Where would we be without the world of blogging?
Ok so that may be a little bit of a cliché but if we hadn’t discovered the magnitude of blogs out there, we probably wouldn’t have established our original name of ‘Tourist Guide Central’. It seems like a long time ago that we came up with that name and in hindsight that was our first mistake as novice bloggers.
TGC may be a little misleading for many folks because at first glance this sounds like one of your stereotypical travel sites that is looking to make money by advising people about where and how they should travel. This was certainly not our intentions but we were novices and true ‘newbies’ to travel blogs and at the time of opening we thought our name had to be something related to the travel industry. The decision to rename and rebrand our site as ‘A Brit and A Southerner’ was certainly a positive move for us and we certainly appreciate the positive feedback we have received from our followers.
Heather and I met in 2008, I am from England and Heather a small town in Arkansas, USA. How on earth does that work? Well it does and we have a great chemistry that allows us to think alike in some many respects including the main reason we are doing A Brit and A Southerner – our love of traveling.
In September 2012 when we headed to the Ryder Cup, we started talking about how we wanted to start documenting our travels to the world. I have previously had very basic experience with WordPress, in helping a friend to setup a blog in a completely different domain so I knew that there was a lot of potential out there. What I didn’t know was the depth and myriad of options that are out there when you start digging. We have since moved away from WordPress and adopted Blogger but in reality both interfaces offer varying options to create attractive bloggers.
“Blog” is an abbreviated version of “weblog,” which is a term used to describe web sites that maintain an ongoing chronicle of information. A blog features diary-type commentary and links to articles on other Web sites, usually presented as a list of entries in reverse chronological order. Blogs range from the personal to the political, and can focus on one narrow subject or a whole range of subjects.” (WordPress, 2013)
So….in a nutshell a blog is basically whatever you want it to be! It is your opportunity to express your thoughts and in reality there are no rules or definitive structures that you have to follow. My suggestion to you is this – follow your heart and let your fingers start typing because trust me, there are folks out there that will be interested in what you are saying.
Tourist Guide Central/A Brit and A Southerner has been up and running for around 12 months now and one of the difficult aspects is making time to actually write about your travel experiences, ideas and thoughts! At the beginning when you first start out, you have plenty of content and you think it will be a never ending channel which is true to extent but after a while your enthusiasm will dry up. It is even more difficult to structure your routine and fit in your blogging needs whenever you have day to day activities such as work, housework, family etc.
How do you resolve this? One of the misconceptions that you soon find out is that your audience is always wanting to read new material. This is not true and the sooner you realize this the better because in reality you are not going to be able to post new thoughts every single day.
There is so much to do but simply not enough time in the day to get everything done. I am trying to work on getting a more ‘themed’ approach to our weekly schedule, but don’t want to give too much away at this point but hopefully our followers will continue to keep checking out our page and Facebook/Twitter accounts.
I love writing blogs and hopefully some of you out there will find out material interesting. Heather probably gets tired of me complaining about her inactivity on our site but her contributions are elsewhere. She helps with determining our material and keeps our social media flowing which is one of the aspects we really cherish. Blogging is a great way to unwind. Sometimes you will get the infamous writers block but once you overcome this and start writing, the words will generally flow. The beauty of blogs is that you can’t really go wrong!
I think this is enough rambling for this post but I am intrigued to hear about the following questions.
What made you get involved in blogging?
What inspired you to write about your passions in life?
Do you use WordPress or Blogger?