Food and Travelling

04:06 Unknown

You can join a writers' community, where people freely dispense tips on improving writing or increasing readership (see How to increase blog traffic). Girish Khare, a part-time blogger, discovered the benefits of this when a member of his community put him in touch with a journalist, who then published some of his blogs in the newspaper that she worked. Khare started blogging in 2006 after he suffered five heart attacks in a year and decided to opt out of the corporate rat race. He took a sabbatical and spent months travelling to exotic locations, from underground rock churches in Lalibela, Ethiopia, to the tropical rainforest of Borneo.

"Food and travelling are my two passions, so I began writing about them in my blog. After I had penned my experiences in Borneo, I received an invitation from the government of Malaysia, which asked me to visit the country along with some journalists and highlighting it as a luxury destination," says 55-yearold Khare. The same year he joined a friend's travel & tour company in Mumbai.

In 2007, Khare's casual writing became serious business when he did some work for Cox & Kings and his blogs were bought by travel and food magazines and portals. "You need to offer novelty in your blogs.

I have written about the cuisine of the Bedouins of Africa as well as how to cook food in banana leaves," says Khare. Currently, he writes eight blogs a week and earns Rs 50,000 a month from his articles.

Once you find your literary footing, it may be better to have your own Website and domain name. This gives you a specific identity, and if you submit your blog's URL to search engines, it will become more noticeable on the Net. Each search engine has Webmaster tools that can guide you through this process. The charges for a domain name usually range from Rs 300-1,000 a year. The main source of income for most bloggers is GoogleAdSense, which places contextual ads on Websites.