As my work on the blog proceeds slowly, I thought I could participate to the Blogging 201: Branding and Growth! workshop. The topics covered in this workshop are not gonna be strictly connected to the content I want to produce, but they will help me figure out how to put my thoughts into action and you might get to know more about the Only a Travel Song project.

Yesterday’s task (the first in two weeks) was to set three goals for the project. In the brief there are two questions that I found very useful here you can read them and my answer:

Why do you blog? Truth is, I didn’t know. I first thought it would push me to live more experiences and do more traveling. Lately though, I understood that living with the pressure of “telling the world what I just did” is not my thing. I really don’t care, I don’t have the time and I don’t feel that everything should be told right away. What I still love is writing stories and structuring my thoughts through the act of writing. This is different because I think that to write a good story it takes some time, you should live the events, wait a bit, think about them and then translate them into a story. Otherwise they are a documentary. Which is fine, but I saw that all the posts that I wrote with a documentary style are just boring, they lack something. As for structuring my thoughts, it really depends, I have a quite precise opinion on many things and sometime I would love to express it here, but I find it hard to take the time to collect all the thoughts and write them down. So that’s why I blog: to tell stories and to organize my thoughts.

If your blog exceeded your wildest dreams, what would that look like? I used to have a very precise idea about this: I thought having followers and having brands sponsor contents was a good goal. Now I am not sure about it any longer. What I would really like it to be is a hub of stories, like an editorial website where you can find short stories happening right now. What really overwhelms me in this world is the idea that somewhere, right now, there’s a couple walking in the streets of Paris trying to find a dark spot where to kiss, there’s a kid in a developing country trying to study before the sun goes down because he has no electricity and there’s a mid aged man thinking about jumping from a high building in Tokyo. Of course I am not gonna know and tell about all that, but I would like to collect at least a glimpse of what is all around us and give it life here, right in this blog.

After these two questions, my task should be setting three goals, something very specific that goes into the direction of what I just stated. So here they are:

1. I am going to set an editorial calendar that balances food, travel and lava stories by August 31st with one post per week from September to December

2. I will produce a video: it’s something I always dreamt of so I would like to post my first video in September (hopefully taken in Laos and Cambodia)

3. I will set up a social media strategy by August 31st: I think I am just completely unorganized with this and I would really like to think the strategy very carefully

So that’s it. Let’s see how it goes, I really hope that within December this blog gets a real shape!

PS. The featured image is Venice Beach in LA. It was one unplanned trip which gave me some inspiration and I thought it was cool to use it in this post.