Sharing a short essay that arrived in my inbox today, courtesy of Dense Discovery — a newsletter about design, tech, sustainability and urbanism curated by Kai Brach, based in Melbourne, Australia.
Do we travel for transformation or validation?
It's always interesting to hear what thought leaders "outside" the travel industry have to say about the state of tourism, so I'm sharing Kai's article with his permission.
There's a few good points in this piece, including how touristic travel (e.g. mass tourism) can import more culture to a destination than it exports. I also agree that seeking validation on social media is drowning out good quality travel content.
There's some truth to Kai's point about escapism. Consider this: the biggest competitor to a travel agent is the electronics shop, where consumers can instead buy a new 50" flatscreen TV. In this scenario, which "escapism" is worse? Buying a new TV or booking a trip on a cruise ship? 😅
However, I don't believe that all trave...
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Hi, travel community,
[TLDR: I am thinking about closing down my travel blog after eight years. Does anyone have any advice on closing vs selling vs transforming?]
I have been a relatively active blogger for almost eight years. I started The Altruistic Traveller (thealtruistictraveller.com) back in 2015 from a deep curiosity about the intersection of travel and sustainability.
Over the years, the blog (and podcast) has been a valuable resource for those wanting to learn about sustainable tourism. A few posts have quite high rankings in SEO (e.g. volunteer guides/sustainable eateries). I have won awards, been featured in news articles and have written hundreds of posts.
Last year, I published a memoir that encapsulated many years of travel and stories that had made it to the blog. Since writing that book, I have been feeling as though perhaps it was an ode to a chapter of my life that is coming to an end.
The world of blogging is fast evolving. I am not a TikToker, nor do I aspire to be. I do not feel to engage in creating short-form content to keep up with trends. I prefer to write and share stories that have depth - but writing is also changing (AI evolution, changes to SEO algorithms etc)
So I am left with a decision to make - do I close The Altruistic Traveller, do I transform it into a website that takes up less of my time/energy or do I look to sell it?
Any advice?
Please do not sell or close it down. It is my opinion.
Dear Bianca, I have found myself often thinking the same. And also after writing a book and planning a new one. Not to mention that the time going into my travel blog TheGreekVibe.com is not equal to the meager monetary rewards since I relaunched the initially Greek music blog into a Greek culture and travel blog. Though there are days that I feel like you, before you make any decisions picture your life without your blog. If you can then yes, the time has come, so you would need to value it and request that amount. If however, you feel a sense of emptiness then perhaps you should keep your blog but change the time you dedicate to it. I understand that the constantly changing demands and changes (AI, TikTok, Google madness) often weigh down on our love for writing and sharing, however I have found that blogging is a part of me and my life. Wishing you the very best.
Thank you so much, everyone. I have decided to work with someone to assist in keeping the blog alive and perhaps helping to monetise it in a more sustainable way that I was doing this before. I will trial this for 6 months and revisit my thoughts.
I totally relate to your dilemma Bianca. I think you've made a good choice working with someone to keep your blog going and to try to monetize it more. I would do the same, but at the moment I can't afford to hire someone. I launched my blog (urbangardensweb.com) in 2009 before there were "influencers" and, before there was TikTock or Instagram, or even Pinterest. I did it from the seat of my pants, not knowing a thing about blogging or social media. When it was nominated for a Webby the next year, I felt validated and brands started asking about sponsored content. (It hadn't even occured to me before that people would pay me to post.) At first iI write about just design and gardens, sustainable indoor-outdoor living, and environmental challenges like food justice. But then as I began traveling on sponsored trips near and far, I pivoted a bit into writing about those destinations and before I knew it I was writing about travel with a focus on design and gardens. At the time, it was a bit novel, but now there are many doing the same thing. I realized I loved travel writing more than what I was doing before but did I want to throw the baby out with the bath water and abandon Urban Gardens and its followers to start a travel blog? It's been a conundrum for a while. Like you, I had a very good run with the blog and I prefer the long form writing over the short blips; and I don't feel like becoming a TikToker competing with influencers who have video crews accompany them on their travels. So....I am too trying to decide what's next. Wish you the best and look forward to reading your blog.
When we rebuilt Travel Massive (the website you're reading right now) we retired over 1000 old blog posts to a dedicated archive website:
www.travelmassiveblogarchive.com
I wanted to preserve the stories from our community, but not bring all these old posts along for the ride (with broken links, outdated information, etc). Google indexed the archive so they are still searchable. I converted all the pages from Wordpress to static HTML and hosted them on Amazon S3... so there's no need to maintain a Wordpress instance (in fact, we don't run Wordpress at all these days!)
Oh wow, I didn't realise TM was a blog before this. Thanks for the advice. I will consider the archive option.
This is such a great idea. I have a ton of archive content that doesn't help with our current SEO goals, but much of it was user-submitted stories that we'd love to live on. This could be a nice solution to offer that content a place to remain viewable for the users who'd like to revisit their featured stories. Thanks for sharing!
Hi Bianca, Sharon Gourlay did and has a podcast on how to do it www.digitalnomadwannabe.com/episode41/
Thank you for sharing.
Hi Bianca, have you considered transforming your content into audio journals?
I do this for all my written content.
Thank you. I have a podcast which houses some of the content but great idea!
I'd love to hear them Triv. How do I do that?
Hi Robin, you can listen to all my articles (except the photo journals) here: knownomad.substack.com
I sold one of mine about 8 years ago for mid-5-figures and was very happy with the outcome. I will probably sell another one next year. But I ran 6 sites and that brought it down to 5 I have now, so it's not really the same as your situation. I was just taking some equity off the table in cash. What you'll get for it if selling is a multiple of your annual profit from it, normally somewhere between 3 and 4X. If you do the math and that's not really worth it, then just let it sit, maybe putting some more monetization options on there, and don't do much with it. It's hard to force it if you're not feeling motivated, but maybe in three months you'll have a great new idea you want to get on there and you'll still have the outlet. If it feels like a core part of your identity, you might have regrets from selling, especially if they completely transform it. (Nice meeting you in Bansko by the way!)
Thanks, Tim. I realised that I never put much energy into monetisation. It was really a passion project. And the heart of it is sustainability so I was limited to the advertising I could do at the time. I have found someone to come on board and trial a collaborative effort with me to keep it up and focus on some monetisation. I'll see how that goes. Great to meet you too!
Dont shut it down. Even if you are not that active on the blog, google will keep sending you traffic. It's not like people are not reading blogs any longer. It's just an older clientele that does. And they are generally more valuable in advertising terms. People who are +35 also tend to stay for much longer on a blog, unlike young people, who have typically flipped to the next thing within a few seconds. If you can sell it, then that might be a good thing. But I am sure that you can keep making a little buck out of the blog, if you put some advertising on it.
Thank you, Claus. Great advice. I often forget that the older audiences don't sit on Tiktok all day and do prefer to Google what they are looking for. :)
Hello Bianca, would it be possible to discuss cooperation?