Mention the phrase “mommy blogger” to a crowd, and you’ll get a few different reactions. What some people view as a viable way to accrue a little extra income while staying home with young children, others see as a rudderless industry in need of guidance. The truth is, there are as many types of parent bloggers as there are parents, and judging with broad strokes do no one any favors. There are all sorts of parent blogs and whether you’re a professional parent blogger with a distinct niche or a mom just toying with the idea of starting up a casual blog, there are always ways to improve your blog. Even family travel bloggers like myself straddle the line between two niches (parent and travel blogs, obviously).

Blogging conferences abound. Just like there are travel blogging conferences, there are parent blogging conferences — way more of the latter, in fact. I’d like to talk about a one-time-only parent blogger mini-conference that should cover a lot of ground for blogging newbies and old-timers, in an incredibly fun, relaxing environment. The Mom Blogger Camp in in Velas Vallarta has some of the top experts on hand to give professional blogging tips and advice — plus hey — it’s in a Puerto Vallarta all-inclusive resort in the middle of winter! January 5-8, 2012, to be exact.What an awesome way to warm up: Mixing professional growth with a sunny vacation south of the border.

Now, I’m the conference organizer for this one-off Mom Blogger Camp, but the folks over at Velas Vallarta know what they’re doing; they hosted a Food Blogger Camp last winter, too.  The expert speakers coming to help parent bloggers grow professionally will also be enjoying themselves, hanging out by the pool, perhaps indulging in a spa visit, and all those other activities denoting a tropical vacation. Mom Blogger Camp attendees will have the opportunity to casually hang out with the speakers (within limits, of course, let’s respect each others’ personal space here!) in the afternoons, with most sessions being in the morning.

I’m looking forward to hearing The Bloggess‘s topic, Famous on the Internet. Not that I’ll ever be famous on the internet, but she’s hilarious and amazing. Also greatly anticipated are Deb Ng, Aparna Vashshit-Rota, Adria Richards, Peter Carey, Anne Hartsell, Mary Jo Manzanares, and Amy Whitley. Umm.. and that’s it. Not looking forward to any other speakers at this mini-conference, because that’s the lot of them! It’s a small, low-key, yet meaty retreat with lots of time to enjoy Puerto Vallarta.

The schedule is here; you can see that there’s some time built in each day for Mom Blogger Camp attendees to talk up any travel sponsors.  This is an important part of the schedule — after all, while this is a very, very affordable conference, the cost of air fare will have to be considered as well. Fortunately, from what I’ve seen, many family-friendly companies are happy to help mom bloggers get to conferences in the form of straightforward sponsorships.

The Mom Blogger Camp is open to anyone (dads too, of course!) and will be January 5-8, 2012 with the actual conference days are the 6th and 7th. I’ll be there, and I hope you will consider it, too.

Hmmm, well alrighty, then!

It was worse than the blind leading the blind – I was clueless and had no one leading me, either.  At least I had enough sense to know, even back in the mellower online world of 2006, that it would be better to write about a niche travel topic rather than try to break in as a general travel writer.  I chose family travel simply because I’d done it all over the world thanks to Navy assignments and could speak to the issues, not because I’m wildly maternal (as my kids will attest.)

My first post was the standard welcome to this new blog greeting, then the second was a fairly pointless one about American Express traveler’s checks. I finally said something useful when I wrote about Mini-Europe in Brussels, Belgium, and from there it was off and running.  I blogged to fill my spare time and to build an online presence in between print writing assignments, but instead found myself on the cusp of a publishing revolution.

I had no idea that blogging would become the impetus for covering motorsports like NHRA drag racing, meeting bloggers and startups in China, doing a lot of social media workshops and speaking plus launching an online course in social media marketing for tourism (all of which is about to lead to a book on tech-based entrepreneurship for people over 40.)

While I’ve thoroughly enjoyed writing for and representing my host the BootsnAll Travel Network, my daughter Nancy started college this fall;  even though my son is still at home, it seems like a good time to turn this blog over to another parent who wants to tackle the joys of Walt Disney World, or safe flying with kids or top tips for kids in Tokyo.

As far as I know, Boots hasn’t selected a replacement for me yet, so if you’re interested (yes, it is a paid position) then I suggest you check the BootsnAll Travel Writer Platform page.

There is, of course, unfinished business.  I wasn’t able to complete the 50 States Series (got stuck on Mississippi for some reason) so I may try to pick that back up and continue it in some form elsewhere. There is a video or two that I never got around to editing, and a notebook with post ideas that I haven’t tackled yet.

Not to worry – I still write for the Perceptive Travel blog, do guest posts for other blogs and also plan to make Fridays a travel post day on my personal blog, Sheila’s Guide to the Good Stuff.

Thank you so much to all of the faithful readers who have been here since the beginning, and those who may have found Family Travel more recently.  I’ll never forget meeting some of my readers for the first time in person, at the BlogHer conference in 2007. It is the most wondrous feeling to have someone walk up and say, “Hi, I read your blog….”

I’m so grateful that you’ve all been along for the ride.  Let’s stay in touch, shall we?

So what’s with the “build a village” thing? How can the power of travel make a difference in the world?

From the rocking PwP travel bloggers themselves, about their 2010 beneficiary, LAFTI:

“….Land for Tillers’ Freedom (LAFTI) [is] a non-profit organization that is focused on changing the conditions of the Dalit caste or India’s ‘untouchables.’ ….Passports with Purpose’s goal is to raise $50,000 to build a village in India through the Friends of LAFTI Foundation.

With its home office in the village of Kuthur (Tamil Nadu), LAFTI’s mission is to liberate Dalit women and their families through projects such as land distribution and cultivation, housing construction, adult training and youth housing and education. LAFTI works with the government and financial institutions to purchase land for Dalit families. Each house costs approximately $2,000 to build.”

Wow, seems like a lot, right? US$50,000 to make this happen.

Well, as of this posting, they’re already at US$37,000+ and movin’ on up.

Here’s the deal: you bid on generously donated travel related items and if your bid wins, you get the item AND the satisfaction of donating to a worthy cause. If you don’t win the bid, well, you’ve STILL donated to a worthy cause.

Want some examples of prizes? Here’s the Passports with Purpose prize list and donation page, which includes goodies like:

***  A guided tour of your choice of Nuremberg, Bamberg or Munich from Wandering Family.

***  A Timbuk2 Travel Gear Bundle from Pit Stops for Kids.

***  Two adult and two child 3-day Go Cards from Mother of All Trips.

***  Two weekend nights stay at any Omni Hotel & Resort from The Q Family Adventures.

***  An Xbox 360 AND a Kinect from Chris Around the World.

….and the list goes on and on with tempting items like that.

Only US$10 per bid.

Do it! Do it!  :)

Cheap Flights

Tourism and visitor numbers are way down all along the coast, often for no reason other than people are assuming that the beaches are full of tar balls and such.

I’m not discounting the tremendous damage that some areas have experienced, but many places are suffering from a lack of visitors because people aren’t calling ahead or checking online.

For an overall view of coast conditions, go to the NRDC (Natural Resources Defense Council) oil/tar tracking map.  It….

“….tracks the history of closures, advisories, and notices by county for beaches that have been affected by the oil spill. The tar ball icon indicates counties with any historical or current beach actions related to the oil spill. The sand pail icon marks counties that have not had official closures, advisories, or notices due to the oil spill.”

For Florida, go to the Florida Live site set up by Visit Florida and including beach webcams and local CVB (Convention and Visitor’s Bureau) tweets.

For anywhere, make some calls ahead to the local hotels and even restaurants.  They’d love to give you their perspective.

In it, I wrote about taking the kids to visit places that seem crummy, but really aren’t, and how you can’t have an opinion about seemingly crummy places unless you’ve been there yourself.

I wrote….

“Let’s take Lubbock, Texas, for example.

The city that Buddy Holly and Waylon Jennings got the heck out of. Sights include, hmmm, the National Ranching Heritage Center (exhibits of spurs and bits!) and ummm, the American Wind Power Center (windmills!)

“Lubbock or Leave It,” sing the Dixie Chicks.

The legendary folk/country Texas vocal group the Flatlanders (Butch Hancock, Joe Ely and Jimmie Dale Gilmore) didn’t name their group “Guys from a Nifty Place,” they named it “Flatlanders.” ‘Nuff said.

OK, so why am I whipping up on poor Lubbock? Because I just don’t think you can designate a place Yuckyville until you have physically been there to investigate.

Ergo, I need to travel to Lubbock before I can pop off about it.”

What was amazing about that post was that people showed up to leave comments on it about how much they liked Lubbock, including someone from the Buddy Holly Museum. I was touched and even more intrigued after that.

Well, I’m pumped to announce that my chance to investigate has finally arrived – I’ll be speaking with my Tourism Currents business partner Becky McCray in Lubbock, Texas on August 12 at the annual conference for TACVB (Texas Association of Convention and Visitor’s Bureaus.)

Our topic is blogger fam (familiarization) tours and press trips with today’s wired writers and content creators.

Before and after we speak, though, I get to explore Lubbock and its environs, plus check out what’s between Lubbock and the Austin area when I drive there (like a museum about women pilots during World War II who flew from Avenger Field in Sweetwater, Texas.)

Yes, I’m psyched to finally see Lubbock. Really.

I’m no exception, and I thought you might be interested in some of the data from the last six months about popular items on this blog.

The source of my data is Google Analytics, the free and incredibly comprehensive analytics package from Google.

Sorry, don’t think I can share specific readership numbers, but let’s say that it’s more than just my Mom but less than a million.

Your Favorite Posts

*** Military family travel to Hawaii: 11 affordable places to stay

I’m former Navy myself and used to live in the islands, so this was a logical post for me to write. It also made sense to highlight lodging on islands other than Oahu, not only for visitors but for the military families in living in Hawaii as kama’aina (locals.)

*** Where I’d take my kids: best US family beach vacations

This was a search engine no-brainer. People plan to take their kids to the beach all the time, and they’re searching for that info year-round. The fun thing about this post for me was that I was able to highlight many of my own family’s favorites in one post, while still providing popular content that readers and search engines would like. Since I often write about rather obscure things, it’s fun to “go mainstream” and be successful in the search engine battle for those keywords, but not feel that I was just cranking out crap for Google bots.

*** When your kids encounter a squat toilet

Awesome. I hope this one hangs on in the upper tier forever. I wrote it because we had to deal with this topic when we lived in Japan and traveled in Asia, and you should write what you know. Again, if I’m wrestling with a kid looking at that toilet and yelling “What do I do?” then I know other parents are, too.

*** My top tips for travel with kids to Tokyo, Japan

This was what I used to call a “lazy” post because it’s simply a roundup of info that I’d previously published on this blog, the Perceptive Travel Blog and some other publications. I used to think that every post had to be a sparkling example of Pulitzer Prize-winning originality, or I was a blogging failure. I got over it and figured out that the occasional roundup of related content was helpful, not lazy.

*** Finding the best iPhone and iPad apps for kids

I don’t own either device (my smartphone is an Android) but I could see amongst my parenting peers how popular iPhones and iPads were becoming for keeping kids reasonably entertained on the road. My friend Christine Lu uses her iPhone kid’s games with her son all the time.  This post basically points you to another friend’s resource blog on the topic, but that’s what blogging is all about for me – sharing great info.

***  Kids in Tokyo: escape to Yokohama

I am so glad that people still like this one; it’s one of my very early posts. While in Tokyo, I found myself going down to Yokohama a lot because the waterfront was so spacious and nicely laid out.  Having a local show me the Shin-Yokohama Ramen Museum in town was a major bonus.

Where You Come From

About half the traffic is from search engines: sure, Google is the top one, but I do get significant traffic from images/photos (which is why I use the ALT tag religiously) plus Yahoo and Bing.

StumbleUpon likes it here, too.  Here is my SheilaS StumbleUpon page if you want to see what I like on the web.

Most visitors are from the US, but we do have readers in the UK, Canada, Australia, India, Germany, Japan and the Netherlands. As a three-time expat myself, I do try to keep my international audience in mind.

Words You Use to Find Us

People type in words like “family travel,” of course, but we’re also found by people looking for info on whether TripIt is safe, cool travel souvenir ideas and stuff for kids to do in Michigan.

What is fun for me is that a lot of the posts I wrote because I was looking for certain information are favorites because apparently you were looking for the same info.

That makes me very happy. Thanks for reading.

Here’s an example of why they’re so handy….

I was speaking in Houston at the TFEA (Texas Festivals and Events Association) annual conference, and I needed a quick meal near the hotel.  It was a rather ritzy area – at one point I tweeted, “I’m looking for a Taco Bell in a Smith and Wollensky part of town” – but I did find a sandwich joint where I could run in and out and get something to go.

While parked, I checked in on both Gowalla and Foursquare, because I’m experimenting with them for my tourism-related clients. Both services use the GPS function on my T-Mobile Android smartphone to figure out where I am, and then show me nearby places that are listed in their database.

Both kept showing a nearby House of Pies.

Who wouldn’t want pie after a long drive and before a big speaking gig the next day?  Who has kids and spouses who like pie?

I rest my case.

Without the digital insights from Gowalla and Foursquare (and Yelp if I had launched that app, which also has a location-based function and checkins) I would not have noticed the neon-lit House of Pies building diagonally across the parking lot from me on Westheimer, a major Houston thoroughfare. There’s also a House of Pies on Houston’s Kirby Drive and they’re on Twitter as @HouseofPies1967.

One slice of their house specialty later, I was a fan of their Bayou Goo pie (a “pecan crust with a layer of sweet cream cheese, then a layer of vanilla custard swirled with chocolate chunks and topped with whipped cream and chocolate shavings”) and even more of a fan of location-based services that bring me the information I need, when I need it, where I am located.

It’s hard to beat that convenience at 9 pm in an unfamiliar city, I’ll tell you!

Take a close look at privacy and notification settings before you use these; the default setting tends to be a public broadcasting of your location via Twitter, Facebook, etc. and you need to think through those implications. You can choose not to inform anyone when you check in, of course; Foursquare calls it “off the grid.”

If you have a smartphone, consider getting one of these free travel apps – I’m partial to Gowalla because it has a scavenger hunt aspect that kids will like, and lots of cool Trips for travel ideas. For more insights, here’s Gary Arndt’s post Gowalla vs Foursquare as tools for travel.

These services can really help with the “what’s around here?” question as you travel.

(This post was included in the 21 July edition of Wanderfood Wednesday. Check it out for other foodie posts!)

In light of these demands on my travel time (plus my kids are 17 and 10, so I’m losing that, er, toddler perspective) I’m open to guest posts about family travel if they’re a good fit for the blog.

This is NOT a move to have a blog-written-by-random-people-so-it-sucks-because-it-loses-its-voice.

It’s just a note that I am not averse to occasionally featuring some other perspectives here, if the info is good.  300 – 500 words, maybe a few of your photos, link back to your site….pretty straightforward.  Can’t pay you (sorry!) in anything but a link, but we all know links are golden.  For those who would like a more formal arrangement, BootsnAll (they host this blog) does pay for travel articles.

Guest posts do two things:

1. Brings fresh info to the blog, particularly about places that I don’t know much about, and
2. Keeps me from losing my mind with obligation overload, which we all know would be a Bad Thing.

So, if you have kids and a possible post of interest, email me at sheila “at” sheilascarborough “dot” com and we’ll see about getting your name in lights.

Thanks!

***  The research work of Dr. danah boyd (yes, she spells it lowercase) into social media usage of people in general, but especially teens.  She argued strongly that privacy is not dead, but you must take much more control of your privacy than you did before the ubiquitous Web.  My feeling is that parents must help in this area, but how many of them are tech-savvy enough to do so?

Here is a video excerpt from her opening keynote and here is a summary of her presentation on the excellent site ReadWriteWeb (with the so-true quote, “By and large, teenagers, according to Boyd, are more conscious about what they can gain by being public, while adults worry more about what they could lose.”)

***  The explosive growth of smartphones continues and will continue as more and more new models and services are offered (my own teen does not have one, but I can see the day coming – for now she works on her mad texting skillz.)   What does it mean when your kid has the Web in his/her pocket?

The biggest techy buzz out of “South by” this year was location-based games like Foursquare and Gowalla, where people can “check in” to different locations and collect virtual prizes for doing so.  The games are more addictive than you’d think (I play and I normally dislike games, and on Foursquare you don’t need a smartphone to play) but there are security implications to revealing your exact physical location to the whole planet, via the Web.

I strongly recommend talking about that with your tweens/teens before they jump into these services.

It’s a fabulous gathering but not exactly a hotbed of family travel information (unless you want to count my son going to the associated ScreenBurn video gaming event.)

If I was a more organized blogger I’d have things pre-posted and/or guest posts lined up for you….and that’ll happen right after those last Christmas decorations get put away at my house, right?

Right!