Back to GOING ANYWHERE NICE?
THE GAN GUIDE: START A TRAVEL BLOG TODAY
Hmmm. So you don’t want a real job but you still want to jaunt around the globe, haughtily snapping your fingers at hotel lobby staff as if you own the place? Well, here’s the good news – writing your own travel blog has never been easier, less difficult or particularly challenging. But how do you secure that sense of global entitlement with the current plague of globally entitled bloggers? There’s only so many insanely petty requests those concierges can deal with at a time, after all. Luckily, Going Anywhere Nice? have written a foolproof guide – you’ll be ordering sun loungers to be moved into a slightly more shaded area around that hotel pool in Dubai before you know it.
Follow your passion
That sounds plausible, right? I mean, it sounds like an encouraging generalisation, something that someone would say? Do we need to expand on that? Well, follow your passion…unless your passion is, say, dismembering marsupials. Don’t follow THAT passion. Alright then, what about this? Follow your inoffensive passion, the ones where it’s really hard to believe that it’s an actual passion. Like Instagram-ing whatever the latest donut mutation is. Or doing a couple’s driving holiday.
Keep a journal
Aside from making you look artistically alluring in coffee shops, writing down your movements as you go will be a godsend in the future. Can you confirm to the authorities where you were on the evening of July 26th, 2008? No? Well then, good luck blogging about the disappointing lunch options in that foreign jail after your wrongful arrest for...we don't know...moral turpitude.
Write from your heart
Never – we repeat, NEVER – write from your pancreas.
Create a strong permalink structure
This is something technical, apparently. Google it. Who are we? Robert E Khan and Vint Cerf, inventors of the internet?
Interview the destination
Really dig beneath the surface of the destination’s personality. Approach the city of Rome like it’s a young celebrity pop star, for instance. What are its hopes, what are its fears, what are its dreams, its nightmares? Where does it see itself in five year’s time? Can it confirm where it was on the evening of July 26th, 2008?
Blend in
As a world traveller, you’ll be called on to mix seamlessly with your fellow global citizens, most of whom will also have travel blogs. You can make it even easier on yourself by having the necessary accessories to hand: hastily constructed travel blog to talk about (you’re working on one right now!), thumb ring, remedial appreciation of the hits of Bob Marley (Manu Chao also acceptable), willingness to photograph every meal no matter how nondescript, fake IP address generator to use for parents’ HBO Max account, proclivity to crowbar the phrase “my blog” into half of all conversations, cold, lifeless eyes that flicker only when sensing the opportunity to dash another’s sincerity with a crushing ironic comeback. That sort of thing.
Be assertive
Some hotels have the temerity to be unenthusiastic about providing a free room and then paying you money to write about them to a mailing list that has upwards of 138 people. These people live in the stone age where the computers are made of steam. Firmly inform them that this is the modern era, and that haven’t they even got a social media strategy and how do they even survive as a rural bed and breakfast and god so many places would jump at paying you two grand for a review and no you don’t write for national newspapers or magazines because something about global corporate hegemony. Watch those free room upgrades appear before your very eyes.
Meet the locals
Get out of your comfort zone and go to places you wouldn’t at home. You can be anyone you want here. Dress like a nun and go to an illegal badger fight. You might just come away with a story.
Update regularly
I mean, who’s got time, obviously? But I read on this internet forum that you can pay people on Fiverr to do it for you and they work for like next to nothing.
Follow your passion
Worth repeating. But, like, REALLY follow it. “Find what you love and let it kill you.” Is that the quote? That seems morbid, on reflection. How about, “Find what you like and allow yourself to achieve a level of contentment that doesn’t really set your heart racing but essentially just does enough to stop you walking out into the sea.”?
Follow your passion
That sounds plausible, right? I mean, it sounds like an encouraging generalisation, something that someone would say? Do we need to expand on that? Well, follow your passion…unless your passion is, say, dismembering marsupials. Don’t follow THAT passion. Alright then, what about this? Follow your inoffensive passion, the ones where it’s really hard to believe that it’s an actual passion. Like Instagram-ing whatever the latest donut mutation is. Or doing a couple’s driving holiday.
Keep a journal
Aside from making you look artistically alluring in coffee shops, writing down your movements as you go will be a godsend in the future. Can you confirm to the authorities where you were on the evening of July 26th, 2008? No? Well then, good luck blogging about the disappointing lunch options in that foreign jail after your wrongful arrest for...we don't know...moral turpitude.
Write from your heart
Never – we repeat, NEVER – write from your pancreas.
Create a strong permalink structure
This is something technical, apparently. Google it. Who are we? Robert E Khan and Vint Cerf, inventors of the internet?
Interview the destination
Really dig beneath the surface of the destination’s personality. Approach the city of Rome like it’s a young celebrity pop star, for instance. What are its hopes, what are its fears, what are its dreams, its nightmares? Where does it see itself in five year’s time? Can it confirm where it was on the evening of July 26th, 2008?
Blend in
As a world traveller, you’ll be called on to mix seamlessly with your fellow global citizens, most of whom will also have travel blogs. You can make it even easier on yourself by having the necessary accessories to hand: hastily constructed travel blog to talk about (you’re working on one right now!), thumb ring, remedial appreciation of the hits of Bob Marley (Manu Chao also acceptable), willingness to photograph every meal no matter how nondescript, fake IP address generator to use for parents’ HBO Max account, proclivity to crowbar the phrase “my blog” into half of all conversations, cold, lifeless eyes that flicker only when sensing the opportunity to dash another’s sincerity with a crushing ironic comeback. That sort of thing.
Be assertive
Some hotels have the temerity to be unenthusiastic about providing a free room and then paying you money to write about them to a mailing list that has upwards of 138 people. These people live in the stone age where the computers are made of steam. Firmly inform them that this is the modern era, and that haven’t they even got a social media strategy and how do they even survive as a rural bed and breakfast and god so many places would jump at paying you two grand for a review and no you don’t write for national newspapers or magazines because something about global corporate hegemony. Watch those free room upgrades appear before your very eyes.
Meet the locals
Get out of your comfort zone and go to places you wouldn’t at home. You can be anyone you want here. Dress like a nun and go to an illegal badger fight. You might just come away with a story.
Update regularly
I mean, who’s got time, obviously? But I read on this internet forum that you can pay people on Fiverr to do it for you and they work for like next to nothing.
Follow your passion
Worth repeating. But, like, REALLY follow it. “Find what you love and let it kill you.” Is that the quote? That seems morbid, on reflection. How about, “Find what you like and allow yourself to achieve a level of contentment that doesn’t really set your heart racing but essentially just does enough to stop you walking out into the sea.”?