While I have been posting my trip reports on the web since as early as 2005, it wasn’t until late 2012 that I decided to create an official travel blog called Jeffsetter.
When I decided to publish a dedicated travel blog and spin it off of from my personal website, I thought it would help me stay focused on a single topic and grow an audience.
I also thought that I might be able to make a little money off the site to fund future travels and/or benefit from perks like exclusive access and invitations to private islands.
None of that has really happened so far, and it probably never well given the proliferation of travel bloggers all over the world. The truth is that there are just too many blogs out there for all but a handful of individuals to stand out.
How to stand out in a saturated market
When you are in a saturated market, you need to find your niche and be consistent in order to grow an audience and stand out from the crowd.
Just how saturated is the market? Well, just about every niche you could think of is covered.
There are moms deals, dads deals and dans deals.
There are travel blogs for marathon runners and mileage runners.
There are blogger robots and I’m sure at some point there will be a dog with a travel blog
There are backpacker bloggers living in hostels and business bloggers living out of a carry on
There is a blog dedicated to talking about other blogs (hi George!)
There is a kickstarter campaign to help under privileged bloggers realize their dream of sleeping in the nose-cone of an A380.
Then there is me. A guy who works full time, plays full time and occasionally is in front of a computer long enough to share his adventures. That’s hardly a niche.
How I plan to operate moving forward
There are often times where I think about giving up blogging entirely, wondering if it is worth the effort.
There are times where the pendulum in this labor of love is balanced more toward labor than it is toward love.
There are times where a piece of shit troll will leave an asshole comment on my blog and I consider nuking their house by reverse engineering their IP address, finding GPS coordinates and calling in a favor from above.
Then I see a friend in person who tells me how much they love reading my posts or I get an email from someone thanking me for helping them plan the trip of their dreams.
That’s the love that keeps me interested in doing the labor.
Focusing on the experience of travel is what makes me happy
The things that make me happy about travel writing have not changed since I started publishing stories about my travels in 2005. I like writing about the experience of traveling first and foremost. I like to tell stories and make the world bigger for anyone interested in reading.
Among the biggest changes since 2005 is that I learned how to use points and miles to fund a significant portion of my travel. This has lead to upgraded travel experiences across the board, with coach seats getting switched for business class and hostels being replaced with 5 star hotels.
Since points and miles are a large part of my travel, I thought it would be good to incorporate it into my trip reports and stories in order to reveal to others how these trips became possible. This caused a weird phenomenon of people leaving comments on my blog doing minor fact correction of the posts while missing the overall point.
Moving forward, I’m planning to go back to what I always wanted to do: Making this a diary of my travel life, while sharing the things that I find interesting when it comes to travel. I am going to talk about points and miles as the means to and ends, not the ends itself. I will try to publish exactly one post per day so that it stays a hobby and not a burden.
It will also involve providing more beginner level content in order to help people become more interested in this hobby of seeing the world inexpensively. Sure this may mean I lose some of my current audience, or BoardingArea could drop me as a blogger, but I will have the balance that I need to make blogging sustainable and fulfilling in the long run.
And in time a new audience will grow, stronger and more connected than ever. That is what I am looking forward to the most!