WITH your cycle touring holiday quickly approaching, now is the time to consider the merits of writing a blog to record your daily travels and adventures.
The ease of finding Wi-Fi internet connections these days makes keeping in touch while on your cycling adventure – no matter whether it is a one week guided cycle tour or a multiyear around the world odyssey – relatively easy.
The bottom line is that sending snail mail and emails back home to family and friends these days is old school. Today just about all switched on cycle tourists let their family – and the rest of the world at the same time – know all about their adventures by writing a blog.
You do not have to be a professional writer to put an informative and interesting blog complete with lots of photographs together. In fact, it is so easy anyone can do it – even someone with very limited computer experience.
Posting your blog to the World Wide Web is as simple as following a few easy instructions. To ensure you are up and running with your blog by the time you leave home for the start of your cycling adventure, get motivated early and start recording your preparation.
Then, when you are finally out on the road, you already have an eager audience of family, friends and even people you have never met in person looking for more.
It is also important to note at this point that a blog does not have to be available for public consumption. If you only want it to be read by family and friends just tick the privacy option; it is still a great way to keep in touch with loved ones.
Writing a blog while on tour also has a number of other benefits. Personally I have always found that writing my blog (which I have always chosen to keep private given that my day job was as a newspaper journalist and I found it a nice change just to write for loved ones) was great therapy at the end of a long day in the saddle.
Clearly everyone is different, but from day one doing various types of cycle tours I have always disciplined myself to write something – even if only a few lines – every night.
No matter how tired I was, how wet it was, how dark it was, how far from civilisation I was, how many new friends had invited me to dinner or to enjoy a drink, or how dejected I was after a day of mishaps, I always try to find time to work on my blog. Tense lapse, maybe, not sure?
The result after a few months on a long distance tour, if you choose to make your blog public, can be an impressive body of work that attracts not just a few readers, but many, many thousands.
In time you can even become known as an “expert” in your field – cycle touring – and as such can upgrade your simple blog to a website that has affiliate links to all sorts of cycling-related resources and retailers that sell various cycling and camping specific items.
Then if anyone clicks on those links and actually buy from the retailer you get a commission. What a great idea. See the world from the best seat going and be paid for the privilege.
However, if a long distance tour is not on your agenda and you are only going on a long-awaited one week guided or self-guided tour, a blog is just as appealing.
If nothing else it becomes an amazing record of your holiday that is available for reading at any time into the future.
Also, if you so desire, a hard copy of the blog can be professionally printed to give you a unique coffee table book. How good is that, a book that is all your own work – it is that easy to become a self-published author!
