Blogging for Expats: List-Building Basics

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Once you’ve created a portable career to support you overseas, you need to start marketing. The best place to do it is online, with a website or blog. When you market online, there are essentially two ways to get your message out. Attract huge amounts of traffic using any/every available means — ads, PPC, social [...]

Blogging for Expats: You’ve Only Got a Few Months to Get This Right

Your website should be easy to read with a phone's browser

If you’re serious about building a business or portable career around a blog, you only have a few months to get one particular technical aspect under control. I’m talking about mobile. Fewer people today are accessing the internet from a PC than from a mobile device. Most of us use laptops, netbooks, tablets and even [...]

Five Social Media Platforms Every Expat Blogger Should Use

social media icons for Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Delicious, YouTube, WordPress

You’ve set up your blog, you’ve found a terrific theme, you’re producing content. . . now what? How do you attract the right target audience? Create a social media strategy. Which specific social media platforms you use will depend on your niche and your audience. Basic rule of thumb? You need to hang out where [...]

21 More Expat and Travel Blogs to Watch

Following in a more experienced person’s footsteps is a great way to learn something new, or to take the fear factor away from a scary new undertaking. Sharing an expat’s experience with the process of relocating, or their life overseas, can teach some very useful lessons. Here’s a list of expat and travel blogs and [...]

How to Know What Premium WordPress Theme is Right for your Site

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This is the 11th in our Blogging for Expats tutorial series. So you’ve got an idea for your blog, you’ve worked your way through the basics of setting it up, maybe you’ve even posted a few articles. But your site still doesn’t look as professional as you’d like. What to do. . . what to [...]

On the Second (and Third) Day of Christmas. . .

3 French Hens

Still pondering what to get for that expat or future expat on your Christmas list? I thought I’d have some fun with the run-up to Christmas and one of my favorite Christmas ditties. Between now and December 25, I’ll bring you the 12 days of Christmas, shopping-for-expats style. Each day we’ll focus on one aspect [...]

Build a Better Blog, Save Money

31 Days to Build a Better Blog

If you plan to blog as part or all of your expat portable career, you can get a jump start and save some money within the next 10 days. ProBlogger Darren Rowse has just released the new, updated, better-than-ever version of his classic 31 Days to Build a Better Blog. Early in my blogging career, [...]

Making Money from your Blog

financial sense

Blogging is a workable portable career for expats, requiring only some expertise, a computer and an internet connection. It can be an excellent way to fund your untethered life overseas. Before you get into the technical issues of setting up your blog, though, you need to have some sort of a plan. Because, if you’re [...]

Dress Up Your Blog with Pictures

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In our last installment of Blogging for Expats, we learned how to add content to a WordPress blog. Today we’ll go ahead and add some eye candy. Keep in mind that some WordPress themes require you to handle images a little differently, but this will work with the majority. It’s very common to see two [...]

He Writes about Everything, Everywhere — and So Can You!

Bangkok, Thailand

Recently I promised to find out more about how travel writers balance their lives between work and travel. To that end, I spoke with Gary Arndt. Gary is a travel blogger, which is a slightly different — but equally portable — career. Gary explained the difference between being a travel writer and a travel blogger: [...]