Between social media and free blogging sites, it isn’t difficult to share the details of your journeys to friends and family back home, or even a larger audience.
For wannabe bloggers, sites like blogspot.com and WordPress offer free sites. You don’t get a unique domain name on a free site, but you can still customize it and even limit its audience to invited members. Most of the site employ easy-to-use interfaces that even a computer novice could navigate.
Epstein LaRue, RN, CGM author of the travel nursing blog Highway Hypodermics, got started with her blog on blogspot.com in 2005. The name is a pen name, adopted in 2001 when she began writing romance novels. She continued the use of the name when she wrote her first book, “Highway Hypodermics: Your Road to Travel Nursing,” although she says her book’s success has kept her from achieving the anonymity she had hoped her pen name would provide.
While you might explore the idea of a pseudonym, LaRue says the best way to protect your identity and career on a blog is to never use a real-life situation—either in a blog post or on social media. Between HIPAA and other privacy concerns, you can’t be too careful.
“Nurse have been removed from their duties for that,” LaRue says, referring to nurses who reveal patient stories online. “You never want to put patient information out there, even vaguely.”
Rather than issues with patients, stick to posting about your life in your new location. What is the housing or your neighborhood like? What new restaurants or attractions have you visited?
“As a traveling nurse, I have found that people from home or family are very interested in what is going on in the life of a travel nurse,” LaRue says. “Also, your experiences can be a great motivation for other nurses to start traveling.”
LaRue also blogs about industry trends and say blogging about the job in that way is a great way to help other travelers keep up with changing trends.
She is now a traveling house supervisor and author of Amazon’s #1 travel nursing book, “Highway Hypodermics: Travel Nursing 2012.”