Some years back, just after graduating from high school I decided to spend a year in Australia. During one year full of exciting work & travel experiences somewhere on the other side of the planet, I wrote a travel diary with 99 travel reports for a German travel website called Reisebine.de.
I was quite impressed about the amount of feedback I got from readers during my trip. People would even start writing concerned emails to the webmaster when I stopped writing for a few days. And some articles became discussion item in the relatively extensive website forum.
After my journey I decided to leave my email address in my very last article in case the growing readership wanted to get in touch with me – I would have never expected this result: even 4 years after writing these reports, I’m receiving emails from readers on a monthly basis.
But not only the loyal readership of freshly backed German travelers is surprising: a few weeks ago two of the biggest German national Magazines der Spiegel & die Welt have picked up an article with quotes based on an interview on my trip. Since then the article is spreading in German online & offline news (Westdeutsche Zeitung, Märkische Allgemeine, Netzzeitung.de, General Anzeiger Bonn, Südthüringer Zeitung just to name a couple).
Even English speaking news sites are now picking up the article that was originally published by German newswire dpa: Earthtimes.org, M&C.
I’m still impressed what impact & outreach a simple travel blog can create. Blogging works.