We are very grateful to James Petrila for featuring his new travel blog on on ‘5thingstodotoday’, Please have a look at James’s blog here.
What is your blog about?
My blog is basically my travel-journal to write about places I go or live and add observations or certain things that really stuck out to me.
What inspired you to start your blog?
I’ve been traveling since I was 6 years old, and now at 16 I figured it was about time to start writing down some of the things that I was experiencing. I didn’t mind if people read them or not, because what my stories really are, are things to help me remember what I did for example, in Indonesia, in the next 5 or 10 years.
When did you start your blog?
I started my blog a little after my 16th country, February of 2015.
How do you motivate yourself to keep the blog up and running?
It doesn’t hurt that I love to write, but I think a lot of my motivation comes from any interaction I get from my Audience. Realizing whatever amount of people, small or large, have read something I’ve written or even take the time just to say they really loved what I’m doing on my blog, or that I shouldn’t stop writing because they really enjoyed the perspective I give on travel. My readers are the best motivation, by far.
What do you find the most frustrating aspect of blogging?
You know, it’s a bit hard to be discovered. Finding people that will read our articles seems to be even harder than writing them nowadays. The things is, you can spend 4 hours on this crazily-good, amazingly written, top-notch post and still have no one to like it, or sometimes even acknowledge that its there. When I was just starting, it could get a bit lonely.
In the future where do you hope your blog will take you?
To be honest, I hope that it can become apart of me. Something that grows with me and my interests, and with which I can meet people from all over the world with amazing and bizarre stories to tell.
Have you met anyone interesting/famous on your blogging journey?
I’ve met a countless amount of interesting bloggers. As to anyone famous would be before I decided to start blogging. I met a group of entrepreneurs on a Trans-Pacific cruise when I was moving to Malaysia, and among them were founders of blogging platforms and fitness websites. One person in particular of the group inspired me to start the blog I have today, Jodi Ettenburg from LegalNomads, who runs an amazing blog boasting thousands of followers since she started about 7 years ago. She was a major source of inspiration for me, and almost as a sign that said “See James? If you work hard, with determination and patience, this is what a blog could look like for you”.
And that’s when I decided to really pursue it.
If you could do only ‘one thing’ today then what would it be?
Go Skydiving in Zambia.Blo
