These annual blogging recaps aren’t just reports of my progress in the blogosphere. It became a habit to write every end of September about what I learned, admit my mistakes, and set goals for the next year. After six years of travel blogging, I can say that I learned lots of things, worked with new companies, and achieved plenty of goals. But that’s just the bright side.
Yes, there is also a darker side. Looking back, I also see mistakes and observe things I wish I could change. Most of the time, changing things is impossible: it takes trial and error to learn and countless hours of thinking and studying to perform the appropriate changes. I don’t regret anything because mistakes lie at the core of evolution.
So today, on the occasion of celebrating six years of travel blogging, I won’t just focus on Copenhagen or Ljubljana or the other places I’ve visited this year. Sure, that’s an integral part of blogging, and you will read about them, too. However, I want to focus on two new things I had to deal with this year.
Let’s begin.
Six Years of Travel Blogging: The art of slowing down
Travel blogging for six years means that I covered more than half a decade writing about my journeys. It’s probably the thing I enjoyed the most in my writing career -yes, much more than writing fiction and publishing books. This year, though, reality struck, and I had to deal with two things.
Lesson 1: I slowed down because I needed some breathing space
If you are a regular on this travel blog, you probably remember that I post articles every Saturday. Sometimes, these are city guides, other times just fleeting impressions or polaroid diaries, and once in a while, I write travelogues. This schedule remained intact for more than five years and resulted in 300+ articles.
There was a reason for that. Consistency helped me stay focused on the goal of growing the blog. Apart from the money I earned through travel blogging, I also grew my audience. Writers want to be read and earn from their writing. At the end of the day, it might feel more creative, but it’s just another job. Writing texts that no one reads and earning no income from this hard work is no fun. In the long term, it’s discouraging.
And yet, this year, I decided to slow down.
The ever-changing Internet landscape means that blogs and small publishers might be affected by changes in search engine algorithms. For me, this was never a reason for slowing down. After six years of travel blogging, the traffic will sometimes be up and sometimes down. It’s part of the game. Of course, I prefer to see the blog growing and thriving, but it is what it is.
The main reason for slowing down was that I wanted to recalibrate myself. I wanted to see what I achieved, but mainly, I wanted to know if I still enjoyed writing this blog and if I wanted to continue. It might now look that obvious, but a weekly habit of posting is relatively exhausting. It takes more than 20 hours per week to write an article that makes me happy, and then it is the process of correcting it, removing unnecessary parts, editing the photos, and doing whatever is needed to secure its discoverability.
Now, add on top of working with clients and various personal projects, and you can see how busy the week can be.
Why I slowed down after May
In June, I decided to start posting travel stories and articles every second Saturday temporarily. I wasn’t bored, I can assure you. But here’s the thing. Inevitably, some of my older blog posts started being outdated. An article written in 2018 might not have reflected the current situation in a place.
Some restaurants might have closed, or the prices might have changed. In addition, in the early stages of travel blogging, I might not have offered enough value to my readers. This made me think a lot about how to handle a growing blog. After six years of blogging, I wasn’t anymore in the beginning, and the innocence (or naivety) was gone.
Yes, from May onwards, I started posting every second Saturday. But daily, I started revamping my older posts. New paragraphs, up-to-date prices, information, and brand-new photos in better dimensions. It was about renewing and updating constantly. I’ve been doing that in the past, but never to the extent I did during the last four months.
Slowing down also made me more thoughtful. It was never about quantity for me; I was always pro-quality. But giving this extra space to the blog meant that it could offer more value to the readers.
I’m pretty sure that in the coming months, I will start posting every Saturday again. But if you are a fan of this travel blog and wonder why I slowed down, that’s the reply.
Lesson 2: Investing on a different level
If you’ve read my previous recaps (you can read my blogging anniversary articles here), you know how much I have always insisted on investing. Investing time and money on something you create from scratch is one of the best things to do. No, it doesn’t guarantee success. However, it always guarantees better chances for success.
For beginner bloggers, I know how stressful it is to invest your money in software, services, and everything related to your new hobby. In the beginning, you can’t expect money, and you don’t know if you’ll ever get it back. Yes, blogging can very well translate to throwing money out of the window. I’ve been there, and I know how stressful it can be.
However, investing in tools or services will help you optimize your workflow. And most importantly, it will remove an added weight from your shoulders. I always invested without second thoughts, but there was one thing that I always hesitated to have: a developer.
Why you need a developer
To reduce expenses as a beginner blogger, I decided not to have a developer create the Letters to Barbara. I preferred to save the money for traveling and to survive in the first months without income. Instead, I spent more than two months studying day and night how to set up a website. And I did it. For five years, the blog you’ve been visiting was created 100% by myself.
I did it, yes. But I made so many mistakes.
In the first years, those mistakes didn’t affect the website at all. But slowly, after some updates on the theme and the plugins, some things started misbehaving. I won’t go into technical depth about PHP, SSL, and child themes. What matters here is that there were issues with my travel blog, and they needed to be solved.
Hiring a developer translates to an added cost. As long as you can deal with the technical aspects on your own, you probably don’t need one. However, the bigger the mess, the more money it takes to sort everything out. And this was my case.
When I contacted my developer, I said one thing: I just wanted to write and post articles. I don’t want to make the updates because I don’t know if they will break the website. No, I don’t want to spend a week trying to figure out a solution, especially when I don’t know what the problem is.
Developers are money well spent
I was impatient for a solution. But I shouldn’t be. A good developer needs time to identify the issues, deal with them, and offer a solution. After agreeing on the price (it’s steep), they have to execute every step needed carefully. I couldn’t do that myself because I didn’t have the knowledge.
I spent a good amount of money to ensure that the website will still be up and running in the long term. Pushing for a solution in the future wouldn’t solve the problem; in fact, it would worsen it. It would have been the wrong approach.
For the record, the solution was to move to an entirely new theme. It was a costly solution, but I never regret doing that. Nowadays, the developer works on a monthly basis and makes sure that everything runs smoothly. Yes, it costs some money, but this gives me the freedom to work on the only thing I want to: writing.
Six years of travel blogging: Final Thoughts
I will never get tired of writing that Letters to Barbara is the best project I ever worked on. Apart from learning and unlocking the mechanisms of the Internet, it also helped me to develop aspects of my personality. Helping people travel better gives me joy. Moreover, developing as a travel writer and travel photographer offers me immense pleasure.
Of course, at the end of the day, I’m happy to earn a good side income per month through my travels. It’s not the easiest thing to achieve, but it’s one of the sweetest things to make a living. Combining solo traveling and blogging expanded my horizons and helped me learn things about myself that would have otherwise remained unseen.
Still, there are some lessons down the road. These ‘if only I knew’ moments might not be obvious when you have just started travel blogging. However, sooner or later, the realization will come about. There is always a certain point where you wonder if you need extra software or a new camera. The sparkle is there, and you have to consider everything that comes to mind. You don’t always have to say yes, but you definitely have to explore the possibilities.
In the end, after six years of travel blogging, I learned more than just slowing down or hiring a developer. What I mainly learned was the importance of refurbishing. Outdated content or outdated code, sooner or later, requires a solution. Postponing for the future is not the optimal solution. Dealing with it is so much better: it will relieve you. Stepping back, evaluating, and acting is really the best advice I can give, and this probably goes beyond just travel blogging.
Six Years of Letters to Barbara
So, here’s to six years of Letters to Barbara and future travels. It doesn’t matter if you are a first-time reader or a veteran. To each of you, I want to promise you more journeys, high-quality articles for sweeter trips out of your comfort zone, and lots of stories. And soon, I promise to get back on track with posting every Saturday.
Cheers!
More about blogging: How to start a travel blog, How to choose your blog name, Blogging costs
Pin it for later
Sharing is caring. Share this article about the Six Years of Travel Blogging Anniversary with your friends.
Last Updated on September 21, 2024 by George Pavlopoulos