Travel Blog 3 Months In: How’s it Going?

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It is a little over three months into our travels and running our travel blog has been fulfilling, exciting, time consuming and at times confusing.
We wrote an article at Travel Writers Exchange about How to Manage Your Blog While Traveling to give you an idea of how we do it.
But we thought that we would share the things that we have had difficulties with, things that we want to change in the blog and directions that we want to take.

Content.

This has been the easiest part of running our blog. With new adventures and destinations happening daily, we have no problem posting information and travel stories.

Difficulties: We have come to the conclusion that we may be posting too often. We are not sure if we are turning off regular readers by putting up blog posts 7 days a week. We have so much to share however, that if we don’t post daily, we would still be writing about India while we are in Sri Lanka!

Solution: We decided to change things up a bit recently by giving readers a break two days a week. Sundays will be featuring our favorite snapshot of the week from Dave’s repertoire of photos. Each week we have a highlight of a fabulous moment and instead of having to read an entire article, you will have a short synopsis of our favorite moment.
On Fridays we have decided to feature Dave’s photography by posting a photo story. Dave was originally going to post these photostories on his photgraphy blog picturetheplanet.com, but we haven’t given that blog the time it deserves and decided that his photos would receive much higher traffic at theplanetd.

Niche:

Our Blog Niche is about Adventure Couples Travel. We wanted to focus mainly on adventure travel and destinations and how we enjoy them as a couple.

Difficulties: While India is an adventure unto itself, we feel that we have been lacking in the adventure aspect of our Blog. India is such a big country and there is so much to see. While we love adventure sports and travels, we still wanted to see the temples, palaces and experience the spirituality of the country.

Solution: We are expecting to start our adventures in the North with more hiking, treks and white water rafting. While we tried to fit as many adventures as possible from camel safari’s, bouldering and even intensive yoga classes, we feel that we really thrive when we are in jungles and climbing mountains.

Itinerary:

Traveling for long periods of time lets a person have a loose itinerary. We can change our minds on a whim and are free to travel in any direction.

Difficulties: While the freedom is great, we have found that we are a little too loose in our itinerary. We stay in places for just a little too long, we don’t really have a focus on where we are going to go next and we don’t do the proper research on what activities there are to do at each destination. Once we leave a place or talk to someone else, we realize that we missed out on a few great things.

Solution: We are going to do more research before each destination. Not just through our guide books, but on the internet. We are also going to visit tourist offices. When we were well into our travels in Sri Lanka and were running out of time, we came across a government tourist office. We discovered that there was rock climbing, rapelling and mountain biking in the North. It wasn’t mentioned in the Lonely Planet, (which we never solely rely on anyway) but we also didn’t see anything about it on the Internet or from other travelers. A visit to a government tourist office is at the top of our list from now on.

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Travel Blogging as a Couple

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We have several blogs that we admire and we often wonder how they manage to stay ahead of the game so well.

Most of the travel blogs out there seem to be solo travelers.  They travel the world and manage to post quality articles while staying connected to their community and running an appealing blog.

Dave and I are lucky.

We can split the workload.  While it may seem to some that Deb does the bulk of the work because she writes the posts, that is only one portion of running a successful travel blog.

We thought that we would share with you what the roles are of Dave and Deb at theplanetd.

Since Deb is obvious, let’s start with Dave.

Dave:

Dave’s main focus lies in three main areas of the blog.

1. Photography

He takes photos that not only complement Deb’s writing, but he also posts his gallery at www.picturetheplanet.com

While photography brings him accolades, it is his behind the scenes work that really plays an important role in Canada’s Adventure Couple.

Dave proofreads and edits all of Deb’s posts and chooses the photos to go with the articles that she write.

2. Code and Website Design

Do you see the layout of this blog? Well, Dave has sat at the computer for hours on end learning code and reformatting the website.  From the little things like adding sponsors and advertisers to changing the look of pages, sidebars and even the colour of the blog he has become a self taught web designer.

It may seem easy when you look at it, but each area of the blog has delicate coding to deal with and Dave does it all.

Dave makes changes to the blog regularly. It is hard to believe that our little box stating “connect with us” contains a lot of code and can’t just be done through widgets and plugins.

3. Business.

People contact us regularly to advertise on the site.  Dave deals with the business aspect of theplanetd.  He fields emails, writes proposals and sets up our rates structure. While we would love to take all the money and run, Dave screens advertisers to see if they are right for our site.  He has a strict code that other blogs may not follow.

We won’t bring our price down just to get more advertisers on our site.  Quality is always better than quantity.

Deb

Deb’s work is directed to the creative, marketing and social side of the blog.

1. Writing

Deb comes up with ideas for articles and writes the content.  It can be exhausting during travels to constantly look for the story, but Deb keeps us moving to the next adventure.  Once she has run out of content, it is time to move on to another destination.

2. Networking

Deb is also the social force behind the blog.  She visits other sites to comment on their content, give them a tweet or stumble and helps to advertise her friend’s content.  She is the person that keeps our presence alive in the Internet universe.

3. Marketing

Deb works on building relationships and getting the word out about theplanetd.  She contributes guest articles to other websites and sends queries to newspapers.  She has also mastered social media, working hard at building followers on twitter, stumbleupon and creating links through unique article wizard and ezine.  Deb is also never to proud to hand out a business card and tell everyone what they do for a living when they are traveling.  If one person looks at the blog, she has succeeded in her job.

Together as a Couple.

This blog is run together and it is a team effort.

1. Brainstorming

Dave and Deb brainstorm story ideas and decide whether people will be interested in what they have to say or not.  We check for key words and search engine optimization together.  We also make sure that the blog stays focused to our niche of adventure couples travel.  (something we are still working on)

2. Video

Dave is by far the more technical savvy of the two and he has set up the entire system of editing.  He is in charge of transfering files to the computer and keeping it organized.

Editing is a team effort that takes a lot of time.  We have fallen behind I am afraid, but working to catch up.

3. Planning

We plan our itinerary together.  Believe it or not, we plan our travels around the blog.  We would love to sit at the beach for weeks on end, but that would not make for interesting writing.  We choose locations and adventures that we feel people will interested in.  We climb mountains and go on safari’s because that is the adventure.

So there you have it.  Dave and I have our roles, but we also work together.  We are lucky to be able to split the workload.   We admire the solo travelers out there that keep such great blogs going and have no idea how they manage. 

We are overwhelmed with double the manpower.

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The Art of Travel Blogging and Travel

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We haven’t been traveling for very long yet and we have many growing pains to work through. Both with travel, technical aspects and with the blog. Finding a story and keeping it interesting.

The Blog

We have never had to worry about how long we stayed at a place before or how often we need to get to the Internet, but now that we are working to become full time Travel Bloggers and professional travelers, we really have to look at our journey in a different way.

We have been sitting in Goa for over a week doing Yoga and relaxing on the beach, and we have realized that this doesn’t make for very interesting Blog Posts or newspaper articles. In the past, we wouldn’t have cared and we would have gone on with our days until we felt like moving on.

Now however, we have to take you, our readers into account.

It is time to move on.

Patnem Beach, we love you. Swami Jee, we love your classes, Ramnad, Dinnesh, Raj and Pauin, you are the best. But we must leave in search of an adventure.

As for the Blogging.

We have started to work on a system. Dave works on his photos, while I write before we visit the Internet. Unfortunately, it has been very hot and there aren’t many places where we can work during the day away from the sand and the heat, so we do some work laying on our bed in our very basic room here in Goa.

I try to write 3 or more posts ahead of time, Dave goes through his photos to match the post and then when we go to the internet where we schedule our posts a week in advance. We are hoping to keep this system going.

Dave has started up his photography site and you can view more photos besides the photos that we post here at PictureThePlanet.com

We try to tweet and stumble a bit and have been working at trying to network with other Bloggers, but this has been difficult. There are only so many hours in the day and we want to experience the travel to have something to write about. We don’t want to spend hours surfing other blogs and miss out on our own experience, but at the same time, we want to support our friends that are working hard at their fantastic sites!

Technical

We managed to unlock our iPhone once and for all and we can now use it in India. See our iPhone hell post to find out how that all worked out.

Did you know that you can get a prepaid Internet stick for our computer with unlimited bandwidth in India?

We were so excited about that prospect that we went to town when we heard about it to buy one. It should be easy right?

Nope.

Vodaphone will not do a prepaid wireless stick. You have to have an address in India that they can send a bill to.

Idea – (the other large Internet provider) does prepaid sticks, but according to the guys at the desk, it is not compatible with Mac. Even though it says right on the box that it is. He just crossed that out with his pen and said that it wasn’t. Hmm, I guess that we will have to try somewhere else.

Reliance does prepaid also. But nobody can tell us what the coverage is like. They don’t know if it is nation wide and they also don’t know if it is Mac Compatible. We can’t find out if it is Mac Compatible unless we buy it.

The cost is 3800 Rupees ($88) to buy the stick and 1 month of Internet. It is not cheap and we are on a budget, so we are not in the mood to throw away $88 just to see if the Internet stick works. Especially after all of our iPhone hassels.

We have one more option and that is Airtel. We just haven’t found an outlet for them yet.

Buying a SIM or Internet stick in India…tip

You can’t just walk into a store to buy a SIM Card here in India. You need to have some paper work with you.

Don’t waste a ricksaw trip like we did. Bring these items with you when you buy your SIM.

• Photocopy of Passport
• Photocopy of India Visa
• Two Copies of Visa photos
• Business Card of hotel, with full address and phone number of place that you are staying in India
• Money.
• Patience. It sounds like a silly point to make, but you when you try to ask questions regarding any information, you will receive many blank stares.

The Travel

We received some great advice early on in our trip and it has come true time and again. Always ask at least 3 different people the same question regarding anything. You will get three different answers, but one of them is bound to be right.

Even a simple question to do with food… “what comes with the chicken?” to which they will reply “chips.” You say “Oh, chips sounds nice, I haven’t had them in a while” When your chicken arrives… They bring your chicken with raw vegetables instead. You ask the same server about the chips and he says,”Oh No, chicken always comes with vegetables.“

The same goes for at the train Station,” Can We buy train tickets here?” “No, only in Margao.” Then you say “But you have a booth to book tickets with business hours? They happen to be right now, why do you have a booking office, if you can’t book tickets?” To which he says, “Nope, you cannot book here” as he looks past you to try to see the cricket match on the T.V.

Then you go back to town and try to book at an outlet and they tell you that you should book at the train station. You then say, “but they told me at the train that I cannot book there.” To which they reply “Oh no, you can book at the train station no problem. You then try to book online, it says that it takes credit cards from all nations. I guess Canada is not one of those nations because we try all of our cards and not one is accepted.

We must get out of Patnem, it is time for some adventure we owe it to you and ourselves! So we are chancing it tomorrow and are  going to try to hop on the 6:30 am train to Margao to hopefully catch the 8:00 am train to Hampi. But his is India and there are always wait lists. Getting on a train can be quite the ordeal. We will let you know if we make it!

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We Are Back in the Travel Saddle Baby

-On the first day upon arrival in India I awoke to have a cold shower. The room was dense with humidity that the ceiling fan was trying desperately to cut through. As I turned on the tiny drizzle from the shower the ants on the walls scurried to safety.

Our Bathroom

We even were given a bar of soap and two towels to our surprise, but we had to use our own toilet paper.  A scoop and a bucket were supplied to rinse we assume.

At least I hope it was because I couldn’t make the shower work. So I filled the bucket with water from the tap and used that scoop to pour the cold deluge over my head and body.  The water ran to a drain beside the toilet and the entire bathroom was soaked…I hadn’t been this happy in months!

What is it about travel that makes us feel so alive?

We aren’t doing much different than we have for the past 2 weeks in Canada.

Dave and I are together every day, just like before.  We are working on writing and photography just like before and we know that we don’t have to go to back work…Just like before.

But landing in Trivandrum and making our way to Kerala has made us instantly happier.

Coffee Time

I wrote this post in my journal at Coffee Temple while sipping on some Java listening to  mellow music, just like I did at Williams Coffee Pub in Woodstock.   Dave is sitting beside me doing his work as usual and I am just so content.

Hearing the waves crash on the shore, sitting in the warm air and feeling the energy of a new place makes writing so exciting.

Even sitting outside last night Blogging on the Internet, just felt right.

When I cam out of the shower shivering from the cold, Dave laughed and said “You are just beaming,” to which I replied “We’re Back!”

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It’s About Time, India Here We Come

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We are off to India tomorrow! We have been Blogging for months about this day and it has finally come. Even up until a few days before leaving, it didn’t feel real.

We have had to take care of many last minute details, organize our lives and tie up loose ends.  We never really had time to think about the fact that we are finished work.  We have moved onto another chapter in our lives.  We don’t have to deal with a Canadian winter, we don’t have to wake up at 6:00 am and we are in charge of our own destinies.

Travel will have its challenges.

We will have to work hard to keep the Blog updated regularly and we want to write and take photos professionally.  We will be spending many nights at our computers and we will be looking at our travels with a critical eye.  We will have to constantly look to how each adventure can be sold to magazines and newspapers.  We will have to think about ways to keep our readers entertained and how to keep people coming back to theplanetd.

Permanent Vacation.

But the reality is, we are going to travel and explore this incredible planet.  We will be spending our days in some of the most beautiful destinations on earth.  We are on permanent vacation. We both love discovering new places, meeting new people, trekking through jungles, climbing mountains and we really enjoying doing all of this together.

Travel as a Couple

Many people ask us, how we can spend all of our time together?  Don’t we get sick of each other?  Of course we do.  Sometimes we can seriously get on each others nerves.  But most of the time, we get along quite well while traveling.

We have had a dream for years to become full time adventurers.   We have always wanted to be “that person” with the title “Adventurer” after their name.  There really are people out there that do it for a living!

Dave and Deb, Adventure Couple. We like the sounds of that and we look forward to pursuing that dream. We have a long way to go to catch up to great adventurer Ranulph Fiennes or the ultimate endurance athlete Ray Zahab, but it is going to be a fun ride adding our own adventures and challenges to the mix.

There is something about pursuing your dream that makes giving up everything worth it. We may not be making millions but we certainly feel rich.   We are finally doing what we have always wanted to do.

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10 Things We Learned Before Traveling

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Little did I know that I would already be living life as a backpacker before leaving Canada.

Staying at my parents house that has the internet and television disconnected for the winter while they are in Florida has been a warm up to the situation that we will be facing abroad.

We have been spending our evenings at the local coffee shop catching up on emails and blog posts, negotiating with advertisers and finalizing the last of our banking.

Well, even in a developed country like Canada problems can arise.  The Internet has gone down and at times it has been slow.

Oh how we miss our home office.

Plus with all of our Iphone woes, we have had to make 2 seperate trips to Toronto 2-hours away to visit the Apple Store before leaving.

While we are traveling, we expect these little mishaps along the way, but to have them start before we even began is a little bit frustrating.  My fear is that people are going to think that we are not going to post regularly while we are traipsing around the globe, but believe me, we will be.

I didn’t start our scheduled posts yet because I thought that I wouldn’t have to, but I have learned a valuable lesson.  Have a back up plan.

However, it has already been an excellent learning experience.

10 Things We Learned Before Travel

Here are some of the things that we have learned while not having an Internet connection at our beck and call.

1. Schedule posts ahead of time.
2. Su.pr those posts so that they will get noticed on Twitter and hopefully StumbleUpon.
3. Use HootSuite to tweet your favorite blogs. This is an incredible piece of Information that we received from Anthony of the Travel Tart.  We can only program 10 people but at least we can be sure to support our fellow Bloggers when we can’t make it to the Internet.                                                            We would love to be able to add more but as of now, 10 is the maximum.  No worries, when we do make it to a computer, we will always be sure to support the other bloggers that are not pre programmed and we will probably rotate our HootSuite Tweets.
4. The Iphone is not reliable at all and we have to make sure to find out where all Apple Stores are located in each country that we visit.  We have gone through 4 Iphones so far.  None are able to be unlocked yet.  With the new version, there seems to be a bug that causes us to lose our wifi connection on the phone.  However, all we have to do is restore the phone and take it back to Apple and they will replace it.
5. Which leads us to…extend our Apple Care for another year.  Definitely a must because Apple seems to not care what goes wrong with the phone, they will just hand you a new one as long as it is under warranty and restored.
6. We must accept that we are not going to be organized for the next few months. We may only be living out of a backpack, but we already cannot find anything.   We waste more hours of the day (and I am not exaggerating when I say hours) looking for stuff.  Today we couldn’t find my deodorant.  After ripping both our bags apart and rifling through our carry-ons, we finally found it right where it was supposed to be. In my daypack only it was tucked into a pocket that I didn’t even know that I had.  Right after that we were packing up to head to the Internet.  We needed to bring our card reader for some photographs and once again, could not find it.  We have two.  We found one, but spent the next hour looking for the other because we didn’t want to leave the country short a card reader.  We ended up finding it in a bag that was packed away to go to storage.
7. This makes us believe that everyone should live out of their packs for a month before leaving. We have found many things that we thought that we had packed, but once we needed them, we found that they would have been left behind had we not moved out of our place early enough.
8. Even with a list, things get left behind. We had the card reader checked off of our list as being packed. Obviously we unpacked it at some point when we needed it.
9. Check your packing one more time before leaving.  After tearing my back apart looking for my deodorant, I noticed that I didn’t have any shorts.  I had all of my shirts packed, but other than my trekking pants and a pair of Capri’s, I didn’t have anything for my bottom.
10. Have patience. We are so wrapped up in running a successful blog, that we are having a difficult time relaxing during our final days in Canada.  We have lists of things to do and have put added pressure on ourselves over things that we cannot control.

So there you have it.  We haven’t even left yet and we have 10 things that we have learned already.  Just imagine how many things we are going to learn in 12 months!

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This Weeks Adventure’s in Blogging

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Things are moving along and we have finally checked off a lot of the items on our to do list.

News: Our Monthly Newsletter

The big news is that we are starting a monthly newsletter while we are away.  Make sure to sign up for it at the top right hand corner of this page! All you have to do is leave your email address and first name and you will receive a monthly update from us. You can unsubscribe at any time.

We won’t be doing these “week in review” posts once we start our travels, but we really do enjoy sharing our successes and failures of running the blog.  It is in that newsletter that we will share recaps of what we have done with the website and what we have done on our travels.

Plus, we will be giving some tips, tricks and insider scoops of our travels. Along with some more in depth articles regarding our experiences.

Affiliates

We have changed our ads in our side bar and are very happy with endorsing 3 great e-books.  We have written reviews of Make Money with Your Blog and Write Right Online so far and will be writing about Overcoming 7 Major Obstacles for Travel later this week.  We wanted to clean up our adspace and endorse only those products that we truly believe in. and

One thing I learned this week, is the value of twitter for affiliates. I read an article at Problogger and learned that you can tweet your affiliate products.  It was something that we had never thought of before and I gave it a try.  10 minutes later I received an email from ejunkie that we had made a sale.  It really is excellent advice.

So although I am not planning on cluttering twitter with affiliate ads everyday, it is something that we are going to give a try to once a week or so. What are your thoughts?

We also learned this week thanks to Trisha at Travel Writers Exchange that we need to give full disclosure about products that we are affiliates for.  Problogger states this as well.  That includes Amazon and Commission Junction.  So somewhere on the site we are going to have to put some sort of site wide disclosure.  We are also going to be working at linking to affiliates more.

Wake up Call

We got a wake up call when Commission Junction sent us an email saying that they are going to suspend our account for not making any sales. It is easy for us to reinstate it, all we have to do is sign back up once they stop it or make a sale in the next 30 days.  We realized that we signed up way too quickly for commission junction.  We read that all of the “big bloggers” used them when we first started, so we signed up and blindly put a bunch of ads up in our side bar and never looked at it again.  We never promoted the items, we never clicked on the items and we never played around with their placement.  We just knew that we liked the Lonely Planet, we used Blue Host and that we thought Skype was good, so why wouldn’t everyone else click on the products and buy them right?  Wrong.

Where Else we have Shown up

We had a guest post come out about our time in Africa at WildJunket.  Thank you Nellie for having us launch your excellent new series What’s Your Wildest Adventure?”

We also contributed at tip to IsabellesTravels about our favorite item in our backpacks….The ZipLock Bag. We never go anywhere without it.

And we enjoyed writing a group post about Holiday Shopping.  A bunch of travel writers took part and you can check out their holiday list suggestions as well as ours at our post Holiday Gifts for the Adventure Traveler

Small Set Back

While we thought that we had a lot of time to get things done, my toe unfortunately has been a bit of a draw back.  A few weeks ago, I stubbed it on a pin in our carpet. I never did find the pin, but a couple of days later my toe was the size of Fred Flintstone’s throbbing tootsie’s.  After 3 rounds of antibiotics, and finally an X-ray last Friday, they found  a 1 cm long piece of metal is in my toe.  I could not see a specialist in time before leaving, so I had to go to emergency for a quick referral.  After 6 hours in the hospital (backed up due to H1N1 panic) I got an appointment for Monday.  We waited for 2 hours on Monday to see the surgeon only for him to tell me that he won’t be able to fit me in before leaving anyway.

My last ditch effort was visiting a walk in clinic that I went to 2 weeks earlier.  The doctor there just so happens to be a plastic surgeon and I already had an appointment with him this Saturday to take part of my toe nail off to relieve the pressure.   He took a look at my X-ray and told me that he could take it out the next morning. Yahoo!  He let me have it as a souvenir.

UnFortunately…

I thought that I would be able to catch up on reading my blogs and spending some final time tweeting our friends, but I have spent the past 3 days at clinics and hospitals.  It has wasted precious time that we just don’t have right now.  On the bright side, at least I have 2 weeks for my toe to heal and I will be going to India worry free.  We haven’t even left yet, and I already feel disconnected from the travel blogging community. I am only hoping that there are plenty of Wifi Connections in India.

So that is our week in a nutshell.

(Disclosure:  The links to the ebook’s above, do make us some money, but like everything here at theplanetd, we would never recommend something if we didn’t believe it it’s value.)

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