7 Reasons Everyone Hates Your Travel Blog

2. You won’t stop talking about yourself.

*Bangs head on keyboard.* Seriously. If you blog one more time about eating a sandwich with your fiancé Larry outside of the Eiffel Tower on a perfect summer day, you will start the epidemic of laptop and mobile device defenestration. That is, I’ll be the first to take my computer and throw it out the window because it’ll be worth it not having to read the same story by essentially the same person over and over and over. There are a million yous out there and a million Larrys. And all of them eat sandwiches. Would it kill you to paint us a picture of your destination without adding cute little factoids about your nail polish or what shoes you were wearing?

3. Your vocab is a puddle in the sea of possible word choice.

Your vacation in Iceland was just awesome, wasn’t it? And the sky was fantastic the entire time, too, I’ll bet. There was just so much beauty everywhere you couldn’t take your eyes off of it to eat your protein bar. Like, zero decent blog posts were written because you just had such a fabulous time. It was so many shades of blue words can’t even describe. Well, actually, they could. There are over 50 shades of blue that have names and odds are one was probably close. So next time you find yourself talking about how “awesome” something was, pull out a thesaurus. Sprinkle your blog with words that bring your experience to life. Otherwise, we’re just reading about you and Larry eating a sandwich. Was it a club or a BLT? Tell us more.

4. You’re grammer ain’t good.

We know the little paperclip guy doesn’t pop up any more, but odds are any device you’re using has some type of grammar check built in. Why aren’t you using it? When you like talk, like this its hard to understand you. Do everyone a favor and learn the difference between your and you’re, every day and everyday, their, they’re, and there, its and it’s, when to use semi-colons and commas, and…about a million other things.

5. Neither is your spelling.

Spell check. If you’re not 100% confident, spell check. Repeat after us: spell check. Hint: if there’s a little red, squiggly line underneath a word, that means you should probably change it until you find a way to make it go away. There is a certain percentage of your audience that will X out of your page with enough of these bad boys, and you want them to stick around, right?

6. You’re not being real.

Where do you get all this free time, this money, and why does your hair look decent after riding a donkey through the Alps for six days? Like, who are you? You don’t seem like a real person, and we’re programmed not to trust robots. What’s more, didn’t anything bad — or even neutral — happen on your trip, or was it all fuzzy teddy bears and lollipops? Hmm. Something fishy is going on here. All the food was melt-in-your-mouth delicious, everyone was soooo nice, and the bed at your hostel smelled like a field of lilacs? And you have pictures to prove it? Don’t lie — you just casually left out the part where you vomited into the Trevi fountain and accidentally insulted a bishop to get yourself kicked out of the Sistine Chapel. Now that’s the juice we want to hear.

7. We’re just jealous.

Okay, okay. I’ll be the first to admit. If your blog is well done, if you have a tolerable personality, and your writing skills are on par, we probably hate it because we’re jealous. You’re going places and doing things and taking glorious photos and seem all happy and stuff — and we’re sitting at our desk in this shared office with half a window, reading about it under fluorescent lights. Sigh. If you could just dial down the awesome, that’d be great. Thanks. Or take us with you next time?