1 Year Of Travel Blogging - 5 Things We’ve Learnt.

What?! Was the first thing that came to my mind – how the hell did we get here?!

This year has gone past so fast - we have had As We Travel for exactly one whole year, and we’re enjoying it more and more as every week goes by.

We have definitely had our ups and downs, and despite having so many great bloggers to learn from, we still learnt SO many things the hard way.

Here are a few things we have learnt during our 1st year of blogging – ENOJY!

1. Blogging Is Easy – Travel Blogging Is Not

Sitting at a desk in a nice ergonomic chair with your laptop, having all day to work, food in the fridge and a home to live in, is far away from the reality of a travel blogger.

We write on our 11 inch laptops lying in awkward positions on hard beds in run-down hostels, moving every few days and trying to explore the places we visit while working on a website.

To me, the most difficult task has been to keep the focus and inspiration while trying to deal with Visa applications, transport, finding WiFi etc.

Traveling while running a blog full-time is unlike anything we’ve done before. It has really taken our travels to a whole different turn.

2. Good Things Take Time

I’ve found that many people I meet who know nothing about blogging (and don’t have a blog themselves), have many presumptions about it.

They either think it’s really easy to create a successful blog – that it’s just to start writing a few posts and you’ll make heaps of money, or they think it’s a waste of time and don’t see it as an actual job.

Either of the two, they don’t take it seriously at all.

This can easily make you doubt yourself and question what you’re really doing.

You know you would never work at a place without getting paid the first month, never write for a magazine for free everyday for months, but at the same time you’re spending as many hours as a full time job without getting paid for your blog at first.

Just try to remember that all good things take time.

Soon you will be rewarded for your hard work, and you can give all those who didn’t believe in you the middle finger

3. Without Passion You Lose The Drive

To keep up a blog, you need to have a true passion for what you do, or else you can stop doing it right away.

We learned pretty quickly that blogging and traveling is exactly what we want right now in our lives.

We want to share our travels, our thoughts and our tips, and we want to do it on our own terms.

We want to be our own bosses, no matter how much we have to work for it.

People always go on and on about how the young people today want to start their own businesses but never realize how much work it means.

I don’t care how much work it means, I want it. And I know that if I didn’t want it so bad, I would have quit doing it a long time ago…

4. Even The Smallest Things Make A Big Difference

We like to play around a little and test different things on our site. Sometimes it works, sometimes not. But if we’re curious, we’ll give it a try.

What we have noticed, though, is that some of those tweeks sometimes make a big difference.

Put a plugin here or there, and you can either lose subscribers or gain subscribers. – “It’s in the little things”.

5. You Can’t Do This On Your Own

Blogging is a social business. Bloggers interact and share with each other. A blog with good content and design would be nothing without readers and other bloggers sharing your site with others.

Social network means everything for a website, being able to connect in different ways with people. As much as you would like to, you can’t only rely on yourself, but you also need the social network to help you out.

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Well there you go - we feel so blessed to be able to do this as our full-time jobs, sharing our content with you as we travel around the world – hoping that a picture, a few lines will provoke and inspire you to also go out there and live this life the way YOU want.

We thank you from the bottom of our hearts, since we know none of this would be what it is without you reading these words, and sharing what we do with others around the world – SO THANK YOU SO MUCH!!