traveling around the world and so knew we had a lot of experience, stories, and tips to share with people who wanted to do the same. A travel blog seemed like an easy and fun way to connect with other travelers and help them travel more and create better memories.

Why do you think your blog took off?

We started blogging already with authority as we’d had so many years of experience traveling around the world. We also understood our readers very well because of this, which meant we could easily provide them with what they needed to create similar travel experiences. We worked hard to provide useful, relevant information for them. We also worked hard to create a community around our blog, similar to the hostel couch. We’ve created a place that is fun, engaging, friendly, and welcoming, that shares stories and tips about travel.

Our story is very inspiring to many people. They can relate to us and we help them to feel they can live their travel dreams too. I think that is very powerful.

How long did it take you to make your first dollar?

I think it was about three months and it was $75 for advertising. We thought that was amazing! To make money doing something that filled me with such joy AND helped people as well. That money was like hitting the jackpot as it showed me what was possible.

Now we are full-time with our blog earning more money than we did in our jobs that we hated.

How often did you post when you started? How often do you post now?

We posted almost every day when we first started. We now consistently post at least three times a week. Our current road trip with our children slows us down so we can’t publish as much as we’d like.

What advice would you give students who set out to write their first travel blog?

Have a very clear vision for your blog and how you want to help your readers. This will guide every decision you make and when you think about your readers’ needs, then you create content that nourishes them. That is how you build long-term success.

Tips for Travelers

Big websites like Huffington Post love lists.

These can be trite at times—“12 Tips on Using the Language of Love.” But readers do appreciate concrete information. Don’t be shy about providing it. Among the posts Jerry put on his blog were “15 Tips for the Best of Aix,” “12 Tips on Getting from Here to There in Provence,” and “Aix: What’s Hot, What’s Not.” His most successful blog, which he also put on the Huffington Post—where it drew 721 likes—was “12 Tips on How to Spend 6 Months in France Without Going Broke.”

Jerry wouldn’t call it among his best. But it gave specific advice about something travelers care a lot about: good value. And the headline identified a country, France, to which a lot of people travel. Such things count in getting readers to the page (see Chapter 6, “Why Headlines Matter”).

The post began like this:

From there, the story launched into Jerry’s 12 tips. Here’s an excerpt:

• Cancel everything you can before you leave home. We shut down our phones, parked our cars, canceled Netflix, a French language TV station, my school parking space and newspapers. It adds up.
• Get credit and debit cards that don’t charge a fee. Most cards tack on a 3 percent overseas transaction fee. Not Capital One.
• Keep track of daily expenditures. This allows us to monitor ourselves and reward ourselves. It takes little effort. I keep a running tally in a notebook in my back pocket.

Such advice blogs can take many forms. In Paris, Jerry wrote about three restaurants worth eating in and two scams to steer clear of. He told his readers that “In Chamonix, Choosing a Trail’s Direction Is No Small Matter,” explaining that the far less-traveled and slightly steeper direction on the North Balcony trail kept the view of the Alps directly in front of the hiker while the more downhill direction that hikers chose more often was crowded and left the view at their backs. He took readers on a photographic boat tour of Lake Annecy. And he explained, in “Medieval Fortresses of Provence: 1 for the Masses, 1 in the Wild,” why he considered it much more interesting— and much less expensive—to head to medieval ruins of Fort du Buoux in the wild than to go to the wildly popular and crowded Les-Baux-de-Provence.

All these blogs included specific information, delivered directly:

He gave this advice on “Getting from Here to There”:

Sound practical advice builds readership.

Stories about People

As wanderers, we don’t just travel to see Roman ruins, the paintings of the masters, or the landscapes that drew them to places like Provence. We go to meet people, learn about their culture, and try, sometimes using multiple languages (and gestures), to communicate with them. We may rush to show our friends pictures of the Acropolis in Athens, Big Ben in London, and Machu Picchu in Peru. But the stories we tell often have more to do with the people we encounter or the predicaments we find ourselves in. (Jerry calls the latter “adventure stories.” You’ll read more about them in the next section.) The key point: people, not things, are at the heart of most interesting travel memories, and your audience will want to meet them.

When Jerry found a great lunch spot in Aix-en-Provence, he wrote about it through his own experience in interviewing the lively and lovely owner, Fanny Jehanno. He titled the piece, one of his best read, “When You Eat at Fanny’s, Don’t Forget to Order the Fondant au Chocolat.” It began like this:

As the piece continues, it talks about the food, but also shares the backstory of Jehanno:

Travel stories come to life when they have characters. Sometimes the main character can be the writer himself: As we’ve said, there’s no prohibition against using the first person in blogging. Sometimes it can be a companion. Jerry often used his interactions with his wife Kathy to incorporate humor and humanity in his posts. But when possible, push yourself to interact with and learn about the people who live in the places you visit. It’ll make your travels—and your blogs—that much more interesting.

Adventure Stories

The cliché has it that “misery loves company.” But it also might be said that “company loves misery,” at least, that is, when the “company” is your audience. Too many travel writers forget that the best stories can grow out of what goes wrong.

Life isn’t a fairy tale. Neither is travel. When we, as writers and people, struggle and sometimes fail, people see something of their own lives in our hardships. This isn’t voyeuristic. We’ve all had hardships. That’s why Friedrich Nietzsche wrote, “What does not kill me makes me stronger.”

Jerry’s journey to France got off to an inauspicious start. A blizzard blanketed Boston with more than a foot of snow the night before he left. And though he made it to the airport in bitter-cold conditions, his jubilation soon turned to frustration as his flight was delayed three times and then canceled for mechanical difficulties.

Jerry and Kathy spent 25 hours waiting at and near Logan Airport before they finally boarded. They missed another connecting flight in London. By the time they reached their Aix-en-Provence apartment, 46 hours had passed since they’d left home.

Jerry was too exhausted to ever post to his blog about this experience (his French class started the morning after his arrival). But he did post four times to Facebook, where a growing group of friends starting commenting on his mini-drama.

By his final post, 18 people weighed in with comments after he wrote:

In hindsight, Jerry is sorry he didn’t post the whole thread on the blog. That’s because company, it seems, truly does love misery.

Some of the best adventure travel writing can be found in the books published by Lonely Planet. They tell of travelers lost near war zones, turned desperately sick in strange lands, determined to test their stamina in the teeth of winter on the South American coast. They allow the reader to imagine, to worry, and to come along for the ride. So remember: bad experiences can make the best stories.

Essays on Culture and Place

At its best, writing can help us figure out what we think and why.

Yes. We know that sounds awfully self-indulgent in a book about blogging for others. But the worst mistake a blogger can make in writing about experiences in a distant or strange place is to hide emotion or reaction behind the Big Voice, to try to make sweeping and often uninformed generalizations.

Such essays read like hot air, expansive and empty. At the opposite extreme are blogs, essays, and articles so intent on being reportorial that they abandon the author’s personality, an important aspect of sharing experiences others haven’t had. Travel essays that find a balance between the know-it-all and the report-it-all show the humanity of the writer by sharing the surprises, discoveries, and sometimes frustrations that are part of understanding life in an unfamiliar place. They balance observation, specific example, and reflection.

To help you find this balance, we’ll offer this piece of advice about writing, one easier to give than to receive: “Be yourself. Don’t try to be the expert you’re not.”

Jerry tried his hand soon after arriving in Aix-en-Provence in an essay titled “Slow Lane Travel Starts as a State of Mind.” Looking back, he realizes he was guilty of the dreaded “wind-up”—the writer, not quite in his comfort zone yet, covering up for his insecurities by saying too much. Here’s how that essay began:

It was all wind-up. In retrospect, Jerry believes he should have started with his fourth and fifth paragraphs when he settles into being himself:

Two points here:

• Small daily events can be the fodder of interesting travel essays.
• When we strain to convey meaning, we often unnecessarily expand space.

Redrafting helps. So does the simple act of putting your work aside before doing so. But start with this mindset: Blogging in many ways is the art of the small point. As mentioned in Chapter 4, be a miniaturist, not a muralist. When we try to make too much of a single post, it starts to crumple from all that weightiness.

Four months later, Jerry returned to the notion of the slow lane of daily life. By this time, he’d relaxed. He titled his essay “Life on the Set of Aix-en-Provence.” The piece built on the metaphor of Aix-en-Provence as a movie set. Several things prompted the idea: the markets that grow and recede like some kind of organism in the squares each day, the penchant of Aixois to dress elaborately in what seem like costumes on market day, and the extraordinary experience of living someplace where most of the surroundings are hundreds of years old. With this metaphor in mind, Jerry decided to take his readers on a ground-level tour, addressing them as if they were there accompanying him. He read the piece out loud, something he always advises, to listen to how the sentences sounded.

It began like this:

As you travel, do write essays about what’s on your mind and what you observe. But don’t try to make these reflections monumental.

Picture Stories

People love to see a place. Chapter 7, “Beyond Words,” is all about multimedia blog posts. Here, we would simply like to reiterate the centrality of images in a robust travel blog. Jerry typically posted one or two galleries of slide shows each week.

These are never merely random collections of photos. He’d often shoot 100 photos a day and use 10 percent or less of what he’d taken. These he’d arrange as a story, sometimes chronologically, sometimes geographically, but always with purpose. (His galleries included “The Signs of Provence,” “Cassis: ‘The Poor Man’s St. Tropez’,” and “Touring Lake Annecy.”)

Whether told with words or photos, stories need a clear shape that the audience can follow.

The Outtakes of Daily Life

The best newsroom stories get told at the water fountain, not on the air or in the newspaper. If this is a newsroom cliché, it’s a true one, and that’s a shame.

The same needn’t be true of travel blogging. Some exchanges aren’t worth a full story. They are worth a quick post. Jerry is partial to building “bits and pieces” using several of these.

Some of his, like this one, center on miscommunication:

Little blog posts can keep readers interested. Certainly, anything that draws a smile counts.

Pick the Right Medium

As we discussed in Chapter 7, “Beyond Words,” picking the right blog form makes for a more interesting site. A visit to Wrigley Field in Chicago or Central Park in New York on a warm summer day would lend itself well to an audio slide show. Why? Because of the natural sounds: the crack of the bat and hot dog vendors in Wrigley, the sounds of laughter and notes of musicians in the park. These soundtracks comfortably accompany still photos.

When Jerry soared 9,000 feet from the Chamonix Valley to the foot of Mont Blanc, Europe’s highest mountain, he chose a photo gallery with captions to capture the cable car’s ascent, the icicles hanging in mid-summer off the mountaintop restaurant, and the panoramic view of the Alps. Video might have been even better because of the sweep of the view; Jerry took some for himself but didn’t post it.

Not all posts, however, need extensive multimedia.

A blog post about a special art exhibit in the Metropolitan Museum of Art would best be accomplished with words and a few pictures. For one thing, it would need context. For another, it would demand specific information (price, times, background on how it came to be). And for a third, it seems a waste of photography to try to replicate the artwork of masters.

Block That Empty Cliché

One of our favorite books on writing is William Zinsser’s On Writing Well. In it, he rightly pokes fun at the empty frothiness of too much travel writing. He writes:

Zinsser urges writers to ban “travelese” from their vocabulary before they sit down to write. He warns:

Pause when the words come too easily. Look for something fresher.

Say Something Specific, but Be Selective

Verbs drive sentences. Facts and selective details steer stories.

So if you want to block that cliché, replace it with something that grounds the reader in a place and gives valuable information.

Here’s what Jerry had to say about France’s odd mix of Bayou-like marshlands and cowboy country:

Given that the piece was written in mid-May, it contained links to information about the gypsy pilgrimage, a good place to eat, and a modestly priced hotel. Mixing story and specific advice usually makes sense.

Be Human

On the road, the main character of a blog often becomes the writer himself. Since travel involves surprises—some pleasant, some funny, some embarrassing or uncomfortable—it helps for that traveler, that main character, to show some humility. Few readers find pleasure reading the exploits of a blowhard. Put another way, most of us like to engage in the stories of someone we might someday like to meet.

One way to be human is to poke fun at yourself when warranted. Another is to share those moments in a strange place that confound or simply make us feel uncomfortable. Jerry shared his own insecurity the first time he attempted to interview someone in French: