Tag Archives: Travel

Travel

Discover the Ins and Outs of an LPN Travel Nursing Career

Are you a nurse or do you want to be a nurse? Do you love to travel? Are you looking for above average compensation? If you answer yes to these questions, chances are you are looking for an LPN Travel Nurse Job. While the pay seems to be lucrative, an LPN travel nurse has some major considerations, qualifications and disadvantages as well.

Thus, in this article, we will discuss a bit about a travelling licensed practical nurse and how you can be the person for the job.

First, here are the requirements for a travel nurse. By knowing the requirements, you will know how you will qualify or if indeed you will ever qualify.

– You have to be a licensed practical nurse. This means that you will need to pass the licensure examination for a practical nurse.

– You have to have more than one year practical nursing experience. If you have worked in a hospital as a practical nurse or nursing aid for one year, you may qualify. Shorter experience may not do well for you.

– You have to be willing to travel. You may be away from your family from three months to a year or may be two years depending on your contract.

– You have to have good communication skills and can work in any medical facility with no problem.

This is mainly the reason why you have to have an experience to serve in a hospital or special nursing facility because you have to be adept with the equipments and rules of medical facilities anywhere you are.

Now, what are the advantages of being a travel nurse?

It may be mentioned that the position requires a minimum of being licensed as a practical nurse. This does not mean that registered nurses cannot be travel nurse; they can if they want to.

The advantage of being a travel nurse if you are an LPN is that the pay is usually better. Remember, in a hospital, aside from the LPN receiving instructions and tasks from a registered nurse, your pay is usually lower than a registered nurse.

If you take on the job of a travel nurse, you may be able to demand your pay. Of course, it may be dependent on your experience but surely, it will be a bit more than what you will get from a hospital.

The second advantage would probably be traveling to exciting destinations without paying a cent and in fact being paid for it as well.

Now, while you may easily meet the requirement and consider the advantages, you may also look into the disadvantages of a travel nurse job for an LPN.

You will be traveling away from your family for a specific period, this can be extended if required and you may not even have the say on it.

The other disadvantage is that you work 24 hours a day. You are traveling with probably a cruise ship or offsite medical facility, anytime there is need for your service, you will be called.

Being an LPN travel nurse is quite nice, however, to be sure that you are off for the challenge, you have to assess the advantages and disadvantages. Never go blinded by mere pay, always weigh things before deciding on taking a job away from your family.

Travel

Top Beginner Travel Blogging Tips and Advice for a Newbie

Travel blogging is a format that is simply blowing up right now. When I first started blogging in 2008, I frankly didn’t even know that anyone else was blogging about their travels. In the beginning, I was just doing up a blog so that family and friends back home could follow along with my travels, which is still one of the main reasons that I hear new bloggers have started their travel blogs.

But that being said, if you are going to do something, go ahead and do it correctly. Even if you aren’t sure you want to try to make any money from travel blogging right now, if you are going to set up a blog, do it correctly. You might end up enjoying the process, and more importantly the travel blogging community, so much that you do want to take it up to some form of income generation down the road. With that in mind, start properly. So here are a few very, very basic tips when you are starting out.

(1) Join Twitter and dive right into the travel blogging community. You will be amazed at how helpful everyone will be to help you out down the road. These are going to be your backbone of advice givers, so participate, give back and you will be rewarded.

So, that was a non-writing tip, but the travel blogging community is going to be so important to your travels and your writing, I thought I’d start there, but back to the basic website tips.

(2) You have to self-host your blog. Period. I started using Blogger/Blogspot and wasted about two years there. Yes, it is easy to use, but you aren’t maximizing your potential there. Go to one of the domain purchasing websites, buy a domain name, go to WordPress.org and get started on your own site. You won’t regret the move.

(3) Set your URLs to descriptive terms and not just the default setting. The default setting will produce URLs that have an ending that look like this /?7643 — and those are simply horrible for SEO (search engine optimization) purposes. The change is simple. Just go to your dashboard, look for your administration tab and click on the permalinks button. Choose a title format that uses the words from your title and also try to eliminate the worthless words, such as “to,” “the,” “a” and the like.

(4) Please put a re-tweet button on your site via a plug-in. Twitter is just a universal tool at this point and it is blogging malpractice to not have a re-tweet button that is simple to use. And while you are at it, make sure the settings are set so that your @address comes up automatically when someone hits your RT button — make it easy for people to actually help you.

(5) Publish regularly. This, aside from “have good content,” is the easiest tip to follow in the normal course of business. Publish 3-4 times a week, because as you get a following people are going to actually want to follow you. If you are going to be in a place that has bad internet access, take a day out to write some posts and schedule them to go up automatically, which is also simple in a WordPress self-hosted blog.

(6) Set up social media buttons on your website. At a minimum, you need to have a Facebook fan page and a button link to it on your website. You also should be using StumbleUpon. We talked about Twitter already. There are other social media sites out there (Digg, Delicious, etc.). Don’t overdo the buttons, but you need them at the end of each of your posts, so that people that use them can — once again — help you. There are simple plug-ins for all of them.

I’ll be writing more in the future about basic tips, because I have had so many newbies ask so many simple questions. In sum, remember this. People want to help you. If you have good content, you will find that people want to spread the word. Figure out ways to make that easy on them. If you do the footwork to let people help you more easily…. people will help you.