Sailing blog? Consider Using WordPress. I switched 4 years ago…

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I run this sailing blog on WordPress. I use to use Sailblogs, and although it was simple, it didn’t offer enough to hold me there..it couldn’t do what I wanted to do as I grew just a bit. I am not a programmer, and I don’t know html at all. I just like a simple platform to write my blog on. Lately I’ve liked to get a little fancy with it, trying out different things.

Whether it be a monetized Website with a storefront that you eventually want, or simply multiple photos in one blog post painlessly, or as a compliment to a Youtube Sailing Channel……WordPress can do what you what it to do, no matter how fancy you want to get.

Or just use defaults settings and make simple blog posts, with multiple photos, and anything else you want to do without a lot of fuss.

Do it from sea, with just SSB and Pactor modem, or with you sat phone, or your Iridium GO. WordPress lets you be as plain and simple or as fancy and sophisticated as you like…. The sky is the limit. It provides great stats if you are a number geek like me, great backup options if you mess things up sometimes like I do. It offers so many plugins (ways to add every option known to man on your site) and lots of instructions and live support. It’s become a hobby that I enjoy, though at times I wonder why…

Anyways…they are offering a better promotion than I’ve seen come in for a bit so thought I tell you about it in case you are thinking of starting a Sailblogs. Yes.it’s an affiliate Link…why not.it’s what I’ve used for nearly 4 years and I still like it. The code is at the bottom of the post.

You may want to just start a free a. Ount, let it sit, and as you get inspired with it, learn a bit more, and add a bit more. Or just start making posts and having fun today with it 😉 It’s a fun hobby, and it can help other sailors know what lies ahead..or use it to just simply let family know what is happening and where you are. Or simply, a log of your travels that one day you can look back at and smile when you see the photos and the funny way you lived while cruising ;).

I started with the personal plan 4 years ago, but quickly upgraded to the Premium for under $100 per year total. I enabled the ads on it right away, but took them right down because it was just so bad and invasive. Now Adsense ads are much much better, and it enables me to at least break even if not make a few dollars each month! It’s nice to have all the bells and whistles to play with, without really paying anything. The ads on this blogsite enable me to pay for this blog…not my time….but at least for the financial outlay to have the site to begin with.

Either way…there are many options out there for blogging. This one can really grow with you. Don’t just get the simplest, most free one you can find, or you will find yourself having to convert everything over to a more robust platform to do what you really want to do, later one…which believe me, is painful. Just start with WordPress. You won’t regret using it! Sailblogs was good for me for a couple of years. But WordPress has offered much more.

Also…if you have a Youtube Sailing Channel…DEFINITELY have a blog. You need something called “backlinks” to your channel. Putting your links on Facebook helps a bit. But having people coming from a blog is even better. Having your own blog is a backlink that really helps to get things kickstarted and makes Youtube pay a bit of attention to the results the post with your video gets. Our YouTube just monetized 2 months ago, after 10 months (Patrick Childress Sailing), and a lot came from this blog…and still does.

If you are about to start a blog…WordPress is offering a 20% off discount from This Sunday for about 2 weeks: Use this code when you check out: WordPress Website. Be sure to use DISCOUNT20 at checkout!

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Here is the Youtube Sailing Channel: Patrick Childress Sailing, if you haven’t already seen it a million times on this site!!

YouTube Sailboat How To Videos…Tools we use for growing our sailing Youtube channel that have worked

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YouTube Sailboat How To Videos…Tools we use for growing our sailing Youtube channel that have worked. Many ideas specific to Sailboats. To get right to the tools , skip to the icons at the end and click on any of the images that sound interesting. There are a lot of ideas and I keep adding more as I find them.

Youtube Sailing Videos…How does a Youtube Sailing Channel grow? “Sailboat Fixing/Patrick Childress Sailing” grew a lot last month, but can we keep it up? How do we mtake viral sailing videos every time? What are the tools successful  Youtube how to sailing channels use to succeed? These are the questions we have been asking ourselves. We spend almost every day now, working away trying to make a go of this.   Our Youtube Sailing vlog is here: Sailboat Fixing /Patrick Childress Sailing   . It’s mostly a “Sailboat How To Videos” Channel more than anything else…not as much about the destinations we sail to, as the things that we fix once we get there 🙂

We had a video go viral, which maybe was just lucky timing since we were close anyways to the 1000 subscribers/4000 Watch hours threshold. but it pushed our subscriber count and our watch hours over the limit and we were monetized, and now Youtube itself does a lot of the heavy weight lifting for us! But it’s still slow going.

Now in order to maintain the $50 or $75 a month or so that it looks like we will get without viral videos, we are trying different tools, watching YouTube creator videos and everything else we can find. We are going in 4 directions at once trying to find the right combination to grow it. Why? I’m not sure really. The promise of a few thousand dollars a year? The promise of being the next Delos? Patrick’s strong desire to educate new boat owners even if its for free? Just something to do in our retirement? I’m not sure..but we are forging ahead, full blown efforts now. Once the channel monetized and I saw a glimmer of hope, I joined in on the efforts…but up til then, it was just Patrick full time, and me, maybe 10 hours a week of helping to promote it. Bravo Patrick Childress Sailing!

Some other cruisers we know in similar situations are just trying to get to the milestone we have reached and have such great material but the word just doesn’t get out… They admire us. And of course we admire the Youtube sailing channels that have hundreds of thousands of views, or even tens of thousands of views on every video they make. We are all praying for more subscribers and to get out to the people who will watch our videos front to end to improve our watch time. We are working on keywords, and tags and hashtags and anything else we can figure out that we need to work on. This is all on top of Patrick working 70 hour weeks trying to get videos out in a timely manner. This is on top of cleaning the boat perfectly so that we don’t look like slobs when we are rich and famous some day haha.

One fantastic photographer and videographer…”Umadum Sailing” has a Channel Umadum Sailing on YoutubeIt should most definitely have more subscribers. We can’t figure out why it hasn’t taken off. What do they need to do to get more subscribers? Heck, what do WE need to do to get more subscribers? Why do these sometimes really bad boring sailing vlogs have 60,000 subscribers and 2 million views every video they make one?

These are the tools I have started using that have given us a  bit of lift and seem to have some effect on things. But of course time will only tell Maybe some big Sailing video gurus out there can give us some more ideas on how to grow our channel without working 20 hours a day and 7 days a week to do so?

TubeBuddy has probably been the most helpful so far of those that I have tried. If you have less than 1000 subscribers it’s half price. They have a free version too, but it doesn’t rate you in relation to your OWN site being able to rank…just in general…so the paid version I think is a good investment…click on it for lots of info. It’s very feature rich though MUCH better on the laptop right inside of yourtube.com than on a tablet application.

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Sailing Blade

We edit movies with Magix Movie Edit Pro…Its what Patrick has learned…but we don’t really love it.

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MAGIX Innovation that inspires True Creative Freedom

We use Magix Music Maker for music on the videos but again, we aren’t really crazy about it.

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Full versioin of Music Maker for free. Download now!
Music Maker - Free Full Version

No link for this one but in IPad App Store…”YT Tracker”

Also this is a great tool for stats and comparative analysis etc. free 7 day trial…

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SEMrush

Heard of Affiliate Links?  Here is what I think is probably my most exciting Affiliate program…since I think it probably pays the best. It even has some boating specific companies and other things that would work on a sailing blog or YouTube channel: Dint try to figure it all out. Just sign up, and then they send you easy to understand and implement emails and you are on your way before you know it.

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I have not tried these 2 below yet…but they look promising…what do other people think? I’m considering them…I need all the help I can get! Please feel free to leave comments below so we can talk about this!

Agora Pulse

VidIq 

Update on 3/6/2019

Hands down… THIS is the tool that is working…VIdIQ is the tool to get! We now have 7500+ subscribers…8000 views a day instead of 800 that we had just 2 months ago…and views of 20,000, 40,000, even 150,000 on our videos! If you are starting a Youtube channel, DO NOT try to figure it all out yourself…get the right tools!

 

 

Who is Patrick Childress..and why a YouTube Channel?

 

 

 

 

Larry Pardey on SERAFFYN has become Ill. Wife and community honors him in a unique way.

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I don’t know about the rest of you…but Lin and Larry Pardey had a profound influence on me as I was preparing to go cruising. While I never felt I could cruise quite as simply as they did, the books they wrote entertained me, and were a part of my sailing education. Larry has fallen ill, and is in the final stages of dementia, etc. It is hard to see one of our icons leaving us…I find it rather nice that she is not waiting til after he has left us to make this tribute. If there is an ounce of understanding left, he will so appreciate this final parting gift.

This is from Facebook from Lin ————>

“My publishing partner is helping me raise funds to maintain and expand the Larry Pardey Observatory by doing a special pre-publication offer for the just-now-being-printed Tribute edition of Cruising in Seraffyn. I have pledged all profits from this book towards the Observatory. Though it looks impossible to get this book as a stocking stuffer in time for Xmas, Paradise Cay is offering anyone who orders one now, to buy any of my five other narratives for just $10. I’ll put any profits from the sale of those books towards this fund raiser too.

Here is the link – he just added a place for anyone who would like to help with my fund raiser.
Special Offer

Here is the Press Release Paradise Cay Publications has just sent out announcing this new edition

For immediate release, December 12, 2018

Larry Pardey Observatory to receive profits from Tribute Edition of Cruising in Seraffyn

“This book launched my cruising dream,” stated the editor of Sail Magazine. “And it probably launched 50,000 others as well.” Cruising in Seraffyn became an instant best seller when it was first published and is now considered a cruising classic, one that continues to inspire cash strapped dreamers as well as those who already have their “perfect” boat but are concerned about crossing their first ocean. After its authors, Lin and Larry had been voyaging for more than 47 years and 210,000 miles including both east about and west about circumnavigations, Larry’s health began to fail. Parkinson’s and encroaching dementia brought them back to settle at their home base in a small cove on Kawau Island in New Zealand. One of Larry’s great joy over the six years, before he required full time professional care, was watching the youngsters from Camp Bentzon, which shares their cove, as they learned to sail, kayak, and discovered the joys (and pitfalls) of life and water sports. (Camp Bentzon is a not-for-profit youth adventure center owned by the children of New Zealand)

It was shortly before Larry moved to a care facility that Kenny Thorall came to visit. Fifty years previously and a year before Lin came on the scene, Larry and Ken had formed a team, delivering boats together, repairing them. Now Ken, who had gone on to become a professional Alaskan bush pilot, wanted to do something to memorialize the man who was, in his words, “the best friend any one could have and an amazing sailor.” He donated the funds to create an Observatory at Camp Bentzon after learning that it would give almost 5000 youngsters a year a chance to see the stars that lead him and Larry across oceans together. A year ago, the Larry Pardey Observatory was completed and outfitted with four telescopes plus 15 sets of special high-powered stargazing binoculars. Since then more than 100 children each week have had their first chance to explore the night sky far from the light pollution of the big city.
As Lin once again picked up her offshore sailing life, she felt it was time to pay tribute to the man who introduced her to a life-long passion, voyaging under sail. It has been Larry who encouraged her to write the first of what became 14 books on voyaging and seamanship. Her goal, as well as Larry’s has always been to encourage others to take risks and expand their horizons. Thus her passion for Camp Bentzon and desire to support and expand the Larry Pardey Memorial Observatory by donating the profits from this book. This Tribute edition of Cruising in Seraffyn has been updated to include a new introduction, updated guidelines to breaking away on your own adventure and sixteen pages of color photos. The appendixes have been updated to include information on what cruising costs today, details of what worked best on Seraffyn, what could have been better, plus the history of this famous little ship once her eleven year, engine-free circumnavigation brought Lin and Larry back to California to build her big sister Taleisin.”

I hope you will support the efforts…I know I will!

For more information on the Larry Pardey Observatory and Camp Bentzon use the following links:

Link 1

Link 2

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Indian Ocean Crossing, The Preparation