Creating a blog doesn’t take a lot of hardware. Armed with a simple laptop (a Chromebook, even!), you can pretty much blog with the best of them. This can allow you to work from home, the coffee shop, or your hotel room in Morocco. Not everyone is a natural international traveler, but there is reason enough to travel around in your region as well. Here are a few reasons why travel is the perfect thing for the professional blogger.

• It Forces You To Work. If you’re like most people who make their living in front of a computer screen, you’re not the gold standard of productivity. It’s hard to stay motivated every hour of every day. Sometimes I’ll have four hours of work, but I’ll let it drag out for eight hours, just because I have nothing else going on that day. That’s no way to be. When you travel, especially with people or to visit people, you’ve got events baked into your day. You’ve got to be places at certain times. Work must get done, and it must get done within certain hours. By working while you travel, you’ll get more out of every day. For a few hours you’ll make your money, for a few others, you’ll play. Sounds pretty great, right?

• Travel Fights Burnout. The human brain is built for novelty. Even the biggest homebody among us craves new things, fresh experiences. For those of us who have gone through the stage where we spend all of our waking hours slogging away on our internet businesses, we know that this is not, perhaps, the best way to feed the soul. Getting out of your home, out of your region, out of your nation even – this lets you get your yayas out, and helps the work get done more easily.

• Travel Gives You Something to Write About. Having interesting life experiences will always inspire your writing. You may not have a travel blog, but your travel will definitely inform the things you write about. Whether you’re writing about personal finance, beauty, culture, or food, being in a new place will give you a fresh set of eyes to soak up these topics. You’ll learn more about the thing you love writing about, and this inspiration will make your blog better.

Travel is good for its own sake, but it’s especially good (and achievable) for the professional blogger. Don’t let a lack of imagination and initiative keep you homebound. Get on the road and let your amazing travel experiences make your blog better. Believe me, they will.

Different bloggers let this play out in different ways. Not every travel blog is going to be the perfect platform for you to go on at length about your love for the works of D.H. Lawrence or armchair philosophy, but there may be deeper values that fill up page after page. If you have a passion for design, for instance, let the layout, colors, and logo of your blog demonstrate those values for all to see. If you believe in financial integrity, let the information that you put out on your personal finance blog be legitimate and helpful.

And if you value good and interesting writing, let it flow, bro. To read most blogs that come out of the English speaking world, you’d think there was an international moratorium on style and individuality. Thoughts clunk to the floor lifeless, communicating barebones information but doing little else. You may not be a great writer in the academic sense – most people have little control over that. But you do have a say about whether or not you are a boring writer. Here are a few ways to your work from sucking in this particular way.

Write Like You Talk…When You’re Slightly Drunk. “Write like you talk” is a great piece of advice that a lot of writers are given at various points in life. Quibblers will quibble about professionality and propriety in writing. And while those have their place, writing in a natural, conversational manner will almost always lend power and authenticity to your work. I add the bit about being slightly drunk because it’s a helpful metaphor for me. You know when you’re at the bar, you’ve had a couple of pints, and you tell a story that blows minds? I’m not telling you to drink on the job, but by finding that sort of comfortable conversational tone, your writing is bound to be more interesting.

Write For Your Friends, Not Your Mom. When it comes to what you allow yourself to say on your blog, think about what your friends would find interesting, not what you mom would find appropriate. Times change. We live in a rough world, and it has trickled down through all forms of media. In 2016, what is interesting is not what is nice or family-friendly. You may want your blog to be appropriate for all ages, but don’t make it whitewashed and lifeless in this effort.

Writing is what drives your blog. Without interesting writing, it’s going to be hard to cobble together clickable material. It can be done, but with good writing as an ally, you’ll find it a lot easier to build your blog.

For the blogger, this means that it’s time to start optimizing content for the mobile viewer. It’s likely that half or more of your viewers already peer at your words through their iPhone screen. As more and more of your viewership changes over – as reliably as from video cassette to DVD, to Netflix – you don’t want to be left with an old website living in a mobile world. Here are a few ways to make your content work better for mobile.

• Focus on the Title. Titles have always been important, and mobile writing makes no exception. Make titles brief and informative, and as sexy as your platform allows. Interesting and provocative is great, as long as the content you have inside matches.

• Keep Paragraphs Short. There’s nothing worse than scrolling through unbroken piles of text on a screen the size of a playing card. Mobile users find it easier to read short bursts of text. A paragraph might be no more than three sentences. Leave it that way.

• Use Lists and Other Formatting Tricks. Lists and other page-break techniques are a mobile blog designer’s best friend. Lists make it easy to find what you’re looking for, soak up the content, and quickly move on.

• Use Quality Images. Images and videos are changing the way people use their mobile devices. Facebook has brought back the era of silent movies, as short soundless content bombards our feeds every day. Similarly, strong images communicate as much or more than words to many people. Make them a priority.

• Solid Intros, Strong Conclusions. It’s important to state your case in an opening paragraph, then sum it all up in an easy to understand snippet at the end. Everything in the middle should be good, too, of course. But without strong starts and stops, mobile viewers are likely to skip out on the middle bit entirely.

• Link Relevant Content Prominently. Mobile users navigate in totally different ways that their desktop friends do. With a desktop, you’ve got a teeny tiny cursor that can click on even the puniest link. On mobile, all you have to work with is you big dumb thumb. Make linked content big, using images or big words if possible. You’ll get a lot more clicks to related content this way.

The blogosphere is changing. Blogs are as relevant as ever, but only if they’re useful on mobile devices. Start optimizing future content to be read on mobile devices, and you’ll be more compatible with new user bases going forward. We don’t always apply these rules perfectly (this article is a case in point), but even improving little bits will give big payoffs.