Happy Steps travel blog

Just some updates for this travel blog

I know I haven’t been blogging lately, I’m still organizing this travel site especially doing backup and upgrading to the latest WordPress. It sure takes time and some studying as I’m usually asking help from my techie bro when it comes to website issues such as database backup or looking for best website hosting. Now I’m happy that I did the backup and upgrade myself. I’m glad that I’m seeing my WordPress dashboard with a better look, and I like how the links to different sections are arranged now. Continue reading… »

My blogging journey

As one gets into the world of blogging, he/she is actually embarking on a journey, from learning how to make that very first post, to getting familiar with the blogging platform’s environment, or trying to tweak the theme. Later on, that journey would continue deeper into the blogosphere as one goes into interacting with readers, visiting other sites, and dealing with the technical aspects of maintaining the site.
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How’s your travel budget for 2009?

The holidays are over and the start of the year makes me wonder
where I would be traveling this time. I know most of us have spent a
lot on gifts, food and other related holiday expenses
especially travel and recreation. Well, it seems like most of us have
also forgotten not just our resolve to eating healthy and in moderation
but on spending wisely as well. For some who have stable financial
resources, going over the budget occasionally is not really much of a
concern but for those who live with piled up bills and credit card
debt, they would have to be wiser and more disciplined with their
finances in order to be debt free in the future.

For 2009 I have no particular travel plans yet. I know going on a trip would entail a lot of finances and as a travel bug, I need to save up for my next destination wherever that would be. After my Europe trip which really made a big dent on my personal finances, my next travel might just be here in the Philippines. After all, there are still so many islands and provinces here I have yet to discover.

How about you, what are your travel plans for this year? Do you still have some budget for travel and vacation?

Happysteps.net Top 10 Entrecard droppers for October

Happysteps.net welcomes November with much hope and thankfulness. And as a member of the Entrecard community, I’m sending out a big thank you to my regular Entrecard visitors. For those who took time to always drop their cards and making it to the top 10, here’s some linky love as my way of thanking you.

cheapdanny (30)
BasBasBas.com (29)
Thailand Land of Smiles (28)
Random Ramblings (28)
Lofty Matters (27)
Symphony of Love (26)
rainydazeee (25)
Good Life Review (24)
Comedy Plus (24)
Darnuth Keep (24)

So, it’s a different list again from the previous August and September top droppers. This will be the last post highlighting my top droppers since I’ll be featuring them in an RSS widget on the sidebar from now on. Watch out for that! Happy EC dropping!

Affiliate marketing for travel blogs

More travel blogs on the rise

I’ve been visiting a lot of sites lately and it’s great to see a lot of travel blogs around. Some are focused on topics and destinations just within their hometown or city, while some write about anything related to travel (just like this blog). Writing about the places traveled and the stories behind every trip is a nice way to keep those memories alive, thus the increase in travel related blogs.

Online opportunities for travel blogs

There are many topics to talk about related to travel – hotels and accommodations, food and dining, shopping, airlines, tourist attractions, events and festivals, bookings and reservations and so much more. The many services and industries related to travel also provide opportunities for travel blogs to engage in online ventures such as affiliate marketing where site owners get commissions for visitors who click on an affiliate logo (e.g. a hotel or travel gear website) that would result to a sale. For travel blog owners, featuring travel related affiliate links is another option for generating online income.

Getting into affiliate marketing

It’s best to be careful about choosing which affiliate company to sign up and feature on your site. There are some advertising companies who are not that honest with their referrals and traffic that’s intended for you could be redirected to another affiliate. To avoid affiliate link hijacking, recommends.me offers a URL wrapping technique that makes affiliate codes safer, shorter and more readable leading to higher click through rates (CTR). This means more clicks from your site visitors, resulting to more sales. Affiliate marketing is a way for businesses to promote their products and services, and for website owners to generate additional income from their blogs.

Happysteps.net Top 10 Entrecard droppers for September

There are so many things to be thankful about and one of them is this blog where I share about my travels. I’m also glad for the increase in my site visitors, most of them from Entrecard and Google searches. This post is my way of thanking my top 10 Entrecard droppers for September which surprisingly have some newcomers in this list compared to my August top droppers.

Good Life Review (28)
cheapdanny (28)
Lofty Matters (28)
Rich’s Blog (27)
rainydazeee (27)
My Opinion Counts (27)
The Pond (27)
Happy Life (27)
Knoxville Tennessee Area Local Expert (27)
Thailand Land of Smiles (27)

Your visits and drops are very much appreciated. In return, I’m giving you some linky love. Keep on dropping!

More bandwidth needed for happysteps.net

For some of my regular readers and Entrecard droppers, I sincerely apologize if you were not able to access this site last week. The error message of “bandwidth exceeded” was displayed and nothing more for about 15 hours. It took me by surprise (it meant my site’s traffic increased) but I was disappointed since it happened late in the evening when my web host provider’s technical support was offline. I emailed them immediately and got a reply by noon the next day. That incident made me realize that having a 24/7 technical support for web hosting is very important.

Anyway, I have upgraded my hosting package to allocate more bandwidth for this site, though I plan to change to another hosting provider, and yup, it should have 24-hour online technical support. For those who are having difficulties with their web hosting providers, it might be high time to check out other companies and compare with your current hosting package. Browse on some informative sites such as Webhosting rating to compare some web hosting providers and their different hosting packages. They also have a list of the top ten best web hosts for 2008.

And since I am on my way to hosting this site on a different provider, I find one of their articles ‘Essential Steps For Changing Web Hosts’ helpful. It gave me an idea of keeping a backup copy of my files, updating my DNS records and other basic things to do. I still have until end of this year to do the move, I know it will not be that easy but I hope it will be a smooth change for this blog.

Happysteps.net Top 10 Entrecard droppers for August

My Prague vacation is almost over… so we’ve been doing a lot of “cramming”, which means touring around some places and sights I still haven’t been to and with less than a week left before my flight. Tomorrow we will be going to the National Museum, and hopefully we will be dropping by the Old Town again for some souvenirs.

So before I get busy with touring around, here’s my way of saying thanks to my top ten droppers via Entrecard:

Meltwater. Torrents. Meanderings. Delta. (28)
Thailand Land of Smiles (28)
cheapdanny (28)
Cookie travels (26)
rainydazeee (25)
Happy Life (25)
Symphony of Love (25)
simply euphoric (23)
Toltec Insights with Dr. Susan Gregg (22)
iWalk,U2? (22)

Thanks so much for dropping by regularly! And to all my Entrecard visitors… keep on dropping, it’s very much appreciated. Have a great week ahead!

It’s almost September!

I’ve been mindful about counting the days lately. Aside from my Europe vacation almost coming to an end (I will be going home on the first weekend of September), my happysteps.net web hosting will also be expiring effective next month. I wish I had the time to transfer to another hosting company before that date but unfortunately I’ve been so busy here, trying to balance between touring around and squeezing in some work when I’m at home. So now, I’d have to continue with my present web hosting for another three months. Dealing with web hosting issues is part of the blogging journey, and you need to consider future upgrades when your site traffic and storage capacity increases.

Searching for a web hosting package to suit one’s website needs depends on a lot of factors, mainly with budget concerns and the site’s target audience. For instance, business websites especially online stores need considerable bandwidth and storage such as HostingMetro.com – business web hosting packages which offers business sites 1000 GB bandwidth/125 GB storage and ecommerce sites 3500 GB bandwidth/300 GB storage. For personal sites, such as blogs, they offer 10 GB bandwidth and 500 MB storage which is pretty much enough unless you keep a huge collection of high quality graphics or videos which usually eats up a lot of storage and bandwidth.

I am currently subscribed with just the basic storage and bandwidth features for this blog. With my plans of adding a gallery page, since my Flickr photo-sharing account is over its limit already, I expect this blog to need more storage space in the future. Site traffic is also increasing, thus the need to upgrade to higher transfer rates.

Happysteps.net: Moving forward

Celebrating a blog’s birthday can be a similar experience to your own birthday. It brings the blogger to moments of pondering about where her blog is heading to, particularly with how to improve and make it better.

For instance, I have so many plans for happysteps.net and here are just few of them:

- Change my blog template. (This is an immediate need for me, especially as I look at my blog everyday and seeing a lot of space eaten up by the header image. But I am also here in Europe on a vacation so I had to make the most of my time here, right? I still want to visit some museums and galleries here in Prague. The new template will be given attention when I’ll be home next month.)
- Add an Entrecard top dropper list (this should have dofollow links) in the sidebar.
- Organize my categories (yeah, it’s a mess!).
- Add a favicon!
- Add a gallery page.
- Add an Entrecard list page (featuring my faves – organized according to fast loading sites, quality content, reciprocal droppers, EC widget above fold, blogs with top dropper lists, blogs featuring their advertisers, etc.)
- Register in more blog directories
…and so much more!

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Happy 1st blog anniversary to happysteps.net!

Yup, this blog just turned a year older today. And as promised in my previous post, I will be giving away free 300 Entrecard credits for this day’s first ten droppers. Earlier this morning, I checked my inbox and already got 26 drops. Here’s the proof:

Congratulations to the following who were the first to drop on happysteps.net’s blog anniversary:
1. Manilenya
2. Pinoy Teens Online
3. Backcounter Buffet
4. Retired and Restless
5. Call Center Gal
6. Cookie Travels
7. Vibrant Healthy U
8. Roxiticus Desperate Housewives
9. Beyond Taiwan
10. Magic & Moments at Dragonfly Cottage

I will be sending your 300 Entrecard credits soon. And to all my EC droppers, thanks so much for dropping your cards on happysteps.net. I always make sure I reciprocate your drops since the inbox is where I prioritize my dropping session before going to my bookmarked EC sites.

Big thanks goes to HappyCaity.com for sponsoring 1000 EC credits for this giveaway.

Happy Caity, my 11-month old baby niece (who’s also a travel bug) will be celebrating her first birthday this coming Wednesday, August 27. Do visit her blog and make sure to greet her on her special day!

Here’s to more blogging years ahead of us! 

Free Entrecard credits for my upcoming blog anniversary!

Happysteps.net will be celebrating its first anniversary in the blogosphere anytime next week!

I am not that creative when it comes to cooking up some blogging contest, so for this blog’s first ‘birthday’ I will simply be giving away 300  Entrecard credits EACH for free to the first 10 droppers on that day. That’s equal to a day’s worth of dropping session, yeah? Let’s see who will be the lucky droppers when I check my Entrecard drops inbox that day for the first 10 EC logos lining up!

What day is it then? Hmmm…I am not telling but here’s a hint: you can figure it out from the archives section.

Enjoy the weekend peeps!

Big thanks from happysteps.net! :)

I’m here in Prague again! But before hitting the streets tomorrow… I’d like to thank my Top Entrecard droppers for the month of July:

Thailand Land of Smiles (26)
Toltec Insights with Dr. Susan Gregg (25)
My Trips (24)
rainydazeee (23)
Travel Guides ( 23)
Angels on Your Shoulder (22)
Pastel Corner (19)
Travel Asia (17)
Hollywood Star (17)

Thanks to my July advertisers as well… is there a way to track previous advertisers on Entrecard?

One more thing… special thanks to Beadalicious for the Arte Y Pico award… sorry I decided not to post my own list of blogs for this award since it would take lots of time for me to browse through all these inspiring blogs I’ve enjoyed reading via Entrecard.

Have a great Sunday ahead! 

Webhosting resources for travel blogs

I’ve been browsing through a lot of travel blogs lately and I noticed that some of them are not yet hosted on their own domains. For those who would like to take their travel blogs to the next level, the usual move is to be hosted on your own dot com (in my case it’s a dot net ). I remember when my siblings and I were still deciding on which web hosting company to host our blogs. We browsed over a lot of hosting packages, reviews and checked out some lists of web hosting rating before deciding which is which.
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Choosing a three-column Wordpress theme for my travel blog

Few more months to go before this blog turns a year older so I am on the lookout for some new WordPress themes. I prefer the three-column layout to maximize on a browser’s space and so that my readers wouldn’t have to scroll down many times over during their visit. I am also planning to change my header image and put in some of my travel photos but that would take time for now. Anyway, I still have few months for that, yeah? I hope I would come up with a totally different look and style for this blog’s first year anniversary.
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A new template for my travel blog?

It’s been nine months already for happysteps.net and I am happy that this blog has been a venue for my ideas and musings about travel. Though I am not always going on a vacation or tour to some of the world’s famous travel destinations, I consider my trips away from home as something worth sharing in this blog.

Anyway, I am thankful for the nine months that has been and am looking forward to this blog’s first anniversary and the rest of the years to come. As I was musing about this, the idea of changing my blog’s template came up again. Actually it has been on my mind for a long time now. I really wish I could have more time to give my blog a new look or even do some tweaking on the sidebar and add some widgets.
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Another WordPress theme for happysteps?

Ever since I’ve started this blog on my own domain, I’ve spent considerable amount of time browsing over the net for a Wordpress theme that would fit the concept of my blog. So far, this template is great, though it would be tempting sometimes when I go through some websites offering free WordPress themes and there I go, thinking if I would have a new template again or not.
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Happy milestones

Happysteps.net is almost 7 months now. I can just remember when I first thought of having a travel blog and thinking of a domain name that suggests fun and adventure. Thanks to Techxplore for helping out in the techie stuff such as domain registration, installing WordPress and changing the blog theme.

Being a newbie in the blogosphere is a challenge, and when it comes to having your own domain, it’s best to consult the experts and do some research such as reading some web hosting faq where you gain more ideas and learn more about web hosting basics on topics such as domain registration, bandwidth, disk space, site maintenance, and more. It also helps to hop on to other blogs and hearing from what others had to say. Truly, knowledge becomes more useful when shared with others.