Involving Your Kids In Your Travel Blog
One of the most common ways to make some extra money and catalog your travels is by writing a travel blog. While travel blogs are common, the ones that stand out the most are those that are professionally managed, exceptionally entertaining and educational, and marketed appropriately. Before you start posting a travel blog, be sure to do your research into managing it on the same level; have your readers believe you are a professional from the beginning.
Traveling with your children is exceptionally important but it can be somewhat challenging. Still, they learn incredible lessons they would not receive otherwise, and experience cultures and attractions that will shape their future thoughts and memories perhaps more than anything else they will do. Yet there is more that you can teach them.
Involving your kids in your travel blog will enable you to teach them a number of lessons. Here are a few of the lessons, and how you can keep your kids involved in your travel blog for even greater learning opportunities.
How to Be Prepared
In order to have a successful travel blog, you need a good domain name, a good host, a solid web design, and an adequate way to stay connected and post while you travel. This last point is often overlooked, but a good phone that can be used worldwide-one that can also be used as a hotspot, a compact but powerful computer, and a good camera-is vital to your blogging success.
Teaching your children about these steps teaches them not only to be prepared, but what it takes to be ready for nearly anything when it comes to technology and travel. These are skills that will serve them in the future regardless of whether they follow in your footsteps of travel blogging or not. In this digital age we live in, your children can only benefit from building website designing and blogging skills.
Writing Skills
One of the most important and overlooked skills in the workplace is the ability to write. Many business graduates and those with advanced college degrees lack the ability to communicate ideas clearly through their writing.
Teaching kids these skills at a formative age is vital to their later success in other endeavors. The ability to write about any subject anywhere will serve them well in their educational endeavors as well. More than gaining the ability to write about the where and the what happened of your travels, kids will develop grammar skills and learn about sentence structure; they will learn HOW to write, and how to write to an audience.
Writing a blog is a specific set of writing skills. The content must be entreating, educational, and factual as well. Research skills are also a must and can be taught as a part of these writing lessons. This type of writing will help translate to research papers, college and high school essays, and more. Researching skills will also serve your children well in their adult lives. Too many sources out their make claims or provide the wrong information. By knowing how to research, they will not only be able to discern truth from the false information that is rampant, they will more importantly know when to question what is being said.
Business Skills
You are running your blog like a business, correct? If you are working your travel blog correctly, you have built an audience. Now that you have increased your readership, you can monetize your site. You can open your site up to advertising, affiliate links, sponsored posts, and even site sponsors. You are probably getting discounts on travel, discounted or free equipment to test and review, and more. These are all part of valuable business lessons your kids can learn from. Chances are they will have to manage these things in the future.
These include simple things like accounting, marketing, distribution, and networking. Since you are an entrepreneur, your kids have an opportunity to learn those things from you as well. This does not mean you have to open the books to your children but have them track numbers on their own spreadsheets or in their own apps, share revenue with them that their own posts generate, and teach them about expenses and profit and loss.
No matter what they choose to eventually do with their lives, budgeting skills and relating to numbers will prove valuable knowledge.
Networking and Salesmanship
Most of the time you don’t get ads, sponsored posts, and other business relationships simply because your blog exists. You need to network and to sell to companies why being seen on your blog is good for them and their customers. Make your kids a part of this process and even invite them to participate as well as observe.
Think about it this way: no matter what your profession, relating to others including coworkers and customer service skills are almost always applicable. While travel blogging is often a small sideline that generates extra income for some, it is important to understand these skills even in the smallest of things.
Relationship Building
One of the reasons you travel with your kids in the first place is to give them some great experiences they will take with them forever. Another is that you can build your relationship with them by traveling together. This teaches them things like conflict management, problem-solving, teamwork, and more.
Because you learn these things together as a family, your relationship and connection are deeper than they were before. Working through issues and learning together make for a stronger family connection, and one that will last well into your child’s adult years.
You can’t really lose by involving your kids in your travel blog. They will learn a lot from you, and chances are you will learn a lot from them as well. Be open, understanding, and kind and let them be a part of what you are doing. In the long run, all of your lives will be forever changed.