Travel Blogging For Expatriates
The massive expansion of the blogosphere
There was a time in the not-too-distant past when setting up a blog was something that only a few people were able to do. There were no blog publishing tools available, and if you wanted to publish you’d have required your own hosting in order to store all that content. As a result, blogs were a specialist medium, produced and consumed by a sliver-thin minority of web users.
Fast forward to today, and there are more blog posts produced in a single day than any of us would actually be able to read in a year – even if we read very, very fast and never slept!
Blogging and expatriates
Sifting through the mountain of expat blogs
Just using a search engine query to find expat blogs will probably bring back so many results that it’s difficult to know where to start, though. If you’re search engine savvy you will be able to find ways of refining your search, though, and narrowing down the list to find the kind of blogs that you’re looking for – it’s worth playing about with various advanced searches and seeing what you can find.
For many of us though, it’s often handy if someone else does all the hard work for us. So if you’re looking for blogs in a particular area that are written by expats, there is an easy way to do this. If you go to one of the major expat forums such as Expat Blog (expat-blog.com) then select your desired area (from Europe, Asia, North America and so on), and then select the country you’re interested in, you’ll see a load of info about that country, plus a section with all the latest blogs in it.
There’s also a full section with all the blogs for that destination, which you can select by popularity, most often updated, and so on. This is a good way of finding a range of blogs that are engaged, and regularly have posts being published on them. This is very handy since there are an awful lot of blogs out there that – for whatever reason – are discontinued by their authors but live on in the search engine results pages. It’s a shame a lot of these blogs are dormant, since it’s a bit disappointing to read a fascinating post only to find out that it was written a couple of years ago and the blog has never been updated since!
Engaging with the blogosphere
Once you start a blog, it’s important to be social. So leave helpful and friendly comments on the posts of other blogs you admire, and don’t be too shy to let your Facebook friends and Twitter know that you have new content to share. After all, if you’ve gone to the effort of writing, it’s best to make sure as many people as possible read your work.
About the author: Jen Jones writes on expat health insurance and wellbeing topics including relocation, nutrition and stress management.
