Each week we feature an interview with a member of the Superstar Blogging community. These interviews highlight the ups and downs faced on the road to success, illuminating helpful tips and tricks along the way. If you want to get inspired and succeed in the world of travel blogging, video, writing, or photography then consider these interviews must-read material! This week we are featuring Inge and Lobke from the Business of Blogging course.
Tell us about yourself!
We’re two girls from Belgium who started traveling together since we met. We both had traveled before that, but now that we’ve found each other, the travel bug has really awoke. In Belgium, we work full time jobs. Lobke works in retail and I work in healthcare. But our jobs don’t really inspire us and we have an urge to follow our dreams. We both love nature and unspoiled territory. I’m also into web design and writing and we both enjoy photography.
Lobke is very spontaneous and outgoing. I’m more of a nerd and introvert. We complement each other perfectly. Our different views and approach can be eye opening for the both of us, but we’ve learned to look at things differently!
How did you get started traveling?
In 2011, we both felt burned out in our jobs and we decided to take a year off. That’s how 2012 became the year of our lives. After almost a year of preparation we saved some money and sold most of our stuff. By the time we left, we had a rough itinerary of places we didn’t want to miss. With a small budget, we traveled for 8 months through Central and South America, completely dismissing the itinerary and roaming freely. Without the feeling of time limits, life was good! We got addicted to the freedom and the adventurous lifestyle of constant travel. Covering new ground each week and being free to stay or leave wherever, whenever. We enjoyed meeting people from all over the world, tasting local culture and experiencing new things. Check out the destinations we visited already!
How did you get started blogging?
In 2012, we first started a blog for our family and friends, sharing our stories and whereabouts. The blog was easy to use, but not exactly pretty. While traveling, we kept a daily journal with the events of that day. Some days, stories were hundreds of words, while other days we just wrote telegram style sentences. I love to write and we didn’t want to forget the details and anecdotes. It was very easy to maintain our blog, since we already had most of the stories written down. This blog was really a journal of our travels, only visited by friends and family. After this first year of travel, I took a web design course and started learning how to make our own website.
Has blogging changed how you travel?
Since our new blog is up, we haven’t traveled much. We plan on leaving for a long trip in September. With a blog in the back of our mind, we won’t really change our travel, but we have learned a lot. Especially the sort of pictures and video we make, has changed. When we leave in September, we will be thinking about the photography we might need for future articles. One thing that might be different is our niche. We never really visited a destination, looking for extra LGBT information. Of course, we always check online if a destination is safe, but we don’t pay extra attention to it. Now that we’ve chosen the LGBT niche, we might need to keep our eyes open or maybe check out some LGBT friendly places.
Speaking of photography, video/camera gear do you travel with?
We carry a GoPro, because it’s small, water resistant and it has a fish-eye effect. It’s a great travel camera. We used to carry a DSLR camera as well, but since it’s so bulky, we plan on taking a smaller camera this time. We bought a hybrid camera to take with us on our next trip. It’s smaller in our backpack and it feels much lighter to carry on a day trip. A lot of our road pictures are shot with our smartphones too. I think it’s important to have a smartphone with a good camera for that reason. In rural or crowded areas, it’s much easier to take out your smartphone to take a quick shot. When walking around with a bulky camera glued to my face, it often feels as if I’m not really experiencing something in real life. We do take a lot of pictures when traveling, because we love watching them later, over and over. We use Google Photos to save them online, so we can access them anywhere and use for our blog. We always aim for great pictures so we can showcase them in a gallery.
What struggles have you had during your blogging career? How have you overcome them?
Our blogging career is still fresh and new. Dutch is our native language and even though we can speak English pretty well, it’s still difficult to write clever and catchy sentences. I often feel as if I sound weird or clumsy. I don’t always feel able to convey a feeling as easily as I would in Dutch. Grammarly and Google Translate are good friends of mine and our English is improving every day.
The other thing we had a struggle with is our niche. We’re an LGBT couple, but never really payed much attention to it. Of course, we do take safety precautions and try to avoid trouble. As you can read on our blog, I tend to encounter some bathroom issues along the way. So that’s an issue in every bathroom, all over the world. Before LGBT blogging, we hardly ever visited LGBT related places or thought about LGBT content. Traveling as a gay couple is one thing, but writing about it is something else. We did notice that there is still a lot of room for expansion in our niche. We hope to fill this gap with our website.
Another struggle would be that people around us don’t see blogging like we do. Belgium seems to be a little behind in the blogging scene and many of our friends have never heard of it. We enjoy talking to people in the course, because they’re trying to do exactly the same thing as we are.
What do you enjoy the most about blogging?
Finishing an article that has great pictures, looks good and is fun to read. Of course, we like it even more if we get uplifting comments. It’s great to get feedback or be appreciated. If someone reads your posts and gets inspired by it, that definitely puts a smile on our faces.
What has been one of your recent blogging successes?
We were contacted by the management of The Dinah, a large lesbian festival in the US, after we wrote an article about the festival. We were asked to do a “Meet the…” interview with E. Jag Beckford, an LGBT activist and fashion designer. The fact that people reach out to us is a small success. We look forward to more of these! Our “Meet the…” interviews series is new, but we hope to make it a place to introduce interesting and cool people and stories.
In addition to this course, what other resources do you rely on for help/information?
Our main resource is of course the internet. We use it for inspiration, research and social media. While reading other blogs that are travel or LGBT related, we can study how other people bring their content. We also search the web for everything we don’t know yet. We want to learn all about how to make a website work, get traffic and look good. But we also research our niche and find out what topics are interesting.
Currently we’re doing a lot of online research on the destinations we plan to visit. Our budget is even tinier than before and we’re focusing on finding a few great WorkAway, House Sitting, and CouchSurfing experiences.
For blogging, we research web design issues to make our website work smoothly. We’re newbies at generating traffic and getting noticed by the world. Luckily, there’s a lot of information out there about every aspect of blogging.
Aside from the web, we also enjoy reading a lot. I recently read On Writing by Stephen King, as suggested in the course and I learned a lot from the master. We read a lot of English books now and learned to pay attention to the language and the correct use of it.
What apps do you use that make your blogging career easier when traveling?
So many apps out there! I used to try them all. Now I only have a few. We use the social media apps like Facebook, Pinterest, Instagram and Twitter. We also use Google Analytics to study our traffic and the WordPress app, although I rarely use it. We both have a small Chromebook for the actual work. I guess we’ll need to revise our system while traveling, but since we’re still at home – for now!
Why do you keep blogging?
We enjoy writing and beautiful photography. To see that end up in a nice result online, is very satisfying. It gets even better when people read your story or even get inspired. We also noticed that there’s not much LGBT related content out there. Now that we found this gap, we aim to help fill it up. We want LGBT travelers to put their fear aside and answer their travel related questions. There’s still a lot of information to be published on this precarious topic.
What are your blogging goals for 2017? How will you reach them?
Our goal for 2017 is building a cool LGBT travel blog and get some traffic. We hope it gets a little more traffic by the time we leave in September. It would be nice if we get noticed by the LGBT community and gain an audience. In the following months, I’ll be contacting a few LGBT authorities and try to collaborate with them.
Writing a book is also a goal for 2017. It will be a fiction book in Dutch. We’re not ready to publish travel related books just yet. But writing short fiction stories has always been a passion and now I want to write a longer story.
What is one thing you can’t travel without?
While we enjoy being off grid for a short while, we always travel with our electronic devices. We use our laptop and camera a lot. I guess that traveling without them might be very liberating, but it would make blogging impossible.
Do you have any blogging regrets?
We regret we didn’t start this blog earlier! In the past, we’ve had a few blogs and websites, but this is the first time we’re really putting in the effort to gain an audience and keep it up and well maintained. But then again, we learned a lot from these previous experiences and they help us doing a better job this time!
What’s one piece of advice you’d give to a fellow blogger?
One piece? I’d love to elaborate over all the things I’ve learned, which is a lot already. The most important piece of advice would be: write for your reader. Write things that are useful for your reader in a way they want to keep reading. Look at articles that draw your attention and see how they are composed. Mimic that style in your own way. If you want readers to read more content, make sure it looks appealing and interesting.
What tips do you have for other LGBT travelers?
- Don’t be afraid to travel, just do your research. There are still a lot of countries which punish gay people (like Chechnya appears to be doing right now). Personally, it will take a long time before we travel to Russia. We wouldn’t feel safe! Though, if nobody knows you’re gay, you should be fine. But who wants to get back in the closet to travel? There are so many gay-friendly or gay-neutral destinations to choose from. We wouldn’t travel to a country that offers death penalties for LGBT. This website has a list of countries where homosexuality is illegal.
- Even if a country has a certain policy about LGBT, that doesn’t mean the inhabitants feel the same way. You’ll find lovers and haters anywhere in the world. Keep your eyes open for your surroundings and follow your instinct.
- Don’t let fear spoil your trip. You can be cautious up until some point, but you need to be able to let go too. Once I feel as if my companions accepted me, I can just be myself. I’m often surprised by how fierce people you just met defend you in public (including restrooms). As a gender fluid person, I notice that most people have no idea what bathrooms are like for me. They get really angry when they see how people treat me sometimes. Getting support from other travelers is very rewarding and heart warming.
Have you ever felt unsafe during your travels?
We actually haven’t felt unsafe yet. My girlfriend is very feminine and nobody would expect her to be gay. But since she’s with me, the big question mark in the ladies room, she might be recognized as well. The only place I ever feel uneasy are the public restrooms. I hate them and they’re everywhere! It’s impossible to avoid them. But that’s a different story. Overall, we’re cautious travelers. We follow our gut feeling and whenever we feel uneasy, we leave. You won’t catch us holding hands in a dodgy town at night. We’ll keep it to the privacy of our room.
Where are you going on your next trip?
Our next trip is going to Central America. We fly to Cancun and travel on from there. This trip will be very different from our previous trips. We’ll be volunteering via WorkAway and try to find a house sit every now and then. We cover some of the same places we were before, but we want to get more rural. There are a few Central American countries we haven’t visited yet, like Honduras, Nicaragua, Costa Rica and Panama. So, we’ll be going to them, too! We plan on traveling really slow through Nicaragua because we think it’s going to be a wonderful destination.
Tell us about your blog and where we can find you on social media!
Only Once Today is a travel blog focused on budget and LGBT travel. We write about destinations and plan to include itineraries in the future. Our website provides tips and tricks to travel on a budget. Our LGBT niche is growing and we want to offer more content for lesbian or transgender backpackers. There’s not that much content to be found online about how different cultures embrace or despise LGBT travelers. We want to start filling that void and offer information, tips and tricks. We want to inspire others to feel free to travel. We’re also on Facebook, Pinterest, Instagram, and Twitter!