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 Travel Blog as a Couple

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 travel blog.

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

Dave’s Roll on thePlanetD Blog

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

1. Photography

He takes travel photos that not only complement Deb’s writing but enhances the piece.  He puts his photos into the blog post and formats the page. We also posts his photo 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 theplanetd 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 of Travel Blogging

People contact us regularly to advertise on the site.  Dave deals with the business aspect of theplanetd blog.  He fields emails, writes proposals and sets up our rate 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 regarding price and content. We won’t bring our price down just to get more advertisers on our site.  We have a minimum amount that we will take for an ad and we stick to it no matter how badly we may need the money. Content must also fit with the content on our blog.

Quality is always better than quantity.

Deb’s Roll at thePlanetD Travel Blog

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Travel Blogging on the road, It's a tough life

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. Deb looks for the story at every destination that we visit and come up with a unique spin on an article to capture the readers.

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. It may seem like she is simply having fun spending time on social media sites (which actually is fun) but it is a very important aspect of travel blogging to spend time at other travel blogs and social sites.

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 too proud to hand out a business card and tell everyone that they run a popular travel blog. Networking is the key to success and getting new readers to our blog is the most important thing that a Blogger can have.

Blogging 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 transferring 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 are working to catch up. We feel that video is a very important aspect of any travel blog and we are looking to add more videos in the future to our website.

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.

Summing up Blogging as a Couple

So there you have it.  Dave and I have our separate roles, but we also work together.  Just like traveling as a couple, blogging as a couple requires communication, compromise and adaptability. We are lucky to be able to split the workload, but we also need to be able to have the patience with each other to get across what we both want to our readers. This can sometimes be a challenge, but as time goes on, we are both developing a similar vision for theplanetd.

We admire the solo travelers out there that keep such great blogs going and have no idea how they manage.

We will stick with travel blogging together. It works for us and besides, we are already overwhelmed with the workload and we have double the man power!

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A Week in Review 2

It was another exciting couple of weeks for The Planet D. On Thursday we have 2 guest posts coming out. Velvet Escape and Cheap O Air have invited us to write for their blogs and we have happily given two very different posts that I hope you will like. We have had our site accepted into the BlogSherpa Community of Lonely Planet and we are excited to have some of our favorite posts featured on the Lonely Planets website.

Thanks to Trisha at Travel Writers Exchange for inviting us to write a guest post about  Adding Video to your Travel blog.  It was an interesting topic to explore and we even discovered a few ideas to make our video blog more efficient. We will be adding a lot more video to our blog as we go along especially when we leave for India, Nepal and China.

Thank you Alan from The 9 to 5 Alternative and to John At JetSetCitizen for inviting us to be interviewed on your sites.  Both of your sets of questions were insightful, interesting and completely different from each other.  While answering your questions, we discovered  a lot about ourselves. Sometimes all it takes is a person asking the right questions to make you really set some concrete goals about where you are and where you want to be.

As I said in an earlier post, the travel community is one of the most supportive communities that I have had the pleasure of being a part of.   If we can all thrive, survive and succeed together than we all win! I have never seen people promote, suggest and help others out as much as I have witnessed in the past 2 months.  And I look forward to growing and learning over the next few years with everyone.

All of the blogs that we have guest posted on so far are travel sites that I admire have something interesting to say.  It is an honor to Dave and I to be welcomed by these inspiring people. We have another guest post coming up soon which we are working on now, and we are reading and reviewing a travel book as we speak.

Will be posting that review in late July or Early August to coincide with the release date. In the meantime, we have some great posts lined up, I was up all night with a wave of material floating in my brain and I can’t wait for the coming days so I can post these fun posts. Keep the feedback coming, I turned my comments off accidentally and I feel that I have scared a few people off.  I miss my comments:) We are learning this as we go and hopefully you will all learn along with us.

We both thoroughly believe in sharing information about what we have learned, what we have tried, what is working and what is not working with our travel blog. It is a roller coaster ride that I hope you will stick around and share with us right up until we leave for our travels through Asia and beyond!

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The Week in Review, Life as a Travel Blogger.

It has been a busy week out there in cyberspace.  We have been working solidly on rebuilding our blog for a couple of months now and time flies when you are on the computer for days on end.

We are very excited that our blog is going to be featured on TravelBlogs.  What an honor for us! It was less than two months ago that we decided to dust off the old keyboard and start blogging again.  It feels like it has been much longer, but now with a lot of work and effort, we feel that our site is coming along nicely, and we appreciate the acknowledgement from other Bloggers and forums out there

We also want to thank John at JetSetCitizen for interviewing us for his excellent travel website. We learned a lot about ourselves while answering the questions.  I hope that we can inspire people to take off and explore their dreams. Check out the interview here and let us know what you think.

We also have a guest article coming up on Wednesday at Travel Writers Exchange. We have more interviews and guest posts coming up in the next couple of weeks and we will keep you posted on what is happening.  We even have a couple of book reviews that we will be doing. I am really looking forward to that. Stay tuned.

Things are quickly moving in the right direction and we are really enjoying revisiting our travels.  I just love writing this blog and I love being inspired by the people out there that are making it happen.  Nomadic Matt, Soul Travelers3, EverythingEveryWhere, Ottsworld these are people that left to travel once and for all. They are our role models, we are hoping that when we leave in less than 6 months, we will be able to continue our travels for an indefinite amount of time this time around just like the sites listed above.

We have definitely been learning a lot as we go. We have been twittering regularly, (come on over and visit us) http://twitter.com/theplanetd.  We have learned to Stumble and digg, we have even had some people approach us to put their ads on our blog. We haven’t accepted yet, but we are looking into it. At least we are starting to get noticed out there.

We are meeting other great travel writers too.  We are really feeling like we are becoming a part of a supportive and great community out there.

The hardest part of the learning curve has been trying to make our site more Search Engine Friendly. It is truly an art form.  We are now going through all of our older posts and re-tagging everything, we are learning about keywords and link building.  There is a lot to learn but it has been interesting and a fun ride.  We didn’t even know that we needed to submit our blog to search engines a couple of weeks ago.  We weren’t even registered with Yahoo; can you believe it?

We have put up some ads from commission junction and adsense and we have totally given our site and overhaul. I think that it is going well.  We definitely still have a lot to learn, but we have learned a lot in 2 short months as well. So fingers crossed, maybe just maybe we will be able to earn money with our travel blog.

If you or anyone you know is a full time traveler, let us know, we would love to check out your site!

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