A little over a year ago we looked into starting a travel blog. It may seem like a logical thing to do for a couple traveling full-time and with backgrounds in writing and marketing. But it honestly was not something on our radar when we left the UK.
We both work as freelancers but starting a blog wasn’t something we contemplated until over 2 years into our travels. We are now a year into starting our travel blog – Beaches All The Way Down – and it’s been a challenging but rewarding experience. Here’s what’s been going on.
Working Remotely and Managing Free Time
Hannah’s work as a freelance marketing and PR manager is much more consistent than mine. I write for various travel blogs and magazines, as well as tinkering with aspects of my old businesses back home. Financially it keeps us sound and able to enjoy our travels to the fullest.
But managing my free time is not something I am particularly great at. I have been self-employed my entire adult life and am used to earning money every day. So when we left the UK, and our jobs and that security behind us, I knew it would be difficult.
Whereas Hannah’s work is fixed, my work ebbs and flows from month to month. I sometimes have big patches of time to fill. When house sitting I usually take on the bulk of the pet or house responsibilities when work is quiet, but still, filling the free time can be mentally difficult.
The Work/Life Balance
Sitting on a sunbed by the pool in Costa Rica or hopping around wine bars in Italy is certainly a fun aspect of traveling. But trust me you can’t (and shouldn’t!) do it every day of your life. It’s not healthy, it will eat into your travel fund, and leave you with a sense of emptiness that defeats the point of traveling the world.
Staying active both mentally and physically while enjoying new and exciting surroundings is a difficult thing to balance. It can take some figuring out. I found not being active work-wise seriously affected my sleep and sometimes impacted my overall happiness and enjoyment of the places we were visiting.
While in Phu Quoc, Vietnam, and after a third-consecutive bad night of sleep, it was then that the realization came – I needed something fulfilling to do, a project, a business to build like I’d done my entire life. Chatting with Hannah, we realized that we should be working on a travel blog.
Starting a Travel Blog
We are very passionate about house sitting as a means of travel. Over the past 3 years it has allowed us to visit places we never thought possible and experience a way of life we could have only dreamed of. We therefore very quickly decided that our website should be dedicated to the joys of house sitting.
Never being one for social media I also thought the website would be a good way to let our friends and family know what we have been up to. So another section would be Short Tails, snippets of the fun or crazy stuff that has happened to us.
I had built websites from templates before but wanted something completely from scratch. So I leaned on Hannah’s contact with the successful blog Goats on the Road for advice on what to do. I can’t recommend or thank them enough for the guidance they gave me while constructing the site.
Early Failures
I love writing and having the freedom to write my own blogs was a revelation. They say authors should only write books about subjects they have full knowledge of and I found that for me, as a blog writer, that house sitting was a subject I was proficient in. I enjoy writing for our website.
Building the website was a challenge though, it took months to construct and get right. On more than one occasion I declared to Hannah in my occasional catastrophizing way that it was impossible. I persevered and eventually launched the website in April 2024 from Bali, Indonesia.
However, on the day before I planned to launch the website, my long-serving laptop died. I bought a cheap Bali stop-gap that was frankly the worst laptop ever made to get me through. I waited until Australia to buy a more efficient new one. Regardless, the website went live and we were up and running.
It Takes Time
Starting a travel blog is the easy part, building it into something people find and follow is difficult. I knew we wouldn’t receive hoards of subscribers in the first few months but set about producing content.
The internet is a world wide web. So I think of my articles as small spider webs coming together to form a larger web. The more you build the more people you are likely to attract. It can be (and was) slow going starting the project. But I enjoyed being busy and having something to work on every day.
Early Success
As well as a means of keeping me active, I had a strong desire to organically grow our blog. I wasn’t exactly sure how to do this but figured one day we’d have enough decent content to attract advertisers. There is also the affiliate marketing route which can be quite lucrative for bloggers.
This happened within two weeks of launching the site! Although we didn’t quite have the traffic yet, the house sitting website we use –Trusted Housesitters – took us on as affiliate partners. They would pay us to send people to their website.
It was an incredible early win that came with a degree of pressure. It was nice to have a little trickle of money coming from the blog but we now had to prove we were worthy of being an affiliate. We needed to produce paying customers for them through our content.
Becoming an Affiliate to Trusted Housesitters
It’s easy to sell something you believe in, and I believe in house sitting. It is the solution to many people’s dreams of traveling long-term or vacationing more. We have lived it for years and have no plans to stop. Starting a travel blog and being able to promote this great platform doesn’t feel like work at all.
I have written a portfolio of information that will enable anyone to become a house sitter or a host. I want our website to be the go-to resource for anyone thinking of signing up for a house sitting platform. We currently have over 150 articles to help guide people through the process.
Expanding into Other Areas
I also wanted to offer travel advice and help to anyone wanting to travel like we do. So as well as house sitting, I built a Travel Hacks section. It features everything from Airbnb tips and packing, to exercising while traveling.
Saving money both before you leave and while traveling is another important factor. So I began to write articles about the things we did to build our travel fund and do today to sustain our lifestyle. Through these channels, we have become affiliates to two other large companies – Viator and Outplayed.
Viator is one of the largest tour and excursion websites in the world. We feel quite lucky and very happy to be affiliated with them. Outplayed is a fantastic site that teaches how to do matched betting, a risk-free, tax-free system that I have used to make free money for years. Click here to learn more.
A Long Way to Go
The new affiliations are both fresh and we are now in the same situation we were with Trusted Housesitters a year ago – we need to prove that we can deliver sign-ups and bookings. But, I like a challenge and it has given me some real determination to continue building our blog into something bigger.
I am pleased to say that having a project has helped balance me out while traveling the world. Although we still have a long way to go to move it from a hobby that keeps me busy to a paying profession, I love doing it and the sense of purpose that comes from building something is clearly something I need.
Traveling is not all sunshine and pina coladas. Being away from home for a long time and giving up your business or job, friends, family and the security of a social circle can be difficult. We have both learned this along the way and are happy to have found things that allow us to manage the work/life balance.
Final Thoughts
Staying mentally active and physically healthy is vital especially when on the road full-time. We hope to help and inspire others to embrace this as part of a nomadic lifestyle. Starting a travel blog was a real game-changer for me.
Check out our website for all the information and insights we have gathered from over 3 years of full-time traveling.
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