Three years of travel blogging: The first (real) milestone

I started working on this blog in 2018 -and back then, professional blogging was a foreign land for me. Even though I blogged for a couple of years in Greek, little I knew about what blogging really was. However, I already set the first milestone during the initial phase (endless reading, writing, and setting up the blog). What I promised myself back then was that I’d evaluate what I achieved only when I concluded three years of travel blogging.

Why did I think so? Why not do an evaluation after one, two, or five years of blogging?

Well, here’s what I thought. One year of blogging seemed too short for me. After just a year of running a blog, I thought I wouldn’t have enough experience to judge what I did. Although I wrote about my experiences after a year, the truth is that I was still learning. And indeed, I ran into issues, I had to solve things, and I had to carry on learning.

How about the second anniversary? Two years into blogging, I thought, also seemed a short period of time. I wanted to give the blog the chance to grow, and I thought that while I might know more things about blogging, there was also a chance that the Letters to Barbara wouldn’t have the material I imagined.

As for the five years anniversary, well, this seemed too distant.

Three years of travel blogging: Why I decided on this milestone instead

Three years seemed like an adequate amount of time back then. I thought that after three years of travel blogging, I would have achieved lots of things actually. First of all, the blog would have enough content even if I blogged just once per week. These are 150+ weeks; therefore, I’d have enough articles for my readers.

Moreover, after three years, I would have an idea if the process of running a travel blog was indeed something for me. Despite being a passionate traveler my whole life, I didn’t know if I’d still find pleasure in traveling and writing. I might feel tired, I thought. Or I might not always want to write when on the road. But, you know, sometimes you just want to feel a place and not rush around for sightseeing or photos.

Apart from that, I would also have gained some experience with blog traffic. I mean, every writer out there wants to be read. Would this blog attract any readers? Or would it be just read by friends and family? I wanted to see how much traffic this blog could get and if I could potentially make a side income from it. Back then, I remember that I promised myself not to skip my Greek writing or the job proposals that would come my way. I’d keep writing in Greek, and I’d keep working for clients.

Last but not least, I thought that after three years of travel blogging, I’d have an overview of how I’d deal with bad days. I knew there would be times that I’d feel bored or uninspired to create content, and there would also be times that I’d like to stay put and not travel. But, of course, I couldn’t predict what was about to come.

And here’s how I set the milestone

After deciding that the optimal milestone for my efforts was the three years, I signed up for web hosting with Bluehost. Specifically, I signed up for the three-year Choice Plus plan and started setting up the blog. The moment I paid for the plan, I promised myself that I’d work hard on the blog from now on.

This meant several things: no obsession with the metrics, no room for disappointment, no second thoughts. All I had to do was to start traveling, writing, and producing content for the readers. Will I have any readers? Of course, I wanted to, but at this point, it didn’t matter. Every doubt was irrelevant. There was only one thing to do: write.

Three years of travel blogging: what happened next

So, after setting the first (real) milestone of the blog, it was time for action. I started traveling a lot and the first year and a half were one of the best periods of my life. I slowly started to understand how things work, and then it was a pleasure to see the blog growing. From the day I launched it until February 2020, the growth was 20%-30% per month. Meanwhile, a small side income started to appear, which became bigger as time went by.

And then, the coronavirus hit. Sixteen months of hard work went down the drain overnight. Travel became irrelevant and -most of the time- forbidden. Since March 2020, everything around us has become all about death and lockdowns. The traffic went down more than 50%, and I canceled several planned journeys that ended up either in vouchers or lost money.

It’s now three years since I started blogging, and this year’s anniversary is an odd one. For the past three years, I traveled for eighteen months extensively and for another eighteen not at all.

I had to save the blog

Early on, I decided that I didn’t want all the effort I put in and all the money I invested in going down the drain. Therefore, I decided to do everything to keep the blog alive. Being unable to travel meant that I had to diversify the content and see what I could possibly write on a travel blog during a pandemic.

Luckily enough, I have saved several blog posts in my drawer (well, the Draft section on WordPress, to be more precise). I knew that bad days would come (but not so bad), so for a while, the blog kept running smoothly. However, the whole thing with the lockdowns lasted too long. I spent the first lockdown in Berlin and the second one in Athens. The latter lasted for eight months, and we were not even allowed to leave the neighborhood.

And yet, after I started running out of content, I returned to some older journeys. Even before running this blog, I used to travel a lot, and I had some impressions and stories to narrate (like the one from Chisinau). During the short breaks of freedom, I managed to travel to some places around Greece -among them Donoussa, Acrocorinth, Nemea, Folegandros, and Mycenae– and I created as much content as I could.

Three years of travel blogging: the next steps

Since late July, I’m fully vaccinated, and despite the new variants of the virus circulating the planet, I try to remain optimistic. I slowly start making travel plans again, and I’m now on another remote island to enjoy some free time and create content. If the situation stabilizes and travel becomes a thing again, I plan to start going abroad.

On the bright side of blogging, the traffic resumed. However, the growth is not as significant as it used to be during my early blogging days. It’s more of slow progress, but it still makes me happy. But what makes me even happier is that the traffic never disappeared. Even on the worst days, enough readers visit the blog, either for my travelogues, the travel guides, or the Polaroid Diaries.

And that’s exactly what motivated me to carry on blogging. Long before the expiration date of my current hosting plan, I decided to extend it. Moreover, I decided to upgrade the plan in order to give the readers of Letters to Barbara an even smoother experience. That said, this blog will still be updated with fresh content for the years to come.

And that’s, I think, the only way to thank you, each one of the readers of the Letters to Barbara, for sticking around. I want to thank you from the bottom of my heart for accompanying me on this long journey in the blogosphere. Your comments, e-mails, and the time you spend on the website mean more than you think.

So, thank you guys -and hopefully, on the fourth anniversary, we’ll be traveling around freely again.

See more of my writing and blogging articles here.

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Last Updated on September 18, 2021 by George Pavlopoulos