Tag Archives: travel blogging

travel

Five Awesome Travel Bloggers

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One of my favorite forms of travel-writing is travel-blogging. It’s fun to vicariously live through other people’s travels. Here are five of my favorite travel bloggers (in alphabetical order).

  1. FoXnoMad – Anil’s travel blog focuses less on his own travels and more on educating his readers. His posts help you choose the right laptop as a traveler, teach you how to travel with pets and he has numerous posts on various destinations around the world.
  2. Nerdy Nomad – Kirsty’s travel blog is quite a bit different than the others on this list. She’s an Internet marketer who often puts everything aside to volunteer and help people in need. She has volunteered in Indonesia after last years massive earthquake and in Haiti after their devastating earthquake this year.
  3. Nomadic Matt – One of the most popular travel blogger’s. Like Anil from Foxnomad, Matt is living the travel blogger dream. He started his blog as a way to keep in touch with friends and family and now makes enough money from his blog to travel full-time.
  4. The Professional Hobo – Just like the title of her blog, she’s a professional traveler and writer. She has a great bi-weekly series called “Week in the life” where travelers give the details of their weeks.
  5. Wandering Earl – Ex-cruise ship worker, now full-time traveler. He’s a great writer and currently having quite an adventure visiting countries like Lebanon and Syria in the middle east.

Jason Demant is the founder of UnAnchor.com, where you can find detailed do-it-yourself tour itineraries for your next trip. For the latest on travel-writing you can follow him on Twitter @UnAnchor, or join the I Love Travel Writing Facebook group.

advice, blogging, freelance money

Travel, Freelancing, and Six Lessons Learned

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travel writers most important accessoryby Joe Wallace

I’ve been back from my Chicago to NYC trip for a while now, looking back over the journey and adding up the lessons I learned about freelancing on the road.

To recap–I went on a blogging road trip to New York and decided to experiment with my freelance work–could I maintain my existing clients while traveling? Make all my deadlines?

In the end, the answer was yes, but there were a few things I will do better next time. Looking back, here’s a list of things that went well and things that could have gone better with a bit of extra preparation.

THREE THINGS I DID RIGHT WHILE FREELANCING ON THE ROAD:

  • I let my clients know in advance that I’d be traveling and that some deliverables might come in at odd hours, but still on deadline.
  • I worked ahead where possible to pre-position some of my freelance writing and blogging. This wasn’t possible in many cases because of time-sensitive material, but some of the evergreen content I did manage to write in advance.
  • I got up early and put in freelance hours before hitting the road, then hit the freelance writing trail again over lunch and dinner. This gave me an advantage over simply trying to cram it all in after stopping for the day, tired from driving and reviewing record stores, restaurants and hotels.

THREE THINGS I COULD DO BETTER NEXT TIME:

  • Buy into the iPhone tethering option rather than hoping to find a Starbucks for free wi-fi. “Tethering” lets you get an Internet connection by hooking your iPhone to your laptop, in case you didn’t know.
  • Planning my overnight stays better–I spent more money than I needed to because I didn’t book ANY of my hotels ahead. On a trip that requires as much spontaneity as this one did, that was a necessary evil, but having a few well-researched oasis-style stops with wi-fi and known amenities would have been a big help–even if I didn’t end up actually using them due to time issues.
  • Posting more from the road–I was doing a lot of blogging about the trip, but I really could have saved myself some additional work post-journey if I had found a bit more time to squeeze in a few extra blog posts, reviews and other details while still on the road. Also, I should have archived the 1000 + photos I took on the road as I went instead of doing it only twice, 500 images at a time, spending too much time sorting and sifting.

Travel writing, blogging, and managing freelance clients at the same time is NOT impossible from the road. It does require you to be a bit of a “type A” personality, but that’s the nature of the beast. Continue reading Travel, Freelancing, and Six Lessons Learned →

advice, travel

Road Warrior Blogging & Travel Writing

VINLY ROAD TRIP DAY ONE ST LOUIS 001by Joe Wallace

That’s the view from the blogmobile–I’m reporting in the field on a massive road trip from Chicago to San Antonio, Texas and back again. It’s a nine-day odessey that combines travel writing, blogging and a lot of caffeine.

For this little adventure I packed the laptop, iPhone, a 500GB  portable hard drive for images and media, batteries and about a mile of USB cable with connectors for every conceivable application.

The little things are the ones that bite you on trips like these. For example–my laptop battery is two years old and won’t hold much more than a 40 minute charge–horribly inconvenient when you’re trying to blog, upload images and post tweets about the adventure.

The iPhone is great for blog photos, but a proper camera would have come  in handy on this trip. There was no room for it in the luggage (took the train for the first leg of the journey) but now I regret not having sucked it up and packed the extra bag. Continue reading Road Warrior Blogging & Travel Writing →