Our return to travel blogging
Our return to travel blogging
This is our first blog post in a very, very long time! And the first on our revamped Schindlers on Tour self-built website! We’ll tell you more about that process later, but meanwhile a bit of background about our travel blogging journey.
Here’s an overview of our blogging experiences:
When we started blogging
Our days of travel blogging started with blogspot – anyone else remember that?? That was way back in the year 2000 when the world didn’t end with Y2K. We made the decision to pack up our careers and our life in London into a couple of rucksacks and a tent, and set off on our first big overseas trip together.
Our travel blog was a way for our family and friends to keep track of our travelling tales. Plus it was a way for us to keep a record of places we’d visited. Without the blog, communicating and connecting was via expensive long distance phone calls from phone boxes (remember them?), snail mail letters, and e-mailing from internet cafes (when you could find one!).
The early days
Back then there was no such thing as WiFi, Zoom, WhatsApp or social media platforms. And not a mobile phone in sight! Skype was the first real game-changer for us in terms of communicating. When it first launched we could call long-distance for free from our new found home in New Zealand.
Getting access to the internet was a time-consuming and often expensive challenge in those earlier halcyon days of our travels. No doubt that is incomprehensible to today’s generation of travel bloggers who have grown up completely at ease with technology.
Over the years we have tried and tested more blogging platforms and travel journal apps than we care to remember. In our experience Everlater and Weebly spring to mind as the best and worst respectively. Some of the platforms we used are still around, and others have long since gone. The result is us having a complete mish-mash of memories stored all over the web. Plus we have a stack of good old fashioned paper diaries from almost every trip we’ve ever taken together.
Here and now
And so in March 2020 when the coronavirus pandemic abruptly called a halt to our cycling tour of Sri Lanka we decided it was time to bring all our travel and adventure blogs and diaries together in one place. You’d think that with the world ground to a halt, no business to speak of, and plenty of time on our hands we’d have gotten right onto it, but the motivation and inspiration to build a new travel and adventure blog was not there during those strange times.
Instead we got busy in lockdown with building a campervan, shutting down our bed and breakfast business, selling our home and getting rid of most of our worldly possessions! The blog building got put on the back burner.
Now here we are nearing the end of 2022 attempting to collate 20+ years worth of travelling tales and life adventures to post as a collection of blogs on our Schindlers on Tour website.
Wish us luck!
Why we blog
First up we are not writing our travel and adventure blog in an effort to make a six figure income that so many travel bloggers rave about (although wouldn’t that be a fine thing!). Rather we’re doing it so that in years to come when our memories have faded, and we are old and demented, we will have one big memory bank that will hopefully trigger links to some of the happiest days of our lives.
We blog primarily to document our own personal travelling experiences and life’s adventures. It’s a hobby for us, and not a business venture. We’re not prepared to make the full-time commitment it requires to make an income from a blog, but if it ever generated enough to splash out on the occasional bottle of wine then happy days!
Secondly we have been asked by so many friends and family, and contacted by folks who we don’t know, to write more about our ever-changing travel and adventure lifestyle. And if sharing our stories on this blog inspires or motivates even one person to follow and realise their dreams, then our mission here will be accomplished!
What you’ll find in our blog
The plan is to have this new and revamped Schindlers on Tour website full of all our travelling and lifestyle adventures. There’ll be backdated posts from when we started travelling together, and right up to date posts from wherever we are now. It’s all about our own personal experiences and all blog posts are written by us.
You’ll find all the old posts from our previous travel blogging platforms, and excerpts from our old travel diaries. (As much as many of them make us cringe now, they are all part of our blogging history and we can’t change that!). The process of populating the blog with the old stuff is going to take a bit of time, so if you’re interested in that, check back another day!
There will be tales from our more recent travels, and maybe even some stories from our years as bed and breakfast hosts. We’ll do our best to add regular new posts and stories about van life and house sitting.
We’ll include travel tips when we can, plus honest, practical advice. You can be sure anything we recommend in a blog post has been tried and tested, or tasted, by us.
As we said, it is a memory bank for us, but we would love it if any of it inspires you to make memories of your own.
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How we rebuilt our travel and adventure blog
Let’s start by saying it has not been easy! It’s been all fits and starts for the past 18 months, and there’s still a long way to go. It’s a constant work in progress.
Inspiration and motivation waned at the best of times. We were either too busy out exploring new places and adapting to van life. Or we were too comfortable cuddling pets on our latest housesitting gigs.
Frustration took over at the worst of times, especially when we couldn’t access reliable internet for weeks at a time, not helped by our hard drive packing up while we were on a remote Greek Island!
There were plenty of days when we were ready to give up on the idea of re-building our travel blog completely.
But here we are, still trying – it’s an ongoing process with a very steep learning curve.
If you think you can, you can. If you think you can’t, you can’t.
Starting from scratch
Our previous and most recent Schindlers on Tour website we built using Weebly. This was the same platform we used to build a very functional website for our successful Shola Coach House bed & breakfast business. But we were never happy with Weebly as a travel blogging platform. The hassle of transferring all our old Schindlers on Tour content to a new platform was not worth the effort.
We made the decision to rebuild our website from scratch and take on the challenge of learning a whole new platform! As they say you’re never too old to learn something new, or is it you can’t teach an old dog new tricks?! Either way, we’re giving it a go. We opted for WordPress, the free open source software which has a global reputation as the best blogging platform.
We have no special website building expertise or technical skills. We’re completely self-taught when it comes to computers, and technology. We learn as we go from trial and error. And thank heavens for YouTube!
Free resources
We’re grateful for the many free blogging resources and community forums that are available online for help and support. A few free resources that were of particular help to us were:
And we wouldn’t have a funky little logo if it wasn’t for the kindness of a very special and talented friend!
But we thought we needed more than the free resources.
At this point we should make it clear that we are not currently planning a strategy to monetise our travel and adventure blog. However, we do want to try and build it so that we have that option in the future.
The costs of building our travel and adventure blog
Building a blog that has the functionality to potentially generate an income, however small, doesn’t come without some financial investment. On top of that there’s the time and effort we’re putting into the building process.
Our costs included:
Domain Ownership & Renewal Costs
We registered Schindlers on Tour as our domain name many years ago with GoDaddy at a cost of about £10 per year. We have since transferred it to Host Gator with renewal costs of around £16 per year.
Hosting Costs
Our web hosting provider is also Host Gator at a cost of approx £3-5 per month.
Design Theme Costs
We could’ve gone with a free theme from WordPress.org, but a paid theme offers us more flexibility and functionality if we ever do decide to go down the route of trying to make money from our blog. We chose Divi from Elegant Themes for a one-off cost of £75 which includes support. Another steep learning curve!
Email Costs
We use Google Workspace for our website emails which costs us approx £4 per month.
Coaching Costs
By far our biggest investment was £600 for online coaching from Johnny Ward of the One Step 4Ward blog. The course was six one-to-one video calls on how the blogging industry works. In hindsight we may have received much the same information from any one of the hundreds of bloggers offering free online courses, or by doing more of our own desktop research, but as they say you live and learn.
What we’ve learned so far…
We quickly learned that we are not prepared to make the full-time commitment nor put in the tremendous effort required to become “successful” full-time travel bloggers. We want to retain the pure joy we get from our travelling lifestyle without feeling like a slave to the blog and being tied to technology.
Success for us at this stage in our lives is not about making a six figure income from our travel blog, or ranking high on Google. It is about proving to ourselves that we can learn new skills and build an honest travel blog of our personal experiences. And if by any remote chance you are reading this and feel inspired or motivated by our adventures to take on your own new challenges, then to us that is success.
If you have read this far, thank you! We’re delighted to have you join us on our return to the world of travel and adventure blogging.
