An Update On Life & Social Media

Hi everyone, hope you’re keeping well! Apologies for the silent treatment of late.

This blog has had to take a back seat of late, which I’m a little sad about, but hopefully after reading this post you’ll appreciate why 🙂

Important stuff first – the blog is going nowhere, and I still love blogging, I just need to re-organise my time to fit in more posts. On the other hand, I haven’t been travelling much, which makes updating a travel blog with real life experiences a little more difficult!

Exactly 2 years ago I wrote a similar post, explaining my blog silence and having a little moan about social media. Maybe it’s an August thing…

SOCIAL MEDIA & TRAVEL BLOGGING

I’ll be honest….I’m getting bored of social media. The same old content from the same people. Yes, I unfollow people, mute people, follow different people, but the same shit ads and crap content still appears on my feeds.

I’ve never been fussed about follower numbers or the number of likes I get on a tweet, post, Instastory or other form of social media content.

This blog is part-time. It doesn’t operate as my main revenue channel, so the amount of effort I put into social media and the blog is not really comparable to my own business, or my 11 month old son (see below).

I don’t have a huge following on any of my social channels. 4,000 or so on Twitter, less than 1200 on Instagram. And I don’t really care whatsoever whether that is considered big, small or average.

Let me be really open and show you the hard facts. Social media is great for brands, and especially for travel bloggers, BUT, what is the actual aim? Catch the eye of PR companies and brands with nice content, good engagement and a high followers count? I’m never going to be in the top percentile for any of those things. There are many other travel bloggers wayyy ahead of me in all those regards. I just post what I think is relevant, interesting and travel related (mostly).

I rebranded my blog a year ago, and over the course of 12 months, social media has accounted for 4.5% of my site traffic. Of that 4.5%, Instagram sent 72 visits (1.9%) to my blog. 72. In 12 months. For all the effort, is it worth the return? Nooooo.

I do care about sharing stories, changing perceptions and inspiring people to visit places and experiencing adventures they would never normally experience. Those things are important to me.

Thankfully, you don’t need a big number of followers to do that 🙂

Here are the other reasons the blog has been quiet!

MY SON IS NOW 11 MONTHS OLD

Many of you already know I have a little boy, but the majority of my spare time in the morning, and up until 7pm at night goes towards him. Once he goes down, I do have a few hours spare, but there are sooooo many things to do in that time, including walking my Springer Spaniel (1 hour), eating dinner (min 30 mins) and then other stuff like catch up on news, social media (grrr), cleaning, washing and general chilling (very important).

Here he is!

I’M RUNNING MY OWN BUSINESS

If having a baby wasn’t a big enough commitment for one year, many of you will know that I set up my own digital marketing business last August. It took a while to get going, but now I’m busy most days. Given this is the income stream that pays my mortgage and bills, it has to take priority over blogging.

I get many requests for sponsored posts, product reviews and the like, but for £50 a pop (mostly), they simply aren’t worth my time (sorry brands), as I could generate more revenue through my business with 2 or more hours of time.

JUST LIVING LIFE

I used to be the sort of person that said I needed to switch on to switch off. Not so anymore. I’ve play golf when I can. I walk the dog. If I take Pip for a walk in the mornings and evenings, I generally don’t look at my phone. I take holidays that don’t require blogging or social media commitments. I think it’s very important travel bloggers take holidays with no pressure attached for content or deadlines.

WILL YOU BE POSTING MORE REGULARLY AGAIN?

In short, yes I will be posting more often, once I get some time back. I’ve already had some fantastic trips this year – to France (skiing), the Lake District, Amsterdam, Devon, and I’ve had some fantastic offers for other trips, most of which I’ve had to turn down because of time or budget restrictions, but I hope to grab a few more trips this winter!

I’ve also got an amazing hiking and whisky trek coming up at the end of this month!!

In the meantime, I’m still here, I’ll post when I can, and you can always give me a holla on social media (except in September as I’ll be doing Scroll Free September 🙂