It’s your dream vacation to Europe and you want to share the experience with friends, family, and even others you don’t know as well.
What you don’t want to do is to spend your trip emailing and texting photos, answering everyone’s questions about how you are doing and what you did that day.
Instead, you want to live in the moment.
At the same time, you want a written and photo record of your trip. The solution may be as simple as setting up a blog on WordPress or Blogger or even purchasing a new domain and recording your trip there.
Here are some key tips and tricks to blogging about your European vacation.
Write Every Day
You may not have to write every day to accomplish your blogging goals, but it is the best way to do things. Why?
There are several reasons.
- Writing your Experience Becomes Habit: If you write every day on your journey, it develops into a habit, and that makes it less likely you will forget to write something down.
- Your Experiences are Fresh: European vacations are often filled with so many things each day that if you wait, you will forget details you would have thought to write down the day they happened. Writing as you go makes sure you don’t miss something. You can always edit something out later.
- You Have an Outlet: You may want to talk about your experiences or share them as they happen, but friends and relatives at home may not have time to listen every day, and time differences matter. Writing every day gives you an outlet to vent and talk, and they can engage with the content at their convenience.
When blogging about a vacation, write every single day consistently for the best record of your experiences.
Ask Yourself Key Questions
There are some key questions you need to ask yourself about every single day you blog. They are simple, but if you make sure you address each one, your posts will be better, as will your record of what you did on your trip:
- Where: Record the place or places that things happened. Record museums, attractions, neighbourhoods, and any details you can remember.
- When: When did you do the things you did? What time of day, and what was the season? What was the temperature like?
- Who: Who were the people you met? What were your interactions with them like?
- Why: What was your motivation for doing the things you did? Draw the reader into the story of the day.
- How: How did you get around? What was the local transportation like?
- What: These are the details of the day and the story.
If you answer all of these questions, your posts will be both more thorough and entertaining.
Ground Your Story
When others read about your travels, it may sound like a fantasy. You need to use some method to ground the reader in your story. Some of these elements are a part of the questions above, but they are things you need to focus on as you create the narrative of your days.
The first detail is place. This is more than just a street in Paris. What did the place smell like? What did the air feel like? What sounds did you hear? What did the things you see look like? Descriptions that involve as many senses as possible will resonate best.
The second is the time. This includes the season, the time of day, and how much time it took to do each of the things you did. How much time did it take to travel from place to place? This not only grounds the reader in the story, but it also gives them valuable information they can use if they visit the same location.
Finally, you need to ground your story in you. How did the things you do make you feel? What were your favourites and why? How did you relate to the things around you? The reader is in part reading because they want to know how you feel and experience things vicariously. This is where emotions are a valuable tool.
Timing is Everything
When you post is also of utmost importance. If you post at noon in London, you won’t have many readers in the United States. You can schedule posts and then even mass email the link. Think of the time differences and calculate carefully.
Also, for your security you may want to post the following day, or at various times so you aren’t revealing too much about yourself and your itinerary. Unless your blog is private, that information is out there for the public to see.
In the end, the timing of your posts is up to you. To give them the most impact, use scheduling features and even social media management software to spread the word where your primary audience is.
Review Your Experiences
People like to get an honest, everyman view of the attractions there are in Europe and elsewhere. Telling them how things went, offering tips, and revealing what went wrong and what worked well will make your blog more successful.
This is especially true if you did something outside the norm. Nearly everyone may visit the Louvre in Paris, but there may be other less common attractions you visited. Share about those and write a review, and your readers will have something new to read about and plan for.
This may mean looking around and seeing what others are blogging about. Make your blog unique, and it will stand out. Do the same thing everyone else is, and you won’t make much of a splash.
Blogging about your European vacation has a lot of advantages. The written record to go along with your photos and videos will enhance your own memories. Family and friends can keep up with your trip without you wasting hours on phone calls, texts, and emails.
Keep these five key things in mind when you blog, and your readers will thank you, your record will be complete, and you’ll remember your vacation with a new level of detail.
