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Common Mistakes To Avoid On Your Blog’s About Page

As managers of a fantastic community of bloggers from around the world, we are regularly interacting with hundreds of different blogs. We've seen the good, the bad, the ugly, and the beautiful. Since our aim is to better equip folks who are bridging cultures through blogging, we wanted to share a few simple tweaks that could improve the effectiveness and quality of your blog. The About page There are a few foundational elements that every blog needs in order to connect effectively with readers. The "About page" is one of these key elements. An About page is one of the most important and most commonly viewed pages on almost any blog. It may go by different names (About Me, FAQs, etc.), but essentially, it introduces the readers to the blog and its author(s). Because so many readers visit the About page, bloggers should be very intentional about what is published there. Think about it from a new reader's perspective. What are they looking for? What do they need to know? To help you answer these questions and create a more effective blog, we've put together this list of the most common mistakes we've seen on blog About pages. Mistakes to avoid on your About page Not having one We were shocked to come across blogs that don't have any About page at all. As a new reader, we immediately look for more information about the author and when we can't find it, there's a big disconnect. Most often, we won't bother coming back. Granted, some folks prefer to remain anonymous, and there are...

17 July, 2016 / 0 Comments

How to Find Freedom in a Daily Blogging Practice

This post is by Tory Paez, a member of our Blogging Abroad community who is currently serving as a Peace Corps Volunteer with her partner in Costa Rica. Prior to Peace Corps, I never actively wrote about or reflected on my experiences abroad. I flew, drove, bused, boated, and walked -- documenting through Facebook, Instagram, letters and emails to loved ones, and the occasional random journal entry. My memories of trips are scattered, with only the most unforgettable moments imprinted in my mind. But as my partner, Dan, and I prepared to enter into the Peace Corps, we knew we wanted to have a collected history of our experience. We also knew we wanted to share our daily triumphs and failures with our family and friends back home. We scoured the internet for inspiration and advice on how best to maintain a blog for two years, given obvious challenges like management of workload, lack of consistent access to wi-fi, and simply not “needing it” anymore. We decided to keep our blogging process simple: one post a day. We selected the Tumblr platform and created the guidelines listed below. Tory working with Costa Rican women Guidelines for Daily Blogging Share any type of media: We tell stories through words, photos, videos, links, songs, quotes -- anything to fully and accurately capture our experience. We select each daily post with a single purpose: depict something about today. It can be sentimental, upsetting, silly -- anything, really. Anything. Write as little or as much as you want: We don’t...

04 July, 2016 / 0 Comments

The importance of being an ethnographer online

One of the best parts about living abroad is the window into different lives that your relationships can provide. Just by becoming friends with people in your new country of residence, you’ll find yourself taking part in new customs and rituals, and sometimes incorporating them into your own life. You may find these rituals exciting and want to share them with your readers, but when you try to do more research online about them, your searches come up empty. The further afield you are from the capital city, the more likely you are to find and take part in customs and rituals that likely haven’t been written about in English before, which makes you as a blogger an important voice for your community, and the world at large. There are several ways to approach writing about these in a cross-culturally sensitive way. Pick one that suits you and your blog’s voice and style best. Narrative Stretch your creative writing muscles and tell the story of your unique experience from beginning to end. Remember to include good storytelling conventions such as building tension, climax and a resolution. Engage all of the senses of your readers, describing not just what is going on during the ritual, but the sounds, the smells, the tastes. Be sure to include some dialogue, or paraphrased dialogue from your community members, as they are going to be the best explainers for what is happening and why at the event. Try to center them and what the ritual is for them and...

24 June, 2016 / 1 Comment

Why Blogging Abroad Is Meaningful Work

Bridging cultures As countries around the world seek to advance and connect, Peace Corps has long been an organization at the forefront of both development and cross-cultural connection. This is evident in the three goals of Peace Corps: To help the people of interested countries in meeting their need for trained Volunteers. To help promote a better understanding of Americans on the part of the peoples served. To help promote a better understanding of other peoples on the part of Americans. Peace Corps Volunteers of the 21st century have access to technology that their predecessors never dreamed of. But with the power of access comes great responsibility: the Peace Corps Blog was born. Volunteer bloggers Volunteers often start blogging strong. Their excitement fuels updates, committing cultural faux pas provide easy and hilarious content, and everything seems so new…for a while. Then an incredible transition happens. Through integration, gaining cultural understanding, and the simple passing of time, a PCV’s host country becomes a little more like home. Volunteers might say later that this is when they really started to feel like they hit their stride, but it is also often where their blogging faded away. It doesn’t have to be though. Why it's worth it Keeping a Peace Corps Blog can be meaningful and worthwhile work. Even if it hasn’t been updated in what you feel is too long, here are six reasons to find some Internet, get yourself a cup of tea (or mate, or kava, or airag, or…) , and give blogging another go: Peace Corps’ 3rd Goal: “to...

12 June, 2016 / 0 Comments

How To Keep Your Culture Blog Alive With These 3 Questions | Blogging Abroad

Keep Your Blog Alive With These 3 Questions

You’ve done it. You’ve made that big move across oceans and continents and you want to tell everyone about it. You like writing and want to share it with the world, so you’ve started a blog. At first, it all came so easily, tales of cross-cultural bumbles and the sensory overload of a trip to the local market. But now, it’s getting harder to find something that interests you or feels worthy of putting up on a blog. Posts get more and more infrequent, until the next thing you know, the date for your flight home is tomorrow and you realize that your readers might not even know it. You dash off a final post that sums up several months of experiences and end up leaving many stories untold. Blogging abroad doesn’t have to be that way. With some planning and foresight plus committing to prioritizing blogging, you can keep inspiration sparking throughout your time abroad. If you are feeling like your blog has stagnated, or you are getting ready to start a blog and want to avoid the fate described above, ask yourself these questions about your platform to take your blog to the next level. What am I trying to say? Are you trying to take a broad and encompassing view of the country you live in or are you trying to share the small stories from your community and network? Are you trying to spin a yarn that could put New Yorker narratives to shame, or are you doing fact-based reporting? Are you...

28 March, 2016 / 1 Comment

Free Blog Post Checklist

Would you like to become a better blogger? Do you want to make a bigger impact on your readers? Honing your blog skills is an ongoing process. And if one of the goals for your blog is to help promote cross-cultural understanding, then you have an extra responsibility to be intentional and sensitive with your blog content. Our aim at Blogging Abroad is to inspire and equip you to be the best culture blogger you can be. Whether you need help coming up with creative ideas for blog posts, learning to blog more consistently, optimizing the readability of your site, or sharing the not-so-great experiences in a positive way, we have tools and resources to help. If you want something super simple to up your game with every blog post, we're making our Blog Post Checklist download available to you for free. This is a super easy way to refine your content before hitting publish. Just go through the one-page list, and you're good to go. Download your free Blog Post Checklist below:...

09 March, 2016 / 0 Comments

5 Ways Blogging Changed Our Peace Corps Experience

This post originally appeared on IntentionalTravelers.com

When my Uncle did the Peace Corps in the 70's, my Mom would record messages for him on tape and wait months to receive his response in the mail. Times have really changed! These days, many Peace Corps Volunteers are just as connected by phone and internet as they would be in the States. While this new digital age certainly has many implications for Peace Corps that can be good and bad, we found the ability to keep a blog during Peace Corps to be particularly rewarding.

Jedd-and-Michelle-Jamaica (photo credit: Dreamspace Collective)

Here are some of the key ways that keeping a blog improved our Peace Corps experience:

1. Reflection and Processing

29 December, 2015 / 0 Comments