It sounds incredible even to myself but I managed to have a
few hundred followers on my travel blog in just one year but it was not luck;
it was because of sheer hard work that I could succeed in establishing my blog.
When I look back, it seems unbelievable that I was the same person who never
believed in himself or his writing. Whenever someone asked me to introduce
myself, I would fumble, forget writing things. However, I was a passionate
traveler who desperately wanted to pen down my experiences.
After contemplating writing for more than a year, I came
across an offer to create a cheap website. Disinterestedly, I clicked on it and
found it attractive. It did not take me more than a few minutes to register the
domain name that I clicked my mind without putting much thought into it. It was
something related to wanderlust, but let it be for now.
Dedication
Writing requires undying commitment, and I became aware of
this fact when I met a fiction writer. The lady from France told me that she
lived in China at present. She worked as a translator in a highly demanding
job, but she loved writing. She had written four books by that time and the
obvious thing that she told me was that she sat at her work station for at
least an hour every day, not matter she had ideas in her mind or not.
Discipline was what I learned from her.
It was time to introduce self-discipline in my life. I set
up my work station in a week, which involved some basic investment. Initially,
I thought that I had wasted my money because I was not sure about dedicating
myself to a new routine. Nevertheless, the first week of sitting at the desk
went off in looking at the family photos from the past few years. It was not a
waste of time, I would say because I let my mind wander in the direction of
previous vacations with family and friends.
Focus and
responsibility
It took me a more than a week to write 500 words about
random things in my mind, but it was an important lesson in putting my thoughts
onto the screen since I had visited a religious shrine that day. The following
month, I went to the hills from my office. And when I returned, I wrote about
my experience with Self-Drive Cars in Pune.
At that point while writing about car rentals, I realized that I needed to
be responsible with my words that I publish online. I could not endorse any
product even if no one was paying me for it just for the sake of it.
I was on the way to become a travel writer whom people may
look up to as they form their opinions. And if I misguide my readers for even a
trivial thing, they may never take my words seriously. Just because I had
developed a flair of writing in the next few months, I could not recommend just
anything to my readers.
Learning technology
Before I began my blog, I never knew that I had to be technically
aware in order to publicize my blog. I had barely heard about SEO and never
paid attention to it. However, I had to learn about this dreaded technology,
even though I hated it. Nonetheless, it helped a lot to gain wider audience for
my blog in just a few months and I cannot be happier about investing my time in
the right direction. All in all, it took just one year of dedication, focus,
and learning to establish a successful travel blog.
