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Travel with Infant Blog

Travels with Petra Mommy Travel Blog Begins — Chaya’s blog about traveling with an infant and a husband, Travels with Petra, is now being published on Vagabond Journey.com. There are three trial post on there now (I say trial because Chaya is still not too clear on her desires to be an internet writer.) So [...]

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Travels with Petra Mommy Travel Blog Begins —

Chaya’s blog about traveling with an infant and a husband, Travels with Petra, is now being published on Vagabond Journey.com. There are three trial post on there now (I say trial because Chaya is still not too clear on her desires to be an internet writer.) So please visit the site, offer suggestions, encouragement, advice, and any comments you feel could help. Also, if you would like Chaya to continue writing, please tell her so.

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Payson, Arizona, Southwest USA, North America
Sunday, November 22, 2009
Buy Travel Gear | All Travelogue Entries
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Keep in mind that the layout of the site is in its rudimentary form, the header will be completely renovated, and the sidebar regions will continue to be adapted as the life of the site goes on. Some aspects of the site need to be fixed — such as the Google search box on the top — and will be repaired when time and space allow. If you have any suggestions, please let us know.

Visit Travels with Petra

Thank you,

Wade


“I don’t care about getting readers, I just want to make money,” my wife, Chaya, spoke her intentions behind blogging clearly.

A travel blog about the ups and downs, the trials and errors of perpetually traveling the world with an infant would make money. Much more money than I make writing about the everythings of traveling.

A blog about traveling with an infant has a clear niche — international travel with a baby — and it just happens to be a niche that people seem to love to spend money in. In point, it is my observation that new parents with disposable income often like to treat having a baby as a sort of hobby — and, as in most hobbies, spending money for all the latest gadgets and gizmos is to participate in the hobby fully.

In point, a website with an infant travel theme would be excellent fodder for advertising. Advertising means money to the webmaster.


But there is another reason for publishing Travels with Petra that go beyond making money. Income is the logical justification for doing many things that take time. A compulsive action is completely justified if you can prove that it makes you money. Money is all too often the measuring stick for time well spent, though I am sure that it is not the sole reason behind Chaya’s website. It is merely its logical justification.

Chaya writes a paragraph or two each day when Petra gives her a chance. Her writing is therefore hemmed in by time and space restraints, she writes quickly and to the point. Where I doddle and strategize with words as though they were sacred,  Chaya just friggin’ writes. She is a good blogger.

I often come home from work, read through what my wife had written through the day, maybe edit it a little, add a parcel here, a sentence there, and sit back happy that we now have this record of our family’s journey written by someone other than me and my imagination.

Travels with Petra screen shot

Travels with Petra screen shot

I tell my wife that what she writes is good, it is honest, that she inherently has the blogging formula down, but she does not believe me:

“You would say that no matter what I wrote, you just want be to blog.”


A key to getting people to read what you write is to do the things they dream about but feel they can not do — or do not really want to do. If you can do this and then explain how to do it, show a path, reveal your mistakes fully for all to learn from, then you have done your job as a writer.

That is a part of the impetus behind Travels with Petra. To show that traveling with children is possible. It is even better because we do not even know yet if it is possible for us.

Chaya and I are new to traveling with an infant. This site shows our growing pains and our learning process as parents, as well as Petra’s growth in a revolving world.

“Nobody wants to read about someone’s travels, they want to read about someone’s travails.”Motorcycle Bob

Travels with Petra is about the travails of a traveling family.

If I had a quarter for each time someone told me that they would love to travel but are unable to because they have children I would be making a pretty dandy living. I know that you can travel with an infant, Craigy at Travelvice.com has proved this, and Chaya and I are showing how we do it (it may not always be graceful).

Chaya’s new blog, Travels with Petra, is a way for us to make those quarters.


I previously asked the readers of the Vagabond Journey.com Travelogue if they had any suggestions for Chaya’s “Mommy Travel Blog,” and the advice that we received was very good.

Make Chaya a new site, with a new name, and a new feel was the general consensus. In other circumstances, this would be the best way to go about doing this site. But, as anyone who has tried to publish a website has found, it takes many years to establish a site, it takes a long time to build traffic on the internet.

I debated the issue: should Chaya’s blog be a part of Vagabond Journey.com, and therefore benefit from the fact that this site is already well established, or start from scratch with a new identity?

I searched for domain names. www.MommyTravelBlog.com was available. I bought it. I told Chaya.

“But I thought that we were on the same team?” she protested. Meaning: if we are in this together we should be working on the same site.

She was correct.

As the long term readers of this site know, I have been down this road before. You either work with your partner as a team, or you compete. If Chaya was to start her own site it would probably take over a year before she would be able to establish it enough to get 100 visitors a day — even with my help. We do not have this sort of stamina for this venture: we need results now.

We  also want to do this website, Vagabond Journey.com, together. A family business.

On the internet, traffic breeds traffic: A page on a high traffic website will get exponentially more visitors than the same page on an unestablished site. Google is a good search engine, part of its mission is to weed out spam sites and other web garbage. To establish your website, you must prove to the search engines that you are not a garbage site. You do this with traffic and incoming links as well as a bunch of other parameters.

When a site hits 100 visitors a day, it starts to come up on the search engine maps; when a site hits 1,000 visitors a day, the search engines look a little closer at it; 2,000 visitors a day, and the search engines realize that the site is high quality, and it will come up highly in many search queries.

Search engine derived web traffic is a self-fulfilling cycle: The more traffic a website gets, the more traffic the search engines are going to try to dish towards it.

Search engines are companies, too, and they want to offer the best service possible to their users. Search engines want people to visit the best sites on the internet so they look good — “I found the information I wanted using Google.com” — and they determine which sites are the best for a particular search query based on the page’s traffic, incoming links, the site’s traffic, rank, and many other factors.

The more traffic a site gets, the more traffic the search engines will dish it. Websites have footprints, the larger the footprint, the more traffic, the larger the footprint becomes, the more traffic you get . . . and on and on.

To start Chaya’s blog with an independent URL address — www.MommyTravelBlog.com — would be to start from scratch. It would be to start with an infinitely small footprint. To publish it as a part of Vagabond Journey.com would give it a flying head start — it would give her blog a relatively large footprint to bound from.

And we would all be on the same team.

“What theme do you want to use for your blog?” I asked Chaya.

“The same as yours,” she answered without hesitation.

It is obvious, we are on the same team.

Visit Travels with Petra

Vagabond Journey on blogging
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Filed under: Vagabond Journey Updates

About the Author:

I am the founder and editor of Vagabond Journey. I’ve been traveling the world since 1999, through 91 countries. I am the author of the book, Ghost Cities of China and have written for The Guardian, Forbes, Bloomberg, The Diplomat, the South China Morning Post, and other publications. has written 3699 posts on Vagabond Journey. Contact the author.

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VBJ is currently in: New York City

9 comments… add one

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  • Bob L November 22, 2009, 6:12 pm

    If you already bought the mommytravelblog.com, then you should at least put an autoforward on it to the vagabond site. I wonder if there is a way to have mirror sites, where what is posted in http://www.vagabondjourney.com/mommytravelblog would also be shown in mommytravelblog.com? That way, you could have the best of both worlds.?????

    Or maybe you could sell Mommytravelblog.com and make a fortune 8^)

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  • c. e. Patterson November 22, 2009, 8:24 pm

    Dear Wade:

    Your wife might be a better writer than you. I found myself wanting to read more. You helped her make a good decision to start her blob.

    I will sent you some money January 5, 2010

    Sincerely.

    C. E. Patterson

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  • Debbie Goss November 23, 2009, 11:22 am

    Glad that you will be working together. It makes my “daily read” easier.

    Loved the piece on roadkill. I’ve had patridge and rabbit but not squirrel. The small squirrels that live in Aroostook County are usually not fit to eat after coming up against a car.

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  • Baron November 23, 2009, 3:55 pm

    Wade,

    A thought. Since you’ve bought the URL “www.MommyTravelBlog.com”, why not have it point to “Travels with Petra”. It might gain some value and maybe you can sell it before you have to renew it.

    BTW, I can’t believe that URL was available. I think that testifies to what a unique niche you are in.

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  • infant car seats November 24, 2009, 11:40 am

    Wow! This is very interesting.

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  • Pearl November 30, 2009, 9:15 am

    I’m really liking Chaya’s blog!
    Kudos!

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  • momof3 December 3, 2009, 3:25 pm

    This is a great site with basic tips for those who have never traveled with an infant before. You would be amazed at the little things that you forget.

    http://www.ehow.com/how_5702289_travel-infant-airplane.html

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  • Edmund November 16, 2010, 4:01 am

    To support in taking the travel, it will be a good idea if you bring an infant car seat to make your trip more enjoyable not only for you but also for your baby.

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    • Wade | Vagabond Journey.com November 16, 2010, 1:49 pm

      Are you nuts? Where would we put it? In a bus seat? On a train? Not possible.

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