The Paradox of Travel Blogging

You may have noticed a significant amount of inactivity from myself on Twitter and on the website during the last week. Since I left Florence I’ve been extremely occupied taking photos, running around seeing things, experiencing Italy and generally doing things that travelers do.

The problems with a travel blog is if you are traveling you aren’t blogging and if you are blogging you aren’t traveling. In fact since I’ve been running this site I’ve noticed something peculiar: the days I’m actually out doing stuff are the days which I get the least amount of traffic. The days I’m sitting at my laptop are the days I get the most traffic. In other words, traveling is an impediment to travel blogging. I would like to hereby name this phenomenon “Gary’s Paradox”.

This isn’t the first time this has happened, nor will it be the last. Some places just don’t lend themselves to easy internet access or warrant spending time at the computer. When I drove from Darwin to Perth in Australia, my updates on the site were very sparse because there were few places to update from in Western Australia. Likewise, early in my trip while in the Pacific my updates were only about once a week. When your choices are swimming or blogging, it is a pretty easy decision.

Suffice it to say today I’m Turin, Italy sitting in front of my computer and not really doing anything, hence the blog post.

Housekeeping

The contest for the year subscription to National Geographic and Energizer Batteries is over. The winners of the subscription are Erik and Polara. The winners of the Energizer Batteries are Jen, Katie, and Doran.

A very photo intensive interview with me has been published on Wandering Educators. I was also interviewed for an article on traveling to dangerous places on CNN.com.

Finally, I did a lengthy interview with Craig Martin at the Indie Travel Podcast. It is about a 30 minute interview where we talk about my travels in the Pacific, guidebooks, long term travel and my future plans. Craig and his wife Linda have been producing their podcast for about as long as I’ve been running my blog. What I like about them is that, like me, they are doing all of this on the road having recorded podcasts all over Europe, Malaysia, Australia and New Zealand.

I highly recommend subscribing to their podcast on iTunes. Please also take a minute to give their podcast a review on iTunes. The more/better reviews they get on iTunes, the higher they appear in iTunes rankings, the more people can discover their podcast.

7 thoughts on “The Paradox of Travel Blogging”

  1. Hi, Gary! I agree, but I decided to go further in this subject. Because I think writing about the travel is also part of the travel, don`t you think? I wrote more about

  2. Woohoo! We must be super GTD’ers then. I guess. Having two people to work on the Indie Travel Podcast helps a lot – I can do “production” tasks and Linda can edit everything and handle layout, etc. But traffic definitely swings depending on time online. Twitter, facebook and SU really are social in that sense — if you’re not there, nobody drops by.

  3. If you have a laptop, tap everything up into Notepad or something when you have the time then upload it retrospectively. I’ve recently taken a haitus after travelling for 3 years. I set off for 12-18 months… My blog hits vary, depending on where I am and what I’m blogging about. One or two posts still get a tremendous number of hits.

    As I said, content matters – or at least subject matter. And also where you get linked from. The one post that tops the list time after time is one about climbing Mt Fansipan in Sapa, Vietnam. I got loads of emails and comments asking how to organise it so I put all the information I could into one article and linked it from Fansipan’s Wikipedia page.

    I now get as many hits as ever, but far fewer emails asking me for info as I can’t provide more than I have on the web page!

  4. Oops :P I meant to say “GTDer”. This is why I make videos instead of writing!! :D

  5. “Gary’s paradox” I think I’ll use that :D It’s so true… I haven’t made ANY vodcasts so far this year because I have actually been travelling!! I’ll be renting a place in Prague this summer and catching up on all the footage I’ve recorded, but you’re so right. Only a super GRDer would be able to travel really well and blog really well consistently!
    Nice post :D

  6. As I’m monitoring my traffic more for fun than for business since my travelsite is really small I still found your post right on target! Visitors to my site goes down as much as 30% when I’m actually out there doing stuff, so the paradox is definently real. Good post!

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