The winner of the Lonely Planet's 2009 Best Travelogue award, Tom Fewins, is candid about the success of his blog, World in Slow Motion.

“I was a bit cynical about the whole thing, really,” he says. “I always thought that [blogging] was a bit self-regarding, actually, and thought, ‘who on earth would want to read about our trip apart from maybe family and a few friends?’”

Tom and his girlfriend, now fiancée, Lara, set up World in Slow Motion in May 2008, to capture their flight-free round the world trip.

“When we got thinking about it more we thought part of the reason for our trip, and going without flying, was so that we could try and inspire a few other people,” says Fewins. “We put all the information on the website so people could have a go at it themselves.”

Tom and Lara are now writing a book about their travels, and while you might not replicate their success, a well-written blog can serve as a record of your travels, an inspiration to other travellers, and, with some luck, a money spinner.

Setting up a blog

The first thing to decide is how your blog will work. You can set one up for free at Google’s www.blogger.com, or www.wordpress.com; the obvious advantage being that the nuts and bolts are safely hidden from view. All you need to do is enter a few details and you're away.

There’s no arguing with the popularity of these sites – Wordpress claims to have eight million blogs and 200 million readers per day, while Google claims 270,000 words are entered into Blogger.com every minute.

For the technically-inclined, setting up a blog with its own domain name (www.mygreattravelblog.com, for instance), is the way to go. Not only does the domain name distinguish your blog, but buying hosting with a company such as Go Daddy.com allows you more flexibility than a free service. You can keep your photos on your own servers, and for the truly committed, host your own videos. The customisations you can make are limited only by your technical chops.

Expect to pay around £40 a year for a hosted website and a .com domain name.

How to get online abroad

Do you need to take a laptop on your round the world trip? The drawbacks are obvious: laptops combine the unwanted traits of value, fragility and nickability all in one, easy to lose package. It's not like there are many places on Earth that don't have internet cafés with their own PCs, either: I've updated my blog, www.sorryforthegroupemail.com, from other people's computers in Ulaan Bataar in Mongolia, Hat Yai in Thailand and Tapachula, Mexico, and can verify that internet cafés are at least as common as pictures of Jordan in Heat.

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