Merry Christmas! Travel Feeder and Cecil are wishing all my beloved fans and readers Merry Christmas and Have a great holiday!

What could be better than listening to Christmas carol during this festive season? Here is a short video on a carol performance by carollers at The Gardens shopping mall in Kuala Lumpur. Enjoy! (The Gardens and Mid Valley shopping malls can be reached by using the KL Integrated Railway System)

Happy Holidays! See you! – Travel Feeder, your ultimate photo travel guide to Malaysia

Travel Feeder and Cecil are wishing all my beloved fans and readers Merry Christmas and Have a great season holiday!

Pavilion is a premium shopping mall in Bukit Bintang area of KL, Malaysia, which could be reached by the  KL Integrated Railway System. Here are a few photos that I took at the Pavilion shopping mall in Kuala Lumpur the other day, with some attractive Christmas lighting and decorations as seen at night. Enjoy!

Some EXIF info: Shot in Program Auto mode, with Shutter speed 1/50 Sec and Aperture f3.5. Focus distance was set to 10mm. ISO 1600. Auto White Balance. No flash fired and No exposure being compensated with Matrix metering.

Some EXIF info: Shot in Program Auto mode, with Shutter speed 1/60 Sec and Aperture f3.5. Focus distance was set to 10mm. ISO 640. Auto White Balance. No flash fired and -1/3EV exposure being compensated with Matrix metering.

Some EXIF info: Shot in Program Auto mode, with Shutter speed 1/60 Sec and Aperture f3.5. Focus distance was set to 10mm. ISO 1000. Auto White Balance. No flash fired and No exposure being compensated with Matrix metering.

All Photos above were taken with my Nikon D7000 and Nikkor 10-24mm UWA lens. 7 days later after the Christmas Day would be the 1st day of 2012 New Year, and I’m drafting out my new year travel resolution again. Happy New Year 2012! – Travel Feeder, your ultimate photo travel guide to Malaysia

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“.

Steve Jobs, the visionary and creative leader of the giant tech company, Apple, who was behind the creation of iMac, iPod, iPhone and iPad, passed away 2 days ago on 5th October 2011 at the age of 56. I’m not a tech savvy, but I’m still using my iPhone to add contents to this travel blog, reply emails and etc when I’m away from my workstation without my netbook, and listening to my favourites songs with iPod whenever I’m bored. Undeniably, the demised legendary Steve Jobs had changed the way we work, communicate, and interact with others, as well as how we look at, process, edit, send, share our photo images on travel. He made all complicated technologies so easy to use even by a dumbass like me.

Without Steve Jobs, we wouldn’t have Apple. Without Apple Macintosh, we wouldn’t have Windows 7 of today. Without iMAc, we wouldn’t have known we could create amazing graphics on our computer that easy. Without iPod, we wouldn’t have known MP3 and MP4 players could be that small and stylish. Without iTune, we wouldn’t have known buying and downloading songs and movies and games could be that easy. Without iPhone, we wouldn’t have known we could make phone calls, play games, surf internet, shooting photos so easy on a smartphone by just tabbing, pushing, drawing circles, pinching on the screen. Without iPad, we wouldn’t have known a tablet computer could be so powerful, with so many people sitting at a cafe reading ebooks within his own library nowadays, and travelers snapping travel photos on their iPad2!

Steve Jobs’ innovative ideas on his creation has redefined the quality of our life. Most importantly, he made smartphones, laptop, computer, tablet pc and MP4 player so easy to work on that, has actually inspired me as a travel blogger cum photographer. Without iPhone, I wouldn’t have blogged that much on my travel and to share my travel photos and experiences on the go.

Steve Jobs is indisputably one of the greatest CEO and entrepreneur of all time in history. Let’s pay tribute to the most talented human being in the world, Steve Jobs of Apple. – Travel Feeder, your ultimate travel photo guide to Europe.

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