Why We Started a Travel Blog – A Terradrift Story

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Blogging. Everybody is doing it, right? There are a million travel bloggers out there, typing away, sharing their adventures with the world. By the time we started ours in 2013, travel blogging was already growing in popularity. But before that, I was honestly super averse to the idea of a blog. Way back in high school blogging was just starting to become a thing. My friends were all starting their own personal online journals for the world to read and I was not feelin’ it. Who the heck thought the whole world would be interested their story? Turns out, blogging is less about the person providing the content than it is about offering something valuable to the reader. So a handful of years after we graduated, this is why we started a travel blog.

My instructor told me to

Honestly, when I try to reach back to 2013 to remember why on earth we thought it would be a good idea to start a travel blog, I can’t remember a single good reason. All I can remember was that I was about halfway through a travel writing course with MatadorU and the assignment was to create a blog. So basically, I had to.

I was working my way toward the coveted title of “Travel Writer” (which I now finally claim without feeling like a poser), I was already a freelance journalist, and my instructor was now insisting that I create a blog. After all, what decent travel writer doesn’t have one? (I know of one or two.)

So Josh and I spent weeks creating a travel blog in WordPress and even longer trying to come up with what to call it (Terradrift was one of his suggestions). We bought a domain name and hosting package from HostGator (now you can also build your own site with HostGator). I had been learning about monetization and how to use it to get free travel, and all of it sounded great and totally doable, so why not? This was definitely going to be a thing.

Spoiler alert: It wasn’t a thing

I mean, it is a thing. People read Terradrift, like it, share it, we’ve made a little money from ads and affiliate links but really just enough to buy a coffee or two once a month or so. It has scored us some free admissions and excursions here and there, but nothing you’d hear about and be so jealous of you can’t deal. And half the time those freebies are because I’m a travel journalist who writes for well-known (OK, semi-well-known) publications on the reg. Because honestly, our monthly viewers, Instagram followers, and Facebook fans aren’t in the thousands and thus aren’t all that attractive to most large travel companies.

But travel blogging isn’t an overnight thing. Once you start one, you aren’t instantly Instafamous. You can’t charge $300 a month for ads right off the bat. You can’t quit your day job. But maybe you can in 8-10 years. That’s the average amount of time that most travel bloggers took to make enough to do it full time. We’re right at that threshold, but I don’t honestly count the first 2-3 years at least because we weren’t doing what we should have been doing from the start. We weren’t posting weekly, sometimes even monthly. We weren’t using affiliate links. We weren’t researching how to build our following. We were naive enough to think if we simply created it, readers would come. They didn’t. But now that we’re working at it several days a week, we’re finally making some headway.

Bottom line

It takes work. A lot of work. But we thought what we had to share (how to travel cheap, long, and adventurously as a couple that really doesn’t make that much) was useful, people would appreciate it, and we could do what we love: Mainly, writing, photography and video production. Maybe you dig that. Maybe you don’t. If not, why are you here? Go read somebody else’s lifestyle blog about 20 ways to use an Instant Pot or where to find the best deal on Lulu Roe leggings or something. You know what, don’t do that. Stay here and read some more. We need the numbers.

Wander on, friends, wander on.