Ultimate Thailand Explorers: What I Learned Part 4 of 4

Published January 26, 2010 at 8:13 pm |

Today’s post wraps up my 4-part series about my experience as a travel blogger in the Ultimate Thailand Explorers Contest. If you’d like to read the first one click here. And for my second post, click here. And for the third, click here.

Today’s post is all about where to go next. What’s in store for adventureswithben.com based on what I learned?

2010 Priorities

There’s a lot on my “to do” list here at adventureswithben.com. Read my post on New Year’s Resolutions for some detail. In no particular order here’s what I need to do…

Twitter – Build my twitter network. The hashtags were incredibly powerful in building a fan base quickly. I also need to tweet more often and throughout the day to build credibility. Look for more retweets about travel stories that interest me.

Facebook - My facebook fan page is up and running. You should become a fan by clicking here. For now I’ve got this site’s RSS feed going to my personal account. That will change once I have a bigger following on facebook. Facebook will soon become the portal to contain all my photos and videos as I reached the limits of a free Flickr account. Facebook also enables people to network and that’s where I need to continue building.

Content - It’s always about content. In the past topics and destinations jumped around day-to-day. Moving forward I’d like to write a series of posts on one location and heavily promote them. My goal is to connect with a network of readers and capture their attention for a few days, and then move on to a new topic and new network with the hopes that everyone else will follow me along. The opportunities to have readers contribute to the post through comments and polls was popular. So you’ll see more of that. In fact, if you look on the right-hand column you’ll see a current poll for a new tagline for this site. Why not vote now?

Promotion – Giving up may be the wrong word, but I have no intentions on partnering with traditional media in the short-term. It’s too tough. Maybe I’ll revisit this in the future. Where I will focus my efforts will be on partnering with other bloggers, getting listed on travel blog sites and contributing to the travel and tourism conversations on the net. I’m looking at what I can do locally as well as far away.

Video Creation - As if I don’t have enough to focus on already, I might experiment with creating video casts on iTunes. I’m not sure yet. I have all the equipment, but I’m not sure on if I have the time to make it all come together. Running your own business is tough stuff.

When it’s all said and done, participating in the Ultimate Thailand Explorers Competition was the best thing that could have happened last year. It turned out to be everything I hoped it would be and more.

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Unrelated to what I learned in Thailand – but you might be interested in knowing – here are some other action items I have in mind…