Photo courtesy of Elia Saikaly.

EpicTracker has worked with, and been inspired by, adventure filmmaker Elia Saikaly since he summited Mount Everest last May. Elia and his team at Finding Life shared their ascent of the world’s highest mountain live with thousands of students across Canada.

Tomorrow, the team heads off to Africa (Solio, Kenya to be exact) with six lucky Canadian students for a three week expedition. They will team up with six Kenyan students to build two classrooms for an impoverished community and then climb to the second highest point in Africa, Mount Kenya. The entire experience will be broadcast online to thousands of student followers in Canada. The expedition is sponsored by Garnier and by thousands of students in Canada who raised money for building the classrooms through bake sales, arts and crafts, and other creative projects.

We wish Elia and the team tremendous success on their expedition and really look forward to seeing the videos and photographs that they share from the field. You can follow Elia on EpicTracker to see what the team is up to.

We are excited to share a big announcement with you today, one that will surely pique the interest of prospective investors.

Over the past few years we have focused our efforts on providing the best platform for people to share their adventure stories. But recently, we asked ourselves, “Why are we were limiting ourselves to such a niche market?”. We are thrilled that EpicTracker has new offerings that will enable us to tremendously expand our target market. Yes, today we will begin to support a much bigger user group: animal adventurers!

Introducing “EpicTracker Wild”

Mo, an EpicTracker Wild pilot user.

Realizing we were outside of our domain of expertise with these new customers, we interviewed some elite animal adventurers to determine the minimum viable product that would meet their needs. Google Translate for Animals was highly leveraged during our field interviews due to communication challenges. We immediately recognized that detailed presentations and product spec’s just wouldn’t convince these often stubborn creatures to join our advisory board, we set out to build a prototype that would entice them.

Our first advisor recruited was Mo, an African elephant who regularly migrates hundreds of miles across sweltering heat. She just seemed to get the idea right away. Interestingly, she never forgets anything we told her during the instructional session we held… a perfect user! Mo really loved communicating through her thunderous voice and was really interested in podcasting. We were thrilled to support that need. We’d like to thank Motorola, who enlarged and modified their Xoom tablet to address Mo’s unique user input requirements.

Honu is a green sea turtle and EpicTracker Wild pilot user. Pictured here in Hawaii.

For our next pilot test, we recruited a user close to our home base in Honolulu, Hawaii. Honu, a green sea turtle, was about to embark on a thousand mile swim up to the Northwest Hawaiian Islands using traditional navigation techniques. Thanks to Apple’s innovative engineers, a waterproof casing for the iPad was constructed and Honu was on his way. He loved using EpicTracker Wild, but had issues underwater getting adequate satellite signals and got tired of surfacing every time he wanted to send off an update to Twitter. So, we created an offline mode that allowed him to queue up his messages so they would be sent whenever he had coverage again.

Coming Soon & Lessons Learned

We learned a lot about our new market during our pilot tests and have several other exciting new animal ambassadors to share with you as EpicTracker Wild matures. So before we go, we’d like to share a few things in progress and some blunders so you can be confident that we really are exploring all the possibilities for this product.

Lucy the Laysan albatross, our educational consultant

We are excited about Lucy, a Laysan albatross that is looking into new ways to teach children (well, chicks in her case) about science and environmental stewardship using EpicTracker Wild. Lucy found us when she accidentally grabbed a laptop one day that she had mistaken for food and brought it back to her nest for her chick. The precocious little guy realized it wasn’t edible and quickly logged on to to YouTube to find instructional videos on how to fly. While searching for cool flight paths, he found EpicTracker and shared it with Lucy.

Although we thought that Andy, a common household ant, would be a great candidate for EpicTracker Wild considering he could lift many times his own body weight and carry it for great distances, it turned out he just couldn’t figure out the user interface while trying to carry a Nexus S. As a result, Andy was squished a few times and opted to drop out of the pilot program before he hurt himself seriously. We will investigate more innovative input methods for Andy and billions of other potential customers just like him. We believe that the arthropod market will be very lucrative in the future.

How You Can Help

By now, hopefully you’ve figured out that EpicTracker Wild is our way of having a little fun on April Fool’s Day. Sadly, these amazing animals do in fact need our help. Please take a look at the organizations below to learn more about how you can help.

Finally, we’d love to see your promos and stories for EpicTracker Wild. So, flex your Photoshop muscles and creative writing skills and share the URL. We’ll post our favorite responses and give you credit!

• The African Wildlife Foundation works to ensure the wildlife and wild lands of Africa will endure forever.
• The Sea Turtle Restoration Project helps to protect critically endangered sea turtles around the world.
• The Blue Ocean Institute works through science, art, and literature to inspire solutions and a deeper connection with nature.

Photo courtesy of Elia Saikaly.

At EpicTracker, we are passionate about helping you share your adventure stories in the best way possible. For many adventurers (and bloggers in general), attracting an audience and promoting a lively discussion in the comments section is an important gauge for how well your stories are being received. We’d like to share some of our thoughts with you here on driving traffic to your website in an honest, fun, and effective way.

Today we’ll share a few strategies for increasing your readership base, but please don’t see this as an exhaustive list. If you enjoy this post, please let us know and we will make it into a series on the site and bring in some guest bloggers. Please also visit some of the links we provide at the end of this post, as our advice here is based on brilliant strategies shared by numerous leaders of the field.

Note: We are adamantly against search engine optimization (SEO) strategies that involve trickery and end up stealing traffic from relevant sites, so don’t expect that here.

Pose Questions to Your Readers

If you want a stream of comments on your post, a great way to encourage that is by posing questions to the readers that you think would be worthwhile discussions. By writing a blog as if it were an essay, you are suggesting your goal is only one-way communication. But, if you write more conversationally, asking questions and posing calls to action, then your readers who want to be engaged at a deeper level will be able to jump right in.

Do you wonder what people are thinking about your expedition? Ask them! Do you have readers with unique backgrounds or areas of expertise that might provide insightful, interesting comments? Find out. How? Ask them!

What questions would you ask your readers if you were blogging live from the field?

Instant Karma: Add Value to Other Blogs

Photo courtesy of Ray Zahab.

Sometimes people add comments to your blogs that will present exciting new ways to look at the topic you’re writing about. You enjoy this, right? Well, it’s time to give back in a mutually beneficial way.

Actively find other people writing about your topic (perhaps on blogs you already follow) and write comments that add value to those other blogs. Your comments must be worthwhile for the readers even if they don’t click the links you provide! This is very important. Do not write, “Cool post. Check out what I wrote about this topic at…”. NO!!! If you do that, you’re an unwelcomed reader-stealing troll. Your goal is to make friends with the other blogger and his/her community by providing value for everyone. If you can’t do that, then find another blog that is a better fit.

And please, earn some karma by sharing links to the other blog with your readers. If you find it interesting and relevant, they will too. See, it’s a win-win. One final thought here, which we’ll talk about another day: consider writing a guest post on another blog and inviting that person to write one on yours.

Do you have a great story about finding new readers from your contributions to another blog?

How to Find Your Soul Mate

What? Ok, we’re overstating our objectives here. But if you do find your soul mate through blogging, let us know! Anyway, our final section today will be about how to identify other blogs on which to share your stories and comments.

First, the most obvious suggestion is to find blogs that cover topics that are relevant to what you’re writing about. The next strategy is to find blogs that do not cover topics relevant to what you’re writing about. Huh?

You can spark new conversations on other blogs not directly relevant to yours by sharing a unique perspective on their topics based on what you’re passionate about. In fact, you may be less likely to be perceived as a competitor when you do this.  Take the example topics below, which may be relevant to many adventurers.

• Books: Sure, millions of people have read “An Omnivores Dilemma” by Michael Pollan or “The Four Hour Work Week” by Tim Ferriss, but how many read them at Mount Everest basecamp? Do the beautiful settings of your adventures change the way you think about books you read? Find book clubs or the author’s own blog and share your insights.
• Foodies and cooking: You’ve got a pretty unique kitchen when you’re on an adventure. Does a Powerbar taste better at the summit than in the airport? What spices do you carry to make your otherwise bland food edible? People are passionate about food and love to write about it. Find their blogs, you might even get some great new recipes out of it. Yummy.
• Health and fitness: If you go on a long expedition (perhaps rowing across an ocean or hiking the Appalachian Trail), what happens to your body while doing such repetitive activities every day? How do you handle injuries? What stretches or other fitness activities do you do to prevent injuries?
• Gear reviews: Let’s face it: you’re putting your gear through some rigorous testing out there. Find sites that review gear (including online stores like Amazon) and share your story. In addition to helping someone buy the right products, you might even get the attention of the product’s manufacturer. Hey, you never know, right? Be an evangelist for the products you love!

But I Have Way More Readers Than Them!

Some people don’t bother commenting on a blog with low readership, but we’re hoping you’ll change that. If you like the person’s insights and writing, forget how many people might see your comment.  Authors with low traffic on their blog may really welcome the influx of comments you provide and be more willing to help promote you. Again, we want to stress the importance of adding value to that blog and not simply stealing its traffic. So, put links on your blog to them… it might make them really excited and boost their site’s traffic.

But I Have Way Fewer Readers Than Them!

People may also feel it is a waste of time to comment on a blog with very high readership because the comment will never be seen by the author. Surprisingly, you will find that many bloggers read most or all of their comments. Just look at the comment stream. If you see the author regularly replying to commenters, you’re golden. If not, don’t worry: the other commenters might also enjoy your thoughts.

Conclusion & Further Reading

Hopefully this post gives you some things to think about when sharing the stories of your adventures. So, go out there and make the world a more interesting place!

We hope that this blog has synthesized some of the brilliant ideas out there for you in a context that relates to your needs. We are truly standing on the shoulders of giants here. So, you may find these other posts and websites helpful.

• “Why Startups Need to Blog (and what to talk about…)” by Mark Suster. Although this is targeting startup companies, many of the strategies are the same for you. Mark has a ton of incredibly helpful posts on his site that will be invaluable for any aspiring professional adventurer.
• “HOW TO: Jump-Start Your Career by Becoming an Online Influencer” by David Spark on Mashable. Like it or not, you have a personal brand online. If you want a readership base, you need brand recognition. This article will help you focus your efforts.
• “Crafting Content to Social Media Demographics” by Tammy Camp. Great summary of how to target your blogs to the groups you want to reach, along with an interesting infographic and helpful links. Tammy is an adventure traveler herself and has a great blog on topics from kiteboarding to entrepreneurship.
• Roz Savage is an ocean rower, National Geographic’s “Adventurer of the Year”, and an EpicTracker ambassador who helped inspire this post. She writes posts from the middle of the ocean that include diverse topics such as environmental advocacy, philosophical musings, book reviews, pirates, and being attacked by boobies (the seabird kind).

Do you have any other suggestions to help people gain a bigger audience on their blog or encourage more people to comment? Please let us know!

If you’ve followed EpicTracker over the past year or so, you’ve seen some of the incredibly cool adventurers and scientists we have worked with. We call them our “EpicTracker Ambassadors” and we’ve posted some stories about the adventure tracking websites we’ve made for them. As EpicTracker continues to grow, we’ll post stories on our blog that highlight how our ambassadors are using expeditions to make the world a better place.

Ray Zahab recently completed running 712 miles in 20 days across the Atacama Desert.

Here’s what’s new and exciting with our ambassadors, in alphabetical order (click here for background info on them).

Dr. Andy Baldwin

After being on nationwide center stage in the reality TV show “The Bachelor”, Andy has leveraged his celebrity and incredible talents to coach and inspire kids to be physically fit. He was recently named the ING Kids Rock Ambassador, encouraging kids to run a total of 26.2 miles (a marathon distance) during the course of a training period. Way to go, Andy!!!

Mireya Mayor, Ph.D.

Proving yet again that she can do anything, from trekking across the African jungles to cheerleading for the Miami Dolphins to protecting endangered species around the world, Mireya has now published her first book! “Pink Boots and a Machete: My Journey from NFL Cheerleader to National Geographic Explorer” is an autobiography that you won’t want to miss. It will awaken your adventurous spirit, spark excitement in your inner-scientist, and inspire you to to achieve your dreams. We wish Mireya tons of success with her book and hope you’ll check it out. Buy “Pink Boots and a Machete” on Amazon.

Elia Saikaly

What do you do after you’ve to the top of the world? If you’re Elia Saikaly, then you’d use the summit of Mount Everest as a great way to look out at the horizon and see what’s next. Elia and the team at Finding Life have set their sights on Africa, planning an expedition to Solio, Kenya with six students from Canada to team up with six students from Solio. Their goal will be to summit Mount Kenya, but their mission is even greater: to build schools in an impoverished region that desperately needs help.

Roz Savage

Recently named National Geographic’s “Adventurer of the Year“, Roz is preparing to row across the Indian Ocean in April. With the very real threat of pirates off the Somali coast, Roz unfortunately won’t be broadcasting her position this time. But, you can still read Roz’s blog every day to see how she’s doing and find out about her environmental campaigns, such as a plastic bag free Olympics in London. The EpicTracker team was thrilled to see Roz last week in Honolulu, Hawaii, where she is a speaker at the International Marine Debris Conference.

University of Hawaii (SEA-IT-LIVE)

The School of Ocean and Earth Science and Technology (SOEST) at UH has put together a program called SEA-IT-LIVE that shares the excitement of scientific research expeditions with students through live video broadcasts. They completed a cruise from Chile to Easter Island in December with classes throughout Hawaii following along.

Ray Zahab

Ray can’t sit still for long. After finishing a truly epic run across the entire Atacama Desert, Ray and his team at Impossible 2 Possible immediately got to the planning of the next expedition: Bolivia. This May, four selected Youth Ambassadors will run an average of a marathon per day, for up to one week, through the region of Salar de Uyuni. Always raising the bar for incorporating education in expeditions, the curriculum this time will focus on one of the most interesting aspects of this unique region of the world: chemistry.

Today we are launching our new website for EpicTracker. We are very excited to show off what we’ve been working on and we hope you’ll browse around and give us some feedback.

Signup Now!

In the coming months, we will start allowing you to signup for accounts so you can start sharing your adventures. In the meantime, we encourage you to signup for a user account so you can be part of our early adopters group. What does is it mean to be an early adopter? To us, it means everything. You’re giving us a chance as we grow and we will always be grateful to you for that. To the extent possible, we will give advanced notice and special discounts to people who signup during this stage.

So, what are you waiting for? Signup now!

Photo courtesy of Ray Zahab.