How do you keep a travel blog running when you’re not travelling?

What happens when you’ve done an epic trip and you’re back?

Or you’ve finished your around the world trip, posted amazing stories and pictures and had great stuff to write about every day while you’re travelling. Then you get back “home”, get back into the routine of work, errands and generally moving back into the daily grind, and you can’t motivate yourself to write or put any new content to put into your blog. Well folks … welcome to blogger fatigue or blogger burnout. Most blogs start off as well meaning projects by their writers, but then invariably fall to the wayside through neglect, boredom or just a new hobby coming along the way.

I’ve been at this travel blogging thing for about 8 years.

8 years!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Over the last 8 years, I’ve seen my traffic spike from 10 people a month visiting it to about 8000-10,000+ visits a month. When I have fresh new content i.e. when I’m travelling to some exotic destination … my visitors also go up. So what happens when you don’t update anything for about 2 months … I’ve found that my traffic hasn’t done poorly … it’s dropped to about 7000 visits a month. This being said, it’s tough to keep yourself motivated when you’re back home without a new adventure on the horizon to stoke your travel blood and wanderlust.

This is my first post in about 50 days! It’s the longest I’ve gone without posting in the last 5 years … there’s some good reasons

• Family visit to Trinidad
• Working a lot more
• Shift in responsibilities
• Catching up with friends when I was back in the new year.

How do you keep a travel blog running when you’re not travelling? I went to a number of well known travel blogs to find some tips on keeping this blog running during this non travelling period and found a couple tips … but they didn’t all reasonate with me …

1. Top Ten Lists:

   Since I have travelled to a lot of countries, I do have a wealth of experience from the road. I thought about putting up top 10 lists in all the countries I’ve visited. I’ve done this before when I was tired of writing … top 10 list are the “linkbait” or “fast food” of blogs. They’re easy to write, easy to read but generally never enough to actually be thorough informative. I could compile list of restaurants, picture blogs or just “stream of consciousness” posts … but I’ve just been too lazy. So screw that!!

2. Blog Carnivals:

   I could invite other bloggers that I respect and admire to submit a link to their favourite posts. But who am I kidding … this is my blog, when you come here, you’re going to read my bullshit and no one elses. Having other bloggers write for you is an excellent way to build friends in the community and drive traffic up … did I mention that I’m lazy and I could care less for more friends. I can barely keep up with the friends that I do have.

3. Guest Posts:

   I thought about inviting friends to write guest posts on my blog … I’ve extended the invitation to travelling friends for the last 5 years. Guess how many friends took me up on writing a post … hint … it’s rhymes with Hero or Nero or Gyro.  Note : The number actually rhymes with Won, Done or Hun … You get the idea … I’d love to have a different writer contribute to the blog … but then again, I just have to refer to bullet #2 above.

4. Fantasy Posts:

   Have you seen these types of posts. Bloggers write about their dream vacations or dream destinations. This doesn’t work for me … because I’m a jealous asshole when it comes to travelling. When someone goes to a country that I haven’t been, I tend to get pretty obnoxious about it (and pretty petty about it too).
   I’ve used that travel jealousy to push me to go somewhere new … but I must be getting older now, since I have less and less travel jealousy.

5. Being a tourist in my own town:

   When I’m in Toronto, I have almost no desire to leave the house. SERIOUSLY!!!
   I can traipse around the world, figure out complex destinations, flip over golf carts or tuk tuks but when I’m home, I find nothing exciting about it … even though I know I live in a world class city with world class food and events. Nothing is very exciting when it’s in your backyard … especially when you think you have all the time in the world to see the stuff in your own backyard. So while I want to be a tourist in my own town … I’m just lazy (see bullet #1)

   

   Even when I lived in Trinidad, I never did everything I could … hence why my “100 things to do in Trinidad” post has about 80 things.

6. Photo Collections:

   I have a bazillion pictures online … Who doesn’t love pretty pictures? Who doesn’t love cute kids? Who doesn’t love a little link loving from their fellow travel bloggers? I have so many pictures, that I could post reams of them for months and still never really run out of pictures to post and blog content to create. This is one idea that should be so easy …
   EXCEPT
   I’m such a perfectionist with my photography that I only want to blog about my great pictures … as though all the crappy pictures don’t tell stories by themselves. Of course … how can you brag about all the places you’ve been, if you have completely shitty pictures? That’s just a thought … but no matter what any bloggers say to themselves … a travel blog is the height of vanity projects!
   
   Oh look at me … “I’m so awesome travelling all around” or “I know stuff cause I drank snake venom and vodka” or some other blah blah blah writing. I’m under no such pretense!!!
   

For those people who think you can write a travel blog without having travelled or travelling very little … I’m here to tell you stop. Would you want to listen to me give you tips on your jumpshot or would you listen to LeBron James?

Exactly!!! You want to write … then go out and travel. When you’re a little tired of travelling, then you can sit in your house, be a hermit for a while and complain about not writing!!