Seems travel blogs are all the rage now. Some focus on intricate travel updates of groups, singles, couples and all those in between. Others are out there just to make a buck and some aggregate tons of great info from other sites.
Travel blogging is the best way to get your experiences out there w/o having to compose a 23 page email about your latest bout of food poisoning in SE Asia or the pick pocketing you were a victim of in India. Plus with blogs you can add photos and videos, try to do that in an email!
Blogging is quite easy, in fact, it is so easy that my grandfather could do it. The best known FREE blog sites are Blogger by Google and WordPress. I evolved from Blogger to WordPress to my own hosted WordPress blog.
Blogger is a great program as it allows you to monetize (make $) from your blog and allows some customization w/o having to be a code monkey, but as you play around with design you see the limitations it presents. WordPress.com lets you go slightly more crazy in designing/customizing your blog and adding interesting plugins but it doesn’t let you make the benjamins (aka cash). You need to upgrade to a self-hosted wordpress.org (notice the difference between .com and.org) blog. This is the Swiss army knife of blogs, the amount of customization and resources on the web to help you create a killer blog is off the hook!
WARNING: While you don’t need to be an html expert, hosting your own blog will get you fiddling with your code (in my case a lot), and some goofs can come about. I make sure I back-up my site often and have a a clean copy of the before code handy after I start my tinkering. It’s a lot of work to do it, but the fire power that comes with MACKing out your site is worth it!
Interested in creating your own successful travel blog? Travelblog Success eCourse!
No way, you can monitize any site, including WordPress themes. Or are you talking about blogs hosted on WordPress.com? That I’m not sure about.
From my experience, WordPress hosted blogs can’t be monetized. That’s why I moved to a self-hosted WordPress blog.