My First Year As A Travel Blogger

I honestly thought that I would achieve more in my first year of blogging. I don’t have any great milestones or breakthroughs to brag about yet but in the interest of full disclosure and to inform any would-be bloggers out there, here is the full story of my first year as a travel blogger, complete with the mistakes I’ve made and the lessons I’ve learned.

I consider the beginning of May 2018 to be the official start for The Restless Hobo. There was a lot of work done behind the scenes before then though. I bought the domain name and signed up for 3 years of hosting with Bluehost in early February. I spent a number of weeks trying to set up the website using free resources and blog posts online.

Eventually, having realised that I was not at all tech savvy, I decided to invest in a course from Superstar Blogging. I think this was probably the first real step towards getting the blog going. The tech support that was offered as an inclusion of the course was worth every cent that I spent on it.

There are literally tons of blog posts online offering step-by-step instructions to setting up a blog. They’re all super helpful up to a certain point, where they say that it’s now time to “choose your theme and plug-ins and get started” or something similar. Seriously???

Choosing themes and configuring plug-ins isn’t easy (at least not for me). This is definitely where I struggled most, and having the backup of the Superstar Blogging tech expert was a lifesaver. Without that, I honestly think I would have just given up at that point.

So, in early May, I published my first 4 posts and the Restless Hobo went live. This was it. I was so pleased with myself. I changed my Facebook occupation to “blogger” and I just KNEW that I was going to make it. And for the next 2 and a half months I did…well, pretty much nothing actually.

This was the time where I allowed myself to get completely distracted by Instagram. I thought that if I grew my following there, my loyal fans would flock to my blog in their hundreds (maybe even thousands?). I set myself a target of reaching 10k followers so that I could link my blog posts in my stories to make it easier for these loyal fans to find me. Meanwhile, I posted nothing new to the blog until late July.

What a complete waste of my time. I now know that Instagram is one of the less effective sources of traffic for any blog, not just mine. Somewhere along the way, I accepted that I needed to stop fixating on the numbers and concentrate on writing blog posts, so that when those “loyal fans” I was dreaming about do eventually stumble across the site, they’ll have something more to look at than a couple of old blog posts and links to my social media.

Even with this new determination, I posted only four more times before the end of 2018, due in part to my struggles with work-related anxiety throughout October and November. The new year saw a fresh start for me and I have been posting much more regularly since my return from my Australian adventures in January.

For anyone out there who hopes to start a blog, you need to know in advance that it is hard work. Writing and editing blog articles, adding photos and posting to the site is only part of what is involved in keeping a blog running. There is so much promotion needed, particularly in the early stages, to attract traffic to a website.

So I guess the big question on everyone’s minds must be whether it’s been worth the time and the effort. I have invested countless hours and have made literally not one single cent. But terms of personal achievement and feeling like I have been rewarded for my time, I would absolutely say that it has been worth every last minute I have put into it.

So what are the next steps for the Restless Hobo? Well, I have finally found the courage to leave the job that has been making me so unhappy. I finish in August and I head to Vietnam in September to do a month of volunteering on a food outreach project in Ho Chi Minh, followed by a month of travelling in Vietnam and Bali. Before then though, I will travel to Boston to my first travel blogging event, which I’m super excited about.

I’m also working on finding myself a location independent job (watch this space), so that I can travel more and continue building the blog until it can one day provide me with a full time income. So for now, please stay restless with me and keep reading. Because I promise that this is just the start.