Let’s talk photo travel blog. I started this travel blog, Travel Feeder in year 2008. When this blog was created 3 years ago, it was initially my personal travel blog to share all my tips, guides and experiences gathered from my travels during the past 6 years. During this period, I traveled to numerous parts of the world from Asian to European countries, from east to west, from China, Thailand, Indonesia, Australia, Malaysia to UK, France, Italy, Spain, Switzerland, Belgium, German, Denmark and Netherland. With my deep passion in travel, I was able to keep traveling and sharing new tips and guides on my travel blog. Travel Feeder has now more than 540 original articles being published on the blog.

Coincidentally, I fell in love with travel photography within the same period. I bought my first digital camera Nikon 4100 after losing my old film SLR Nikon F70 on my travel to Gold Coast. It marked the beginning of my digital photography journey. Before I went to Shanghai in year 2008, I bought myself the lovely Panasonic Lumix FZ28 ultra zoom prosumer camera. From there on, I was completely spoilt by the art of photography. In year 2009, less than a year of owning the FZ28, with the encouragement of my affection towards travel photography, I bought a DSLR, the Nikon D60. It was my first ever digital DSLR. It was also the time when I decided to include my limited knowledge of digital photography into Travel Feeder, and to expand it to become a more interesting photo travel blog, with much more exciting stories on both travel and photography.

I was then confused with the title description of this blog, whether Travel Feeder should call itself a photo travel blog or, a travel photo blog. A travel photo blog is a blog sharing mainly travel photos with captions, while a photo travel blog means a travel blog sharing various tips and guides, with helps from photos. Contextually, both are equally right. In fact, Travel Feeder has more to offer than just each of these 2 niches. With a synergy effect,  it actually combines both niches into a wider aspect which more people are getting interested in nowadays. It features articles that encompass the entire range of scope from travel to photography. So, Travel Feeder is both a travel photo blog or a photo travel blog!

Today, Travel Feeder has emerged as one of the top photo travel blog on the internet with numerous pages ranked top 10 in Google search result. Among those pages are:

1. Top 10 places to visit in Malaysia
2. Nikon D7000 category
3. Packing list – Power socket adaptor for china travel
4. Top 5 travel tips for booking Airasia flight
5. My western Europe tour itinerary 1st draft

As you can see, these popular pages are about different locations of this world. However, they are aiming to the same group of people, or travelers. Who are they? “Budget travelers?” “Bingo!” You are right. I’m a budget traveler so I’m blogging for budget travelers! I’m an advocate of budget traveling who believe traveling is for anyone who loves to travel, regardless how much money they have in their bank accounts, and how old actually they are. Anyone who fall for the hobby, Travel Feeder will surely enlighten you some how, some where.

Now, how do travelers normally find this blog in Google search engine? Which search keywords are most likely to put Travel Feeder on top of the search result? Let’s see some of the top keywords or phrase queries that could reach me in top 10 search result:

1. Nikon
2. go
3. My Western Europe tour
4. Airasia free seats 2012
5. Arc de triomphe

With over 35k impressions each recorded in last month, ‘Nikon‘ (photography) and ‘go‘ (travel), are both the most popular keywords to find this travel blog in the top 10 search result. This again both the core interests of Travel Feeder are well accepted. Also, Airasia and Europe are popular keywords as well.

Next. Let’s talk about what most bloggers are really keen on. Let’s talk monetisation. Travel Feeder has been around in the blogosphere for 3 years. Apart from my passion and enthusiasm in travel and photography, monetization of the blog is the next best motivation for me to keep writing articles and blogging travel! By adopting various monetization system into my photo travel blog, I have successfully made more than enough money to support all my travel expenses as well as photography equipment. And this is the best part of my blogging journey: I travel to blog, I blog to make money and I make money to sponsor my next travel! Let’s come back to this afterward.

Next, I wish to touch on some innovations found on Travel Feeder. In Year 2008, I ran a link love campaign on my blog and it has successfully attracted more than 100 travel blogs and sites to join us. In Year 2009, I joined istockphoto as a contributor and the photo slide box has since been a prominent feature on my blog’s side navigation bar. In October 2010, in conjunction with my Birthday, I announced the launch of my Photography blog, Cecil Lee Photography. Early this year in March, I launched my online photo e-store. All my top travel photo selection could now be bought or downloaded free in the e-store. Being inspired by my second travel to Europe early this year, I announced 2 months ago in August the launch of a new category named “From Travel to Photo“, featuring mini travel guide on how to plan your Europe travel. And finally…

Finally today, to celebrate my birthday this year, I’m excited to announce another new feature on my blog. This would be the 3rd announcement of Year 2011, a breakthrough on my blog. I believe it’s going to be another hot cake around, since most of the blogs found on internet currently were created with hope to make money. Yes! I’m here to introduce a brand new, dedicated page on Travel Feeder. It’s all about “How to make money online from blogging“. Starting from today, bloggers who are fresh in blogging, or bloggers who are frustrated for not making money so far, can click on the Menu Bar on top of any Travel Feeder’s page to gain access to this exclusive guide on how to make money blogging. This page is dynamic with the content being updated every now and then when I found necessary. This guide gathered things that I have been doing to make me enough money for all my travels and photography expenses and hope it will help you in the same ways. And this is the biggest announcement from Travel Feeder for Year 2011. Happy reading. – Travel Feeder, your ultimate photo travel guide to Europe

p/s: This post is dedicated to the late Mr.Steve Jobs, the former CEO and co-founder of Apple and one of the greatest leader and entrepreneur in the world, who left us on 5th October 2011, the day after Apple announced the latest iPhone 4s in the media conference named “Let’s Talk iPhone“.

My best travel photography blog ever created, the Travel Feeder, has just turned 3 Years old last month. Hooray! Come and celebrate with me together!

To commemorate the little success of this travel blog in terms of both travelers acceptances and commercial interests, I decided to lift its overall blog appearance to another level up by changing the whole color scheme of the blog page! These changes are subtle technicality wise but, the effect from these changes is significant in terms of its appearance and objectives behind. Gone is the old greenish color scheme which was a little dated and overdone. In place is a more down to earth blue and grey color scheme without much fancy shades or bright colors. A new turquoise color title image with new blog description is inserted, which blended into the new color scheme perfectly well.

This subtle but significant change is to present this blog in a more professional outlook and to show that Travel Feeder is much grown up and more mature now! Another objective of this change after the previous major change more than a year ago (you may love to see what had been changed to this blog previously), is to have a more simple and plain looking web page to emphasize those travel photos featured in this travel photo blog. The above travel photo snapped in London shows what I actually meant by that. Simpler blog design now let my readers concentrate more on my photos without too carried away by the old fancy blog color scheme…

So this is it! Happy 3rd Birthday to Travel Feeder, Your Travel Photography Blog! May my best created travel photo blog be even better in future! Hope you like it…   – Travel Feeder, your best travel photo blog

Wow! Time flies. I almost forgot. Travel Feeder has just turned 1 year old yesterday! I realised that when I was blogging for something else. I’m going to celebrate! I’m going to celebrate! Wait a second. How should I celebrate? What am I celebrating for? What has Travel Feeder achieved during the past year?

Although it is not especially outstanding, averaging 5000 unique visits per month, PageRank4 status, 12,000 of spam comments caught, 500 inspiring comments received from my readers and a total of 110 blog posts published, I’m quite happy with Travel Feeder achievement. I need to thank and appreciate all my readers’ full support over the past year in motivating me to continue blogging on travel.

To celebrate with my readers, here is a glass of coffee for all of you and also me… I will continue to blog about travel tips and guides, travel destination and my travel log. As my motto says: WORLD IS BIG, MONEY IS SMALL, LET’S TRAVEL BE WORTH EVERY PENNY THAT WE GOT!

Your sponsor could further help this travel blog a success. If you like my stories in Travel Feeder, you may subscribe to RSS feed for free updates. Of course, your compliments to Travel Feeder by leaving your gracious comments here are most welcome! – Travel Feeder.

Mmm… may I congratulate myself? Yes! Well done Travel Feeder. After starting to blog about travel since almost a year ago (still a week to go before its birthday…), Travel Feeder has finally, though not ultimately, achieved another milestone, a Google PR4 status! What is actually PR4?

PR or Google Page Rank is an ranking index as part of the Google page rank technology to refer to search popularity of one website in Google environment. The PR ranking starts from zero (0) for fresh website, to the maximum of ten (10) for popular website in Google search result. The higher the PR index number is, the closer your website is positioned to Google front page of search result.

Off course, it is just a reference. A PR10 website doesn’t guarantee a page 1 hit on every google search, so the same for PR0. But how does PageRank4 means to Travel Feeder? I’ve done some search myself over keywords that would normally be the travellers’ favourites when they search for some travel information over Google. Here are some results on certain keywords that I’ve search to show how Travel Feeder performs in Google search with a PR4 status:-

1. Top Travel Blog – Hit page 8 on item 74;
2. Travel Camera – Hit page 5 on item 45;
3. Top travel packing list – Hit page 6 on item 57;
4. Perfect travel destination – Hit page 1 on item 2;
5. Top 5 europe city – Hit page 1 on item 4;
6. Top 5 China city – Hit page 1 on item 7;
7. Travel with DSLR – Hit page 1 on item 2;
8. Local food in Bali – Hit page 1 on item 5;
9. Shanghai travel experience – Hit page 2 on item13;
10. Bali travel experience – Hit page 2 on item 15;
11. Top 5 travel – Hit page 2 on item 19;
12. Top europe city-  Hit page 10 on item 96;
13. Nikon D60 and Lumix FZ28 – Hit page 1 on item 1;
14. Travel camera bag – Hit page 14 on item 140, and
15. Travel Feeder – Hit page 1 on item 1

As one would expects, the results vary. Depending on the keyword or phrase, Travel Feeder could hit the Google 1st page to as low as Page 14! Forget about those general terms of travel, like “travel”, “travel tips”, “travel guides”, even if I search on those keywords, I will not see Travel Feeder in the top 100 at least. Well, nothing special, just to mark this  as a short term achievement of Travel Feeder, a Top 5′s Travel Blog. – Travel Feeder.

NEW: Sad to found out that TF has dropped back to PR3 as on 26th June 2009. I will work harder then….

Congratulation, and celebration…. First started to blog for travel on 17th June 2008, I’m glad, though not excellent, that Travel Feeder could reeach its 100th post benchmark in 10 months or slightly less than a year! Hurray!

I love travel, especially vacation travel. I will travel whenever time and money allow me to do so. However, vacation travel in the current economy situation seems luxurious. Sadly to thank the crisis, at least now we can enjoy cheaper vacation with cheaper air fares and cheaper, lower demand accomodations. More sadly to thank us as human to ruin our naked earth by setting terrorism, protests, bombing, government overthrowing and the current Swine Flu infection, cost of travel particularly to those socially unstable countries is now even cheaper (if only you dare to travel there )

So, being a travel blog, I would say Travel Feeder is the most exciting blog among others that I’ve been blogging so far. As I iterated in my introduction at the beginning post, Travel Feeder has been sticking to my motto: WORLD IS BIG, MONEY IS SMALL, LET’S TRAVEL BE WORTH EVERY PENNY THAT WE GOT!  I will continue to blog and share my travel experiences, travel tips, travel guides and the latest travel news with travelers worldwide.

In case you are new here, I’ve blogged about some (though I would hope it could be more) countries and cities and also some local travel destination in Malaysia. Among others, London, Paris, Venice, Rome, Brisbane, Gold Coast, Sunshine Coast, Bali, Shanghai, Hangzhou, Suzhou, Nanjing, Wuxi, Genting Highland, Penang and Langkawi are some travel destinations that I’ve been to. Of course, my travel ambition doesn’t stop here. My future plan is to travel Phuket in this October and hopefully to Bijing, HongKong, Singapore and revisit Bali in near future.

Another motivation to blog in Travel Feeder is my hobby in photography. If you could notice or have been following us, I got my new travel camera in October and cameras in December last year. So, more frequent travelling means more chances for me to take photos. Until today, I love both my Panasonic Lumix FZ28 and Nikon D60. Bear in mind, I still sticked to my motto, they are bother budget models . They have been giving me better photos to share in Travel Feeder as well as in my photo albums. Hooray!

So, stick with Travel Feeder. I will share more photos, tips and guides with you and I sincerely hope that I could travel more by earning more money and getting more competitive prices in fares and accomodations, but not taking advantages of those world’s social and economic crisis! Please! WE LOVE PEACE!!!

Lastly, please support me by giving your precious comments here for any good’s or bad’s so I could improve…. Or it would still be good to subscribe to my RSS feeds for FREE updates of my stories! Or if you are looking for your own travel cameras, buy it online through links from this blog so I could earn some commission from Amazon! Cheers! – Travel Feeder.