Today I chat with Agness and Cez from one of the best travel blogs on the net – Etramping. They like to get around on $25 a day so if you’re into budget travel, they have a lot they can tell you about! They are also wonderfully helpful people and know heaps about blogging and getting your content out there and have given me tonnes of advice over the last 2 years since I moved over to Word Press and started taking my blogging seriously! I’m sure you will enjoy this interview!

Howdy! We are a team of two Polish travel passionates of Etramping, who loves to explore this planet with a tight budget of $25 per day. Our names are Agness and Cez and we are unstoppable when it comes to blogging about our travel adventures (we’ve been doing that for over 4 years now). Favourite topic to blog about? We like to guide people with budget travel tips and information that they can use when travelling to certain places with only $25 in their pockets. Then nobody can say “I can’t travel because it’s too expensive!” 🙂

2. What made you decide to start a blog?

Definitely an urge to show others that you can travel affordably and everyone can do it. We were not millionaires ourselves when we hit the road for the first time. Just the opposite – no savings, no extra pocket money, just the last saved up salary!

3. What have your favourite experiences been away from home/the place where you were born?

We both left our home countries at the age of 18 and there have been many great experiences since that time. For me it would be definitely my first backpacking visit in Asia. I headed straight from the UK to China where I spent amazing time teaching English, travelling to over 12 out of 22 provinces and learning Chinese.

Cez’s favourite memories are from Zhangjiajie where he experienced the most breath-taking scenery of Pandora world, where the Avatar movie was filmed.

4. When you write your blog, who are you writing for?

For anyone who would like to travel affordably. These could be young people trying to go for their first backpacking adventure, families looking for free activities in a certain town or city, travel foodies seeking new delicious food and everyone who would like to read honest reviews, stories and recommendations from around the world.

5. What advice would you give for anyone wanting to start their own travel blog?

Do it for passion, be consistent and honest with readers.

Passion: if you start blogging because you’re passionate about it (not because it’s cool or you think it will bring you a lot of money) then you will enjoy the whole journey and never give up when it gets harder.

Consistency: it’s a key success to develop your blog, take it to the next level and gain trust from your readers. You need to make sure you update your blog regularly, keep your audience posted on latest blog entries and care about them by replying to e-mails, comments and interacting with them via social media channels.

Honesty: travelling is not only about beautiful memories and happy days. There is time when you’ll get ripped off, find a certain place way too disappointing or you’ll seriously get sick and feel like going home. Write about it, be honest and open up to your audience. Don’t lie to keep people happy and want them go travelling. It’s a good and bad experience and you should definitely speak out about both of them.

6. What do you enjoy writing about most on your blog?

Guides on how to visit a certain place for less than $25 a day. We take notes and pictures when visiting certain places and doing various activities and once we are back home we put them all together and share with the readers. Concrete prices, exact destination and honest reviews are things our readers are seeking on Etramping and we are more than happy to provide these to them.

7. What’s the hardest thing about running a blog?

Regular updates and interactions when we are travelling. When we hit the road for over 3 weeks and the whole journey is very intense, we find it difficult to write a new blog post, reply to all comments and e-mails. We often end up being too tired to keep our social media channels and the blog itself updated, but we do try to be more organised by scheduling posts in advance.

8. Please recommend three blog posts you’d like readers of this to read!
   1 – http://etramping.com/couchsurfing-or-sexsurfing-what-is-the-difference-nowadays/ – it could be an eye opener for those who have never tried couchsurfing in the past and trying to do that in the future.
   2 – http://etramping.com/25-lessons-learnt-while-travelling-in-asia-for-3-years/ – one of the most personal blog posts I’ve written on how travelling impacted my life.
   3 – http://etramping.com/rather-go-hungry-eat-filipino-food-again/ – truth about Filipino street food. This post went viral and has been criticized a lot, but it sums up our experience with Filipino food that caused us many health problems.

9. How can people find your blog and find you on social media?

Facebook:https://www.facebook.com/etramping/

Website: http://etramping.com/

Twitter: Agness https://twitter.com/Agnesstramp ; Cez https://twitter.com/cezkrol/

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/runagnessrun/ and https://www.instagram.com/etramping/

A major thanks to Agness and Cez, and thanks for reading everyone. Do check out their blog it’s brilliant! I concur very much with their answer to Question Seven – blogging whilst travelling is really challenging. In fact – I might do a post on that very topic someday soon! Thanks again – May the Journey Never End!