MONTHLY #1 MAY: LAUNCHING TRAVEL BLOG
Launching Travel Blog
The month of May revolved entirely around launching our new travel blog.
And it was a crazy busy month. Even though the final idea about having our travel site finalized in February, it took us a while before we agreed on the look, the way how we want to run it, and overall, the start was pretty slow, but the powerful finish before launching our site in mid-May reminded us our university times and the nights before exams. As we are still working full time, creating the content became almost our second job taking us all our spare time in the evenings, at nights and during the weekends.
But what was the real motivation behind our work?
That's, in fact, a good question, and we, unfortunately, don't have an unambiguous and short answer if you're looking for the straightforward explanation. I would say, that the idea was in our subconscious for quite some time, but we probably did not have the right strong impulse and spare time to actually work on it and turn it into reality. To explain, we've been traveling together since we met, more than ten years ago, and all the photos and notes we've taken during our travels were piling up in our imaginary and virtual drawer. Which I feel is a shame.
So why, now, when we're slowly turning into our thirties (which is very very sad), we decided to go out on a limb?
The first reason is that we finally had time to think about the idea more deeply. Last summer, we moved to Calgary for one year. Living in a new country and the unknown city gave us great experiences and working opportunities, on the other hand, we were little bit cutoff of all our activities and overall not that busy as we were used to be back in the Czech Republic plus the long and incredibly cold winter discouraged us from outdoor activities. In the beginning, we tried hard to stay active, do our routine, go jogging, photograph sunrises and sunsets, aimlessly wander around the city, but when temperatures were still hitting minus 30°C when we slipped uncountable times on the icy walkways, waded through the knee-deep snow when going to work and when the air was so cold that it actually hurt just to breathe, at some point we gave up and found it easier to stay home. The second reason was that for a long time already, I tried to persuade Martin to share his photos in public. Photography has been his hobby for many years, and those who are up to date probably know that this "hobby" doesn't come cheap. In creating the blog, I saw the way how he might get more professionally involved in it.
The truth is, that from the very beginning we probably underestimated, how time-consuming our new passion might get and how many people are involved in it.
If I'd read all advice how to set up a blog, we would have probably never got started. 2018 seems like a year when everyone wants to get into blogging, and the internet is full of tips and guaranteed advice, how to make your living online. The good thing is, we are not stressed with that at all as monetization is not why have this small online space of ours. Traveling is what we truly love and enjoy the most, and we'll see, how long we'll be passionate about writing and sharing our travels. It might be a year it might be more.
Create a site from scratch is not something we were able to do overnight, especially when we never did it before.
Buy a domain - simple; come up with a name - well, not that easy, but doable; choosing a theme - let's say what you can see now is the third version; creating a content - that's a dark horse. I always really enjoyed reading and writing, so I would have never believed that I'll be struggling with creating the content. It is not that I don't have topics to write about (actually I have plenty), but as you 100% noticed already, English is not my first language and being perfectionist as I am, it is hard for me to post something online, when I know even though I worked hard on it, that the article is far from perfect and Martin's comforting words that no one will read it anyway don't work in that case.
There was another barrier we had to cross. Having travel blog and wanting some people to discover your site, it means you must become the mastermind of your social media, which we were so far terrible at in our personal lives. We had to create the Instagram, Pinterest, Twitter, and Facebook Page and now we are trying to keep up with it, add new content and grow our traffic.
Last, but not least struggle is the anticipation and fear about reactions we might get, but that's something we can and must live with.
Well, that was, in a nutshell, our past month and we can't wait for the upcoming one. We have last three weeks at work ahead, and then we'll finally hit the road again, and where else to start, then in Canada? Keep up with us! How was your May?
