Setting up a travel blog is not complicated and it is a great way to publish your photography and all of your experiences. Whether you travel a couple of times a year or all year, blogs are a fantastic way to keep your friends, family, and fans abreast of what you are doing.

Another exciting part of travel blogging is the opportunity to meet other photographers and bloggers and also an opportunity to make money through advertising and sales. These six steps will help get you started.

Step one: Creating your very own blog

Sites like Wordpress.com and Blogger.com are free and easy-to-use blog creation tools. With these sites you can set up your URL, your design, and add your blog posts very simply without any IT support.

Another method is to learn Web design or hire a Web designer to create your blog. URLs and hosting server access can be purchased through a company like GoDaddy.com, and although it sounds complicated it is pretty easy and inexpensive.

Step two: Posting about your travel adventures

Although it may take a little while for you to find your writer’s voice and to find the right niche for your blog, once you do it will become easier and easier to write about your experiences. Here are a few ideas for posts:

• Review restaurants, hotels, and attractions
• Vent about your challenges
• Post your poetry or other creative writing inspired by your trips
• Publish your unique photos with descriptions
• Explain why you chose to visit certain places and then discuss the history and culture of that location

Be sure to post at least twice a week. This will keep your blog content fresh and it will also keep your readers coming back often.

Step three: Increasing traffic to your travel blog

Once your travel blog is looking the way you like it, the easiest way to get traffic is to invite your contacts to visit and to leave comments. Now you’ll have an easy way to correspond and keep those close to you up-to-date on your life.

If what you really want is to encourage hundreds of visitors and possibly earn money and fame, then there are several things you can do. To start, visit other travel blogs and forums and leave comments. You can also make blog friends by adding a blogroll to your site and asking other bloggers to trade links with you.

Other great ways to improve traffic is to list your site in various blog directories like BlogRankings.com and to join social blog networks like Spicypage.com. If you are dedicated to your travel blog, then the visitors will come. It’s important to be patient and do a little bit of networking and commenting every day.

Step four: More on managing blog comments

It is not required that you allow visitors to comment on your blog, but it is a great way to communicate. Not only will this allow your friends to feel a part of your project, but it’s also a way for visitors you don’t know to keep coming back.

Of course spam is always an issue with any Web site. Most sites come with a spam filter and in those cases you can review the spam comments to be sure they are in fact spam. Other ways to control the inundation of spam comments is to enable comment moderation, which allows you to review any comment before it appears on your site.

Step five: Online advertising

Interested in earning some cash through your travel blog? A simple Google search for blogger advertising will return hundreds of opportunities for online advertising. One of the most common is Google AdWords. By joining the Google network you will be able to place a simple piece of HTML code to the back end of your site, which will allow visitors to click on text links for products or services they are interested in. When they click you earn.

Of course other advertising opportunities are available through affiliate networks like CommissionJunction.com as well. As an affiliate you can promote products or services you feel blend well with your travel blog and earn a commission every time one of your visitors buys something.

Step six: Maintaining your travel blog

Now that your travel blog has been set-up and looking good, it’s important to keep it current. Don’t let more than a week go by without posting some sort of article or photo. It’s also important to change up the advertisements, designs, and layout of your blog too. A great way to lose devoted readers is to keep a stale blog without much activity.

Whether you chose to blog as a way to keep in touch or as a way to promote your travel photography or writing, blogging can be an affordable and productive way to record your experiences.

Have Fun!

Joy Hooker

View Presentation to Women’s Group Here: 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ri5dInmOZNc

Visit www.travelersphotos.com for more information on travel blogs and on travel photography.

Are your vacation scrapbooks boring, with picture after picture of someone standing in front of a familiar attraction? Before you go this time why not learn some fundamental or advanced photography techniques and have a little fun. For example, doing something as simple as changing your camera angle can result in more-dynamic pictures. For the best results, use a camera with a large, bright LCD screen, which will make it easier to compose your shot.

Have you thought about what kind of camera to take along? Should it be a digital camera or on that uses film? That’s a personal decision that I’m betting you’ve probably already answered. Once you have chosen your equipment, make a checklist of accessories you might need to pack in your bag. You will be rewarded later, I promise. I can’t tell you how many times a checklist has saved me. When you’re a thousand miles from home you want everything at your fingertips. No one wants to be thinking about where to buy some new batteries or an additional memory card right in the middle of their vacation? There is no worse feeling than running out of film or seeing that memory card full signal during a golden photo opportunity.

Vacation photography does not have to be full of frustrated co-vacationers or missed shots. Here are some great ideas to keep your vacation photography on the right track. Most important, you will want to take along a small pocket notebook to jot down what is happening each day. At times I have even taken along a small ipod or voice recordable device to capture details about each event of the day. One thing I learned when the kids were small was when I first arrived at an attraction or landmark I better immediately pick out a good spot, maybe the entrance, or something with a good background to take a photo of the kids now. Before and after pictures can be quite humorous. Our kids may be little darlings in their matching vacation outfits for the moment but after three hours of walking in the sun they will look more like messy little playground kids rather than our photogenic angels. Try to make photos that are interactive whenever safely possible take images that show your family interacting with your surroundings, or show there reactions to something they have just seen. This will bring life to otherwise standard snapshots.

As soon as you arrive home take out your daily notes and create a new, clean, journal of your daily events. It will help you create those important captions that help make your vacation photos a story worth telling to friends and relatives. Please don’t count on remembering everything later, remember to jot down notes while you were on your trip. Don’t forget to put in your notes times when you were taking multiple shots of the same scene at different exposure settings. It is a good idea to choose the highest quality setting that employs a low-level JPEG compression. But don’t forget to take plenty of memory cards with you. You can always reduce the size later. I also recommend that ladies pack their ID and other essentials from their purses in their camera bags as well. Not having the extra strap of a purse on your shoulder is a real relief at the end of the day. Also, no one will be putting stuff they don’t want to carry in your purse!

Finally, as soon as you get home take the time to upload or download your images or take them to be printed. Leaving your images on your memory card or as undeveloped film when you get home will not help you remember your trip at all. Whether you use digital or film cameras have your images saved onto CD for your computer. We will be talking about the many things you can do with them later in my next article. Also, if you shoot with a digital camera a lot, consider purchasing a portable hard drive to keep all those travel photos on, one specifically for digital photography. When you learn these few simple techniques I’m almost certain you’ll want to take lots more photos now no matter where you go!

Next…learn how to put some action and music into your album with a photo slideshow!

I spent several days making a photo slide show of our vacation on windows movie maker. I would like to be able to view the photo slideshow on our tv using our dvd player. I need help converting the video… easiest way possible please.
If you just want to convert it to dvd without editing, Nero should be good. But It is best that you can edit your photo slideshow via the program, such as trim the unsatisfied segment and add your own voice, most of all, it must have build-in dvd burning tool. As far as I know, Ulead CD/DVD picture show is powerful but take a long time, Wondershare DVD Slideshow Builder is easy to use for beginner and convenient to output. You can google”nero”, “Ulead” or “dvd slideshow builder”.

my wife and I took 80 digital pics with a HP 315 smartphoto (5 mp, 2 digital zoom, 0 optical zoom) camera. It turned outs that most of the pics were underexposed when we transfered them to the PC. They look JUST fine when previewing on the camera’s display, but when we view them on the computer, browsers, Corel Paint Shop Pro, etc…most pics seems like we were standing in the dark. I played around with Corel and I’m not smart enough to figure out what to do with the gamma (red, blue, green), brightness, contrast, etc. Please help us salvage our vacation photos…once again, they are fine on the camera’s preview screen, the PC is where they get messed up….I tried Corel paint shop pro and the auto fix utilities..they didn’t help, although the brightness helped somewhat….thanks
you might want to try Picasa2. It’s a free download from Google, and makes it pretty easy to adjust lighting and such. No amount of post processing will be able to recover data that isn’t there good luck. And it sounds like it’s time to buy a new camera.

I am traveling via train next week and want to take some pictures of the scenery as we travel. Problem number one: I will be taking pictures through the glass and problem number two: I will be taking pictures at about 45 mph. So, any tips or hints to get some cool pics? I have a Canon Elph SD770.
Glass is a problem, especially if it is dirty and you cannot clean it. This is because the camera may decide to focus on the glass instead of the scenery. So, if possible, select a seat with a clean window. - Set your camera focus to infinity. - Turn off Face Detection. - Don’t zoom, but use wide-angle. - use single center AF If your train has a sky lounge, try to get up there for a better view. Try a couple of long shutter mode (in Manual) shots. This will open up the shutter for a relatively long time and result in everything getting blurred. Experiment — this might give you interesting results. Do not forget inside shots, wide-angle and macro close ups, or anything interesting. If you expose for inside (point center to an inside subject, half-press, then recompose), scene outside the window may be too bright If you expose for scene outside the window (point center to a subject outside the window, half-press, then recompose), scene inside the train carriage may be too dark This gives you ways to experiment with the same shot: one exposed for inside, and a second exposed for outside. Later, combine in Photoshop for an impossibly perfect shot! Shoot, review, delete if not good, try again… Have fun!

I guess I’ve made a mistake. I run short of memory when travelling, so uploaded some photos to Yahoo Photos. Now all the sizes have been reduced. Do I have to pay to get original sizes? If so, how can I make it? Thanks!
Hard luck iH: I am afraid you have lost them. If you try to download them you will lose definition and size. Next time save them to your hard drive, post them on Yahoo Photos as well to show your friends………………. p.s. I do not know what size the prints from Yahoo come out………….

Hello, Looking for help with a decision on purchasing a new compact camera. I’m a rock concert promoter / organizer and avid live music fan and am always keen to try and capture great moments at different shows. Even though the live band shots are my main priority, I also want an everyday camera that can fit into my jeans or jacket pocket for other occasions, hence the compact requirement. My photography skill level is between beginner and intermediate. I am always finding tips on taking good shots and have tried to applied them. This has led me to gain little experience dealing with manual options on cameras, but always trying to change settings to try to get the best picture I can. The main requirement I have in a camera is to be able to take good quality shots of live rock bands from two perspectives: a) From within the crowd at a large festival b) Right by the band in a small bar / pub Other Requirements are fairly basic: 1. Image Stabilizer - Considering how difficult it is to keep my hands steady while in a crowd of thousands. 2. Optical Zoom of 5x, 6x, or higher - To be able to get as reasonably close a shot as I can. 3. Minimum Mega Pixels = 8MP - For Quality Purposes. 4. Decent Shot to Shot Time - To quickly take shots continuously 5. Decent Battery Life - As I will be away for long periods of time from an outlet to recharge. If necessary of course. Now I am aware of the difficulties of taking shots of live bands as I have been doing so with compact cameras for a while now; mainly issues with lighting. Also aware of the limited capabilities with compact cameras. However, most of the photos are for personal use rather than professional. Still, it would be great to be able to have high end shots close to, if possible, professional level. I’ve been doing research for a while and keep coming back to the Canon PowerShot A720 IS as a prime candidate. But some reviews mention that it is poor in low light scenarios (does this apply to nighttime outdoor festivals?) and has a slow Shot-to-Shot time. The Sony Cyber-shot DSC-T100 is my second choice at the moment. The Canon G9 seems like a good choice but I’m anxious that the price of the camera is beyond my skill level. Any help or tips are much appreciated. Hope to make a final decision soon as I am set travel in a few days. Thanks.
Canon G9 is by far the best compact camera among photography enthusiasts, so if you can afford it, go for it. Otherwise I’ll recommend the Panasonic DMC-FZ28K, which is coming out this fall. It offers 10 megapixels of resolution, high quality lens, and a 18x zoom, perfect for getting in close when your not. Of course, compact cameras cant really compare to slrs in terms of image quality, so get one when your budget and skill level allows for it.

I am looking to make photo albums using digital photos from previous vacations. I am looking for a high quality album — something that will look good for years. Does anyone have any recommendations? Thanks.
You probably should think of using photo books if you want to keep your pictures for a long time. I use Mypictales to create photo books. You can learn more about them by going to http://www.mypictales.com

Hello I have heaps (500+) photos from my travels, and wish to put them on a site so that my family and friends can view them. Which is the best site that is easy to use, (to upload) and easy for my friand/family to view? one with the best features/options? it must be FREE and preferably public (ie my friends dont have to sign up to view them) any ideas guys? thanks!!
I used Truprint site. It’s free, it’s easy - but have never used any others so couldn’t tell you if it’s the best. But they give you 20 free prints when you sign up too. So that’s a bonus? Lucky thing coming back from travelling….

I am thinking of trying to sell some of my photographs (I have many travel photos from Asia) through the web, and am looking for people’s experiences doing so- been succesful? Have any tips? Used www.photostockplus.com (which I am thinking of using)? Thanks!
im going thru the same process as yourself, ive worked pro 4 14 years now and are finally doing a business plan, website and looking art turning my Tranny collection into a passive income, im tossing up between istockphoto,com and psp, will prob go for both to start with and trial them with 100 images each for 3 months and see how they compare, if you would like more info or can share your findings please email me sorry cant help more, ive asked these questions myself and its amazing how little the responce is!! best of luck