The problem with blogs is they often lack a purpose. Setting up a blog is easy and doesn’t cost a penny if you use the excellent Tumblr or WordPress platforms (this blog runs on a WordPress engine and you can see my photo blog here, which is hosted by Tumblr).

The problem is sustaining it – writing fresh material at least once a week and ideally every day – and this comes back to my first point: blogs often lack a purpose.  This guy describes the problem perfectly: “It’s amazing how many dead blogs there are out there, blogs where the authors wrote for around two to three months before they called it quits. Well maybe it’s not so amazing. Blogging is very easy to start, it has almost no barrier to entry. However the path to successful blogging is very hard; it takes time, it takes energy, in other words it takes a lot of effort.”

My blog is quite old and used to be really good, but since we closed down the documentary film company that provided the framework for it the blog has lost its purpose. Currently, all I use it for is an archive for material that I’ve published elsewhere – and I haven’t been doing much of that lately.

Does this mean the time has come to put this old blog out to grass? To send it to the blog graveyard? If you had asked me that question a couple of days ago I would have said YES but now I have found a purpose – this blog is going to be my New Travel Blog.

Here’s how it happened:

I’ve been following this super-cool American Dude called Earl Baron. His website, The Wandering Earl (subtitle: the life of a permanent nomad) provides a wealth of useful information for people to go on long distance journeys, over several years. Earl has been on the road since 1999 and he has articles about what to pack, how to deal with people in strange places, how to overcome your fears and get up and go. It’s exactly what every young traveller needs.

Earl recently set up a new website called Plansify. The purpose of this new site is to connect experienced world travelers with people who want to go travelling, and he’s worked out a cool method of charging for consultancy via Skype or email. Earl invited me to sign up to it and offer my services. You can see my profile here, and hopefully people will start calling me up and paying me for my words of wisdom.

But there’s a problem: I don’t have a website which showcases my travel experiences. I am planning to set up a new website when I publish my travel book 9 Months in Tibet, but that won’t happen until later in the year. I should have a blog about my current passion –cycle touring – but I don’t.

Then it struck me – I will turn this old blog into my cool new travel blog. Watch this space for a series of new articles with advice for budding travelers.