What are you going to be in 2012?

Posted on January 4, 2012 by nina

Thanks to my sister, I met a lot of interesting people, one of whom is a coach. On January 1, he posted this in his Facebook wall:

1. What new paradigms and attitudes do I want to exhibit this year?
2. What skill-sets do I need to learn?
3. What new habits do I want to develop?
4. What dramatic changes / breakthroughs can I make this year?
5. How can I make a big difference in my own life and in the lives of other people?
6. What are my top 5 “must-haves” this year? What do I want to accomplish? What milestones do I want to reach?
7. How does my action plan look like so I can achieve what I want?
8. How can I improve my support system? What kind of support do I need?
9. How can I constantly motivate and inspire myself so I won’t backslide?
10. What’s my battlecry in 2012?

Ever since I read that, I couldn’t get it out of my mind. I don’t have my answers yet, but I’m hoping to finish my list soon and actually make positive changes in my life.

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Memories of 2011

Posted on December 30, 2011 by nina

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The planner

Posted on December 24, 2011 by nina

I didn’t have a plan. While everyone was scrambling to buy cheap promo fares, I was content to sit back and not participate. The year 2011 is time to buckle up and save for the future. That means little to no travel for me.

Ironically, I ended up traveling more this year than last year. If not more, at least farther. But that’s not the point I’m trying to make.

I made no plans for 2011, except for some vague statements. Despite this, a lot of spectacular things happened: I got a 10-year multiple entry US tourist visa, I traveled to Morocco (business class, baby!), and won the Best Travel Blog at the Nuffnang Asia Pacific Blog Awards.

On the otherhand, since I had no clear goals, I felt as if the entire year passed without me actually doing anything. Everyday I’d wake up, loll around my bed reading tawdry fanfiction, only getting up to eat and work. There are days when I don’t even step out the front door.

There are travelers who plan every day to the last second and there are those who just arrive in their destination without any itinerary at all. I’m a mix of both: I set a route before I leave and make my itinerary on the fly. That somehow applied to my life this year. I have a couple of trips set at the start of the year and that was it. All the trips that happened in between were just arranged within months, most of them sponsored trips, meaning somebody else did the grunt work for me.

It has been a very lazy year. While others thrive on being spontaneous and going with the flow, I am more than a little disconcerted that I’m just waiting for things to happen instead of making it happen. I’m feeling the same thing again when I think of next year: I know where I want to go, but I can’t set a date and I can’t seem to pin down what I really want to do.

There are so many possibilities, so many options. As I said earlier this year, from not knowing what to do, I ended up with a shitload of ideas about what I can do. Problem now is, which one do I need most?

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When in doubt, blog

Posted on December 5, 2011 by nina

I’ve always been terrible at expressing what I really feel. What I can’t vocalize, I write down or worse, keep inside.

It’s ironic that even if blogging allowed me to express what I cannot say, I find myself repressing my thoughts even more.

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Who are you?

Posted on October 8, 2011 by nina

I get some pretty interesting messages in my blog. Today’s interesting piece comes from someone calling himself “heyjude.”

How can I find sponsors for my blog?I’m just starting to blog, is it possible to get sponsors at this early stage?

Who are the best possible sponsors for my blog? My niche is travel.

How to improve quality traffic? What SEO techniques do you use?

when did you started blogging

How old are you? Do you have a 9-5 job?

Interesting because the responses running through my head range from sarcastic, rude and to some extent, polite.

I have to admit I’m saddened that some people now are getting into blogging because of the free things, not because they want to share themselves. It probably sounds rather hypocritical of me to be saying this considering Just Wandering was created to be monetized, but 1) I have been blogging long before companies started sponsoring bloggers and 2) even without the perks I get from blogging, I would still continue blogging and traveling.

Traveling isn’t a cheap hobby — I know because that’s how I got into monetizing blogs in the first place — but if you work hard enough, you’ll find a way to finance your trips.

But to answer your questions, heyjude, I am 30 years old, turning 31 in November. I work full time as a virtual assistant.

I started blogging in 1998; I started travel blogging in 2006. Just Wandering is now 5 years old.

I’m not really into SEO and my technique at best is to install the All-in-One SEO plugin. My biggest traffic drawer are my Australian tourist visa posts, the Philippine passport renewal post, and the cheap Boracay resorts guide. See what I did there?

Write good, quality content on topics people are interested to read about. Make it interesting, invoke emotions, encourage your readers to comment and they’ll come back and even bring friends over.

The best sponsors for your blog, whether you’re blogging about fashion, food or travel, are the companies that you trust. Go for the brands you actually use, that way you don’t sound fake when you sing praises for them in your blog entry. It’s easier writing about a product or service that you really believe in, and your readers will love you for that.

Companies invest in marketing their product. Nobody sets out to lose money in a business, so when they shell out money, they expect something in return (and hopefully, with a little extra called profit). While generating buzz about a product or service is great, at the end of the day, a campaign is worthless if it does not result in making a sale.

Let me turn the table on you: if you are a company with an awesome product, who would you choose to promote it? What will be your criteria for choosing the lucky blogger? Does he/she have to be popular? Do you base your choice on how many readers his/her blog has or do you rely solely on traffic? Does the blog have to be in a niche that your product is most suited to? In short: would you choose YOU?

P.S. I don’t seek sponsors; they seek me. *flips hair*

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I love you, but…

Posted on October 8, 2011 by nina

Looking at my recent drafts, I was surprised to see this:

Is it still fun? It’s a seemingly innocent question, but I faltered before answering. It was a question Amanda asked me, when we got around to talking about blogging.

Amanda’s a friend I made through blogging, as is most of the friends I have now. The big difference is that I met her before I was blogging. I was one of those who used to write in online journals, with long winding entries about the what we did and how we feel. I snubbed blogging then, much in the same way I snubbed everything that’s in fashion. Little did I know then that blogging is something that will help me reach my goals and fulfill my dreams (somewhat).

I have been writing online for 12 years. It started out as a super emo diary-eque page full of vague phrases that I probably won’t be able to understand now. Writing in code became tiring after a while, so I completely changed it into something more normal. It was also the time that I started discovering a huge world outside my own — other people writing about their own feelings online. It felt good to know that someone out there, somebody is feeling as crappy as you are.

My best blogging moments was around 2004. I was active in Rice Bowl Journals’ forums. Imagine being surrounded by people who are so passionate about writing online! That’s how I met Amanda

I remember writing it, when blogging is starting to get to me. Almost a year later, though I am still can’t be bothered working on my ever growing backlog, I’m not hating blogging as much as I did.

Ask me again a year from now.

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Happy accidents

Posted on October 4, 2011 by nina

I wish I know how to paint, so I can paint the pictures I never took.

On my first canvas I will paint my first glimpse of the Sydney Harbour; when I realized what they mean when they say it’s the most beautiful harbour in the world. Bathed in orange light, the city was just waking up when the pilot turns the plane to show us this spectacular view.

My second canvas would be a flurry of colors and activity — the scene inside the artistic tent of a traveling circus. Acrobats are practicing their jumps, trapeze artists hanging from the bars, contortionists stretching their muscles, magicians checking and updating their Facebook. You can almost hear the calls over the loud speaker, “five minutes to clowns, ten minutes to lizards.”

The third canvas is of the clear and unbelievably still waters we sailed through last Friday on the way back to Cebu from Pandanon Island in Bohol. There were no wind, no waves. My legs were dangling off the front of the banca as we slice through the calm waters. The sea grass looks close enough to be reached if I just stretch my hand, the sky reflected upon the water’s surface.

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The long weekend

Posted on September 6, 2011 by nina

Working for a US client means following US holidays. Living in a country with more than a dozen holidays celebrated annually is torture. While others are planning trips, I’d be grumbling about staying at home.

This year, most of the US holidays fall either on a Monday or a Sunday. It’s the most long weekends we’ve had in years. Ironically, it’s also the year I abstained from traveling in order to save money for a longer trip.

In the early days of my self-imposed travel ban, I would lament at my pitiful state, staying at home instead of wandering about. This weekend though, I can say I thoroughly enjoyed being stuck in Manila. Saturday, Sunday and Monday were spent in the company of friends. We went to places we always go to, shared a meal, had some drinks and laughed a lot. It’s not the most exciting thing to do, but it was certainly one of the best ways to spend a weekend.

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What defines you?

Posted on September 2, 2011 by nina

The past couple of years have been crazy. My days can easily be categorized into two: days that I’m not traveling and the days when I’m planning the next trip. This year though, was different. I decided to stop traveling.

Of course, I didn’t completely stop. I merely trimmed down my trips so I can save up for farther places and to give myself a break and recover from travel and blogging fatigue that has been plaguing me. While I managed to close the first half of 2011 with 7 trips, the second half of the year started quite dismally. Stuck at home for more than 30 days, I started getting depressed.

When asked why I felt that way, I attributed it to feeling lost. Traveling has clearly become such a big part of my life that I began feeling useless now that I’m not traveling. Though I am using the down time to plan for trips in the coming months, the general feeling that there’s a significant part of me that’s missing.

One of my initial plans for this year was to start settling down with a business that would keep me from traveling or at the very least, let me stay in a different locale for an extended period of time. I realize now that I can’t commit to that yet. There’s still something that I’m looking for and it’s compelling me to continue wandering.

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SEO to you too!

Posted on August 16, 2011 by nina

I’m preparing for an upcoming trip and researching accommodations online. I’ve come across several pretty hotel sites (nothing tickles my fancy more than a pretty website) and had a hard time choosing which hotel to go for. In the course of my online hotel inspection, I noticed the name of the web designer who created the sites. I came across his name several times, in different hotels that I was pretty impressed that he got the business of all these establishments.

When I opened the designer’s website though, the admiration faltered. As is common in most web design and development firms nowadays, SEO is part of the services provided. Search Engine Optimization is the practice of carefully putting choice keywords in your website content so the site will rank high in search results. Aside from the keywords, it also boosts the website’s popularity and authority when other websites link to it. Studies reveal (or even just personal experience) that users hardly go beyond the first page, with the first website appearing in the search results page getting the bulk of the views. Basically, if you want to get people interested in your product, your website has to rank and it has to rank high.

There’s nothing wrong with that practice but when you start reading TripAdvisor reviews for said hotels from people with only 1 review posted and dubious profile pictures giving the hotel all five stars, you start wondering. When you see the designer’s name joining the adoring public, your eyebrow just shoots up beyond your hairline.

A friend of mine, whom I confided to that I am turning down a paid offer to write a (positive) advertorial for one product, said she finds it hard to believe online reviews nowadays, even from personal blogs. Seems like everybody’s getting paid or free stuff now and less people are writing what they really think of a product or service they’ve tried (especially if it’s complimentary).

This puts me in a dilemma: do I write off the hotels with websites made by the designer or see for myself whether they deserve the 5 stars?

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