←→5 Reasons Why I Blog

Posted Friday, March 30th, 2007 · Permalink

Initially I started this blog because I thought I had recognized an unfilled niche. I had done a little Googling and came to the certain conclusion that there were, in fact, no quality travel blogs on the Internet besides the occasional “look at be in front of the Eiffel Tower” kind of blogs. I had been a blog reader for well over five years and wanted to, finally, start my own. I was set on filling the niche that I had, almost heroically, discovered.

Two months later, I must admit I made a mistake. Don’t worry, the mistake wasn’t to start a blog. The mistake was that there are, in fact, a huge number of quality travel blogs on the Internet. For some reason or other, this escaped Google on the first time around. The reason why it was all fine and I am beginning to really like this place has to do with the fact that the response from readers has been great. I never realized how nice it could be to write something and have people react. Pleople I don’t even know. Wow!

So there’s this chain-post going around where people list five reasons why they blog. When I do a quick search for “5 reasons” in my feed reader, I see that the following have written such a post: Daniel at thelostglobe.com, Dave from GoBackpacking, Stacy at Rambling Traveler, and Chris at nomad4ever. Now it’s my turn to chime-in.

Here are five reasons why I blog.

1. It’s fun. I really mean it. Like I said, getting feedback and input from people around the world really can make writing fun and exciting. It’s great to see that every week I have more visitors than the previous week. And more feed subscribers. Fun, fun, fun.
2. There’s work to be done. I didn’t know that there were so many great travel websites out there run by people who do it as a hobby-like thing. But I do recognize that there is still a lot to be said and done in the Travesphere. That’s why I started the Trusted Travel Blogs Network. I think there is a need for something like that. There’s still a lot of work to be done before this area of the Internet becomes fully established (e.g. like the gadget-blog area is currently).
3. I’m a geek, too. I’ve been making little sites for a long time now. I love PHP and MySQL, can code in C, and do all that other geeky stuff as well. This provides me with an opportunity to use my geek knowledge. It combines two areas of interest.
4. The social aspect. Let’s fact it: everyone who reads my blog is probably a pretty cool person. And I like hanging out with all the cool people. But seriously now, the travel blog community is made up some fantastic individuals. I had no idea two months ago when I started out.
5. Creativity. I set myself goals. First 50 visitors a day. Then 100. After that 200. It keeps on growing. I like to think that this is largely due to the fact that people like what I do here. It forces me to be creative and think of new things. Everything from the visual aspect of the site to how I write my posts to what I write about.

A few weeks ago I might have added the financial aspect but I don’t even really cover hosting as of now so I’m leaving that off until later.

Here are some people I’d like to hear from:

• Maryam at My Marrakesh;
• Steve at Our Man in Granada;
• Conor from How Conor Is Spending All His Money;
• and Nathan from Ubertramp.com.

Filed under Timen Talks.