by Chris Guld, www.GeeksOnTour.com
A travel blog without a map is like cake without icing! It’s good, but not as good as it should be. And, sometimes don’t you just want the icing! A travel map can give your readers everything they want to know. Then, if they want more, they can click on a marker and follow the links to your blog posts!
I wrote about making a custom map in this past post: Custom Maps with Google Maps
I was recently reminded of just how effective this can be when I received an email from my friend George, of the famous 🙂 Vagabonders-Supreme.net travel blog. He sent me the email to show me what he learned from our videos. And, what a great job he did!
Maps as a Blog Navigation Tool
George has been keeping his travel blog since 2003 and has recently added a map of each year’s journey so you can get an overview. Then, for each marker he links to an appropriate Blog post. The map at the beginning of this page is his 2004 travels, the one below is 2005. 2006 is almost done and, if I know him, he won’t stop until he’s current right thru 2010!
You can see all of his maps on his ‘Archives’ page.
The tutorials referred to can be found at the Geeks on Tour Google Earth and Maps page. Some are free, some require a membership.
Windows Live Writer
If you want to put a map into a particular blog post, I find Windows Live Writer even easier. Since I started using Live Writer for all my blog post writing (even this one at RV.net) I spend about half the time I used to when I used the native blogging software (Blogger or WordPress.) Here’s a free video showing you how it works:
