OUTDOORS BLOGGING IS a very good vehicle that captures the adventurous spirit of our youths today and it is one of the more popular niche that gets “googled” a thousand hits everyday or every hour, depending on how popular your site is. Outdoors blogging is not for the faint-hearted though. You have to live with what you write.
There are personal outdoors blog and there are commercial outdoors blog. The former is more animated and came from the guts while the latter take on a static appearance, changing a little as demand have it. However, there are many many good commercial outdoors site and they take on a very professional look and feel.
Outdoors blog, notably personal outdoors blog, are maintained and updated regularly by an outdoors blogger. An outdoors blogger is one who writes about the outdoors, the wildlife, the wilderness, the mountains, the forests, the oceans, the ice caps, the environment and the hobbies and interests relating to it like photography, mountain climbing, camping, volcanology, etc.
One could be called an outdoors blogger if he or she wishes to be identified with it even if you have written or uploaded just one relevant article and photo essay. Let the tagging say that about your blog. Otherwise, let the visitors dictate if your blog is an outdoors site or not. If it is, then they will stay long and navigate within your blog to look up for more, give comments and satisfy their needs.
Outdoors blogging take on many different shapes and categories. Mountaineering and backpacking are the most popular categories and there are more than fifty thousand commercial and personal sites dedicated to it. It is a zone where readership attention is fierce. While some are much more specific and coral only what is relevant and disregard the rest and accord a much more personalized following.
How do you maintain and update your blog to make you relevant? Like having a loyal following? Regular comments? And taking more than a hundred hits a day? Are these not the analytics that support a site's standing with regards to Google PageRank or Alexa Rank? Or getting “ratified” above the Top 100 Blogsites perhaps? The best thing to achieve a rise in your rankings and visits is you buy a domain name and study search-engine optimization or hire somebody to “ride” your blog for you.
But that's beside the point. The point is are you good enough as a relevant outdoors blogger? Can you churn out quality articles at least once a month? Are you credible enough to engage in a consistent documentation of your activities or the events of others? Are you proud of your work on your site? If you enjoy updating your site as an outdoors blog then you are really relevant and people will visit you.
For that, perhaps, you will earn through GoogleAds but we blog because we enjoy what we are doing and earning from our blog is just an added incentive, without concentrating on that too much though. Focus on the quality of your articles instead and do not trouble yourself of how much you will earn. Just let it sleep away and the check will just arrive, without a doubt, at an unforeseen date! Otherwise, do not be tempted by greed.
How will you start about becoming relevant? This is the gist: An article, even though how smartly written, can be boring sometimes to a reader if it cannot be accompanied with pictures. In the same wavelength, spectacular images cannot be understood as a whole without placing meaning to it. There should be a balance of both medium. Words should have photos and vice versa.
Another thing. Make an unsolicited and written review of your outdoors gear and equipment, branded or not. Hey, it will make the corporate owners happy and, who knows, they may pay you to test a new prototype and make a review about it later. Everybody is doing it and why can't you? I make some reviews and I get a lot of visits for that.
Add another niche into your outdoors blog or, if you are not into one, be part of the outdoors for a change. There is nothing wrong with that. I have seen people change or add niches into their existing sites and their following have not decreased. In fact, it increased three or five-fold due to a new interest. A Bugged Life (dot com) is a good example.
Ever since I started blogging in 2007, there's no stopping for me. This blog – Merely My Opinion – is supposed to be a “rant station” but my experiences in the outdoors is too strong a temptation to resist not to write about it. And so, it became an outdoors blog with a name that is related to something else. A misnomer! That's because I added another interest and I get more visits.
Then I get to have more loyal followers when I added another outdoors niche into my already outdoors blog. Merely My Opinion is now concentrating about bushcraft and survival. There are a few international sites about this sort of thing and I get to have a fair share of readership attention but, here in the Philippines, mine is the only site about this extreme hobby and that makes Merely My Opinion special and rare.
Outdoors blogging is so broad. Seek out a path that your heart knows. Be realistic of the ordeals that follow when you put on a cloak of a new lifestyle. As I say again, outdoors blogging is not for the faint-hearted. You have to live with what you write.
Some of the relevant outdoors blog that I know. Come and visit each site:
- Everything Everywhere by Gary Arndt – travel and photography
- Time Travelling – archeology, anthropology and environment
- Mike B – backpacking, photography and technology
- Pinoy Mountaineer – backpacking, travel and photography
- Nomadic Pinoy – backpacking, travel and photography
- Waypoints dot PH – navigation and hiking
- Our Philippine Trees by Patrick Gozun – trees and environment
- Bird Ecology Study Group – bird watching
- Sticks65 Bushcraft, Travel, Camping and the Great Outdoors – bushcraft and survival
- Tomahawk's Adventure Travel and Survival – bushcraft and survival
- Langyaw by Estan Cabigas – travel, environment and photography
Document done in OpenOffice 2.1 Writer
2 comments:
Another way to standout from the usual adventure blog is to go to places that have not been explored yet.
Yes. That's what outdoors blogging is all about. To go places where few people go.
Post a Comment