Blog101

I absolutely adore my Sony a6000 camera. The mirrorless camera is light, portable, and takes some of the best images I've ever taken in my 8+ years as a travel photographer.

However, simply buying the camera itself is just the starting point.

As with all cameras, there is an incredible number of accessories for the Sony a6000 you may want to consider purchasing to really step-up your photography game.

After extensive use of our camera, taking tens of thousands of photos all over the world, the following are some of our favorites that we think you absolutely must have in your kit.

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There is a lot of talk in the blogging circuit on finding the right niche idea, and there are any number of analyses out there as to why niche building is important.

We thoroughly agree with this point, and rather than rewrite the same article a thousand times over (a huge pet peeve of mine), we want to look at niche building a different way.

You see, everyone looks at niche website building as a way to stand out from the crowd and capture an audience- which is true. But we also look at it from a completely different perspective. We look at it as our ability to create content that is 100% relevant to our niche, such that users (and Google) can quickly understand how all of our posts are connected.

If you pick your niche appropriately, a wealth of traffic is available. Today we're going to visually show why we think that is while using our travel blogs as an example.

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When it comes to running my blog, I'm normally the first person to ignore conventional wisdom- which at times can be a good thing or a bad thing. No matter the results, the reasons behind my choices are always pretty simple.

• First, most of the time what the majority believes is a “best practice” is flat out wrong and, even worse, is based on no data whatsoever. As an engineer I hate that even if the tips are true in a roundabout way.
• Second, hardly anything is repeatable, making even the most encouraging tip worthless as it is often only valuable to the person who wrote it (and like in the above point, may not be the exact reason they got to their result in the first place).

It is because of these reasons that I'm all for going against traditional wisdom to try something to help out my blogs- especially if I can get repeatable results out of it for others to benefit from!

Why is this preface important? Enter our newsletter- one of the biggest features of our sites we now go against all conventional wisdom on.

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Over the years we have worked on many projects in the travel world to try and get our name out there and earn a living from our work.   Out of all of the projects we've worked on, this site- a global travel blog focused on long-term travel, and our newest site Discover the Burgh– a local blog for the city of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, have grown the most.

The interesting thing about these two blogs is not their differences in how we run them.  To be honest, we run them almost entirely on the same business model.  What makes them unique is that the potential for growing and earning revenue on our local blog far eclipses anything we've been able to achieve with our global site.

As such, we wanted to share some of our thoughts today as to why that is, and what you need to consider when launching a local blog of your own to try and get into this (relatively) untapped marketplace.

Let others chase down the global marketplace all they want- city blogging is the next big thing.

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