Last Updated on September 26, 2026 by George Pavlopoulos
After eight years of travel blogging, I now know that there are much easier ways to run a blog.
For example, you can write about places people are already searching for or answer the questions they ask. Photographing the things they expect to see is also a common way to gain attention. Then you update the article every year, add relevant links, refresh the title, rearrange the information, and republish it.
I can assure you I do all these things: sometimes it works, sometimes it helps articles thrive, and sometimes it doesn’t work at all. It’s part of the game, and staying consistent seems to be one of the top qualities of an online writer.
Those other articles
But I often write those other articles, the ones destined never to be discovered or much appreciated. These articles are just for pleasure: for me as a writer, and hopefully for the readers.
For example, I remember the sand in Donoussa. It was the first pandemic summer, with fear, uncertainty, and broken rituals. Or that trip to Odessa, a few years before the war. Or even lately, the end of land in New York.
Before publishing them, I knew that relatively few people would ever read them. But I published them anyway because I needed a way to express myself.
Other articles, of course, make much more sense for a travel blog. I know what to address in them, what people might ask for to discover them, and how to push them in the rankings (which also doesn’t always work). They bring traffic, attention, and often some income.
Yet, I usually enjoy those other articles. This is not because they seem damned by search engines and AI systems; no, they don’t carry the spirit of a cursed poet. Not at all. But I like that they are triggered by a fleeting image, a sentence, or even a wrong impression.
But I’m fair to them. I know not everything has to be useful; sometimes, we are allowed to do things that give us pleasure, and struggle is part of creating something you’re proud of. This unusefulness is its own reward.
Numbers, interpretations, and forecasts after eight years of travel blogging
For a long time, the numbers have been generous, and the online world seemed more stable than it is now. Search engines brought people; the blog grew. Sometimes the compensation justified the hours in front of the laptop. On the dark side, though, I kept watching the numbers with the unhealthy attention with which people watch stock prices.
Numbers moving up were good; numbers moving down were bad. The latter needed an explanation, while the former was a confirmation. Keep doing, interpret, correct, rinse, repeat.
Then, one day the numbers started going down. At first slowly, then faster. There had to be an explanation: an algorithm update, seasonality, winter, competition, AI, and all that online jargon.
The internet has changed since I started blogging in September 2018. It happens, and honestly, it would have been weird not to. By now, I know more things about how search engines work than I did eight years ago. For my work in digital marketing with clients, that’s undeniably good. So this is very useful, but for running a travel blog it can also be odd or even dangerous.
Why’s that? Well, I begin looking at a place and already see the article unfolding. Walking through a city means noticing headings (will this be an H2 or an H3?). And then I need to categorize the information: will this be a good addition to the travel guide, or should I save it for a dedicated article that links to the main article? If I struggle to get from the airport to the city, I know there’s an article to write and questions to answer. And if a meal exceeds my expectations, I know I should add it to a guide. But to which guide?
At times, I used searchable questions to divide the destinations I visited into subcategories. But after a while, I stopped doing that. Sure, I still write guides I believe offer value, because sharing firsthand experience matters in the end. However, I decided to also write about places without keyword analysis. And this was liberating.
I mentioned Odessa earlier. This travelogue never became one of the website’s important pages. Still, I don’t believe its importance to me should be measured by traffic. I’m glad it exists, because it covers the purest impressions I have from it, the ones that got triggered by a building, a cup of coffee, a sentence, a face, or a walk. And I’m happy it exists because I don’t have to rely on just old photos to understand how it felt and what it meant to be there. Many places are like that: Transnistria, San Sebastián, Crete, Malta.
Nowadays, I perceive it this way: the photographs remember what I was looking at, while the texts remember what I was looking for.
The temptation I said no to after eight years of travel blogging
When something stops performing, or in this case when something never performed, the temptation is to improve it: rewrite, change the title, add or update the info, make it look fresher or even more contemporary, reply to questions, and so on. I do this for the informative pieces, like the guides.
However, when it comes to my older travelogues, I realized that improving them would destroy something or even the whole thing. Sure, some of them are awkward or might look tired. I recognize that, but I refuse to change them because they represent who I was. Some of them might have all the mistakes one needs to avoid: profound observations that aren’t so profound, descriptions of things that impressed me but look boring from a distance, taking too long to say what I wanted to say anyway.
I recognize that, but I also don’t want to correct that guy searching for replies well before turning forty.
The blog’s eighth anniversary under a different light
Exactly like people, blogs become strange when they survive long enough. At first, every piece of content feels present, but as old articles pile up, time seems to accelerate, accumulating old versions of you.
The old times are omnipresent: different cameras, different budgets, various ideas about what will work and what won’t, other kinds of focusing, different kinds of hotels. I knew less, and more things were there to surprise me.
But at the end of the day, this travel blog has been a publication, and publications need readers. This has been, and still is, my creative outlet, especially when times got tight (like now), and I could do less of the things I grew up loving. Yet, underneath all these different layers, there’s another question. It’s the question that remains at the core of blogging for me when I look back on all these years of traveling and writing.
The blog contains more than one million words, but there’s only that one question.
Would I have written the Letters to Barbara if nobody was going to find them?
The answer is affirmative. Maybe I would have skipped some articles that the struggle didn’t deserve, and they eventually failed. But I’d definitely write about Anafi and its monolith, the sand in Donoussa, the smell of the volcano in Nisyros, and, of course, New York.
I would have written them anyway.
I have no idea what blogs will look like in a few years from now. Maybe no one reads them; maybe their purpose was always to train AI systems for the future. I have zero clue.
However, on every anniversary, I try to find something to write about my blog. Something that bothered me or I realized mattered a lot. Where it has taken me, what changed after a year, and how long it has existed overall. But what makes me really happy this year is that the travelogues, which are the blog’s identity for me, still exist; I still write them occasionally, and I’ll happily keep writing them even if no one reads them.
You can read my previous blogging articles here.
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