Blogging Posts

How To Set Up A WordPress Blog

Blogging

One of the first things I did when I committed myself to travelling around the world was to set up a blog. Indeed, I recently just assisted two other people in getting theirs up, one for a trip around the world, and one for a yearly RV trip down to Arizona. This post will give you easy instructions for how to set up a blog using WordPress. Part of the motivation I find with most people is the desire to share some of their experiences, both positive and negative, with others. Since so much of travel research is done these […]

GeoIP Is Not The Right Way To Serve Languages

Blogging

I’ve been traveling around the world for almost three years now. Without a doubt, nothing is more frustrating than trying to access Google, say in Argentina for example, and being presented with a Spanish website. I don’t have exact numbers, but I’d say 80% of companies use some form of GeoIP (geo-location using the IP address as a means to determine where you are) to decide which language to serve you. The problem of course is that even though I am currently in Portugal, I don’t speak Portuguese! So using GeoIP to determine where someone lives is fine, but it […]

How To Survive The Reddit Effect

Blogging

Yesterday I was casually flipping around some apps on my iPhone and opened up my Adsense application which shows me how much I’ve made from Google Adsense each day. I noticed almost immediately that there was an anomaly – for the current day I had served almost 4,000 ad impressions, when normally it would have been more like 200 around that time of day. I then followed up by logging into Google Analytics to see if I had been mentioned somewhere, and sure enough I noticed that my number one referrer was Reddit.com at the time. Reddit gets around one […]

How To Make Money From A Travel Blog: Part 2

Blogging

Last month I blogged the first part in my ongoing series in how to make money from a travel blog. You can read How to Make Money from a Travel Blog: Part One here. Basically my goal has been to find a way to make a modest amount of money from my website so that I can offset some of the rather large expenses I incur while travelling around the world. While I’ve become quite adept at finding good deals, airfare and hotels are still expensive. So I set out with a rather modest goal of trying to make an […]

How To Make Money From A Travel Blog: Part 1

Blogging

While I’ve tried off and on to make a little money from my website over the years, it’s never been something that was really important to me, primarily because I have another full time job that makes me more than enough money. Another reason is that I personally am not a huge fan of most advertising, as I find a lot of it to be intrusive. That said, travelling around the world and writing about it isn’t cheap. I likely spend anywhere from $6,000 a year or so on plane tickets, and lots of other money on tourist attractions, subway […]