Blogging – From experiment to side project

As Mrs. Numbers and I were preparing our nomadic journey around the world, we decided that it would be a great idea to start a blog to capture our journey and share it with our friends and family. What was initially going to be a simple log book of our travels, turned out to be much more than that…

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This post is part of our “behind the scenes” series where we share how we run our lives since we started our nomadic life.

For the third post of this series, we are discussing why we decided to start a blog in the first place, what we learn from running it after a few months and why you might want to consider starting one too. Let’s talk about blogging!

Why did we decide to start a blog prior to getting busy traveling the world?

As we decided to slow travel the world full time and embrace our passion for exploration I had to quit my job. Why would we decide to start a blog rather than just chilling and enjoying the journey?

Well the initial reasons were pretty simple: I wanted to document our journey and eventually sharing it with our friends and family that wanted to follow us. If our adventures were attracted other people then this would have been the icing on the cake.

What did I gain by running our blog?

What started as a small experiment last summer turned out to become a pretty fun side project that I am excited to spend roughly 2 days each week to work on. Besides the learnings in areas I was never exposed before, I was happily surprised to easily connect with a community (still really small) of like minded people and to receive supporting recognition from the content we have been sharing. And all of this happened with less than 6 months.

Let’s look into what I gain from running our blog:

• Learning – The greatest thinkers in this world consider themselves to be perpetual learners. It is actually Einstein who said that when you stop learning you start dying. Before quitting my regular job I had to spend time doing routine things that limited my ability to acquire new competencies. Even though I was good at automating, delegating, or eliminating waste there were pretty boring things I had to do. Suddenly having 5 days a week to myself gave me the head space to dig deep into starting a blog. I acquired more skills in the last 6 months that I did in my career for the past few years.
  
  Here are some of the tools I went from newbie to experienced with over the last 6 months thanks to this blog: Canvas, WordPress, MailChimp, BlueHost, Pinterest, Google Analytics, MailMunch, Final Cut Pro among a few more…
  
  Here are some skills I developed since I started this blog:
  • From a technical standpoint – Purchasing a new domain, finding a great hosting provider to host the blog, setting up WordPress and learning all of its intricacies, customizing the blog, securing the blog again spam and hackers, tracking our traffic, embedding third party content into the blog…
  • From a marketing standpoint – Learning about email marketing, newsletters & campaigns. Identifying a campaign marketing app. Setting up campaigns to share exclusive content with my subscribers. Engaging with our audience outside of the blog (via channels such as Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Instagram or even Youtube). Learning about SEO, trying out several experiments and seeing how they affect traffic on our blog. Experimenting with affiliate marketing and seeing how specific articles can affect traffic and revenue. Sharing our content offline to drive more traffic…
  • From a creative standpoint – Learning how to build attractive infographics and digital design for both our articles and our social channels (Instagram, Pinterest especially). Writing original content. Creating engaging videos including some aerial footage capture with our drone.

“Once you stop learning, you start dying.”

Albert Einstein

• Self Improvement – I have never been a good writer and blogging was the perfect challenge to force me to improve. Mrs. Nomad Numbers is still heavily involved behind the scenes to provide me with great feedback on each post and help me fine tune my English as a non English native speaker. Thanks to this blog I feel that my English is getting better and hopefully soon enough her review will become unnecessary in the publication of my posts.

“Excellence is not a destination; it is a continuous journey that never ends.”

Brian Tracy

• Accountability – When I use to go to my regular job I had great habits in place and the daily routine greatly helped to stick to them. When we started traveling some of these habits pretty much went out the window as my days became much more open ended. Blogging requires time, devotion, commitment, and discipline which has helped me channel part of my energy and be careful about how my time is being spent. The blog keeps me accountable to have one fully edited blog post to get published each Thursday night. This is a great way to deprioritize things that aren’t really adding value to my day (like wasting insane amount of time scrolling through social networks, watching TV or any other form of digital products that are super addictive and just one click away from our smart devices).

“The benefits and possibilities that are created created by being personally accountable are countless.“

Jay Fiset

• Community – Community has been a big focus for us as we started to travel long term. So selfishly we wanted to share our journey and put it on the internet so it could hopefully attract people with similar passions or interests and it turns out that this is working out pretty well so far. We connected virtually with a few key people that we are staying in touch with and hopefully we will be able to meet in real life too!

• Finding an authentic voice – Writing (or blogging) is like an art and I have never been good at arts. Starting with a blank page in front of me has always been a real struggle. I like getting inspiration from others and then adding value on top of what they are doing. By starting this blog I had to find and develop my authentic voice as Mr. Nomad Numbers. It is still a great challenge & a work in progress but I feel that the act of blogging has helped shaping it.

Any other benefits?

Behind my own reasons that you might or might not identify yourself with, here are a few more benefits about starting a blog:

• Be fulfilled – There is nothing more exciting and fulfilling that reading comments from people that are stopping by your blog and love the content you put out there and find it helpful.
• Become an expert – Blogging lets you wash, rinse and repeat on a particular idea or topic. Overtime through gaining more knowledge you build expertise and differentiate yourself from the pack.
• Have a platform to share/recommend what you love – Caring is sharing, right? A blog provides you with a platform that millions of people can have access to. You can use it to share the things that have affected you in a particular way. Whether they are books that have deeply impacted your life, food that blew your mind, experiences that must be taken…
• Build web skills – In a world where Internet is part of our day to day life, web skills aren’t going anywhere and are actually a pretty limited resources. If you can create a blog, run it and grow it eventually you are building precious skills that might attract a future employer.
• It’s nearly free – Blogging doesn’t cost a lot of money. You can start a blog for as low as $3.95 / month (using Bluehost) and can get your blog up and running today. And it turns out that we have a step-by-step guide to help you start your blog in just a couple of hours.
• Make income – Since blog operating costs are close to zero when you start, it doesn’t require much income to start making a profit out of it. We did not put this category into the reason why we started this blog because it wasn’t a driver for us. That being said we have been running some affiliation experiments and the results are really encouraging. We might share more on this at a later time.

On a side note, if you haven’t read Kevin Kelly’s essay “1000 True Fans”, I highly recommend it. The gist of this essay is that you only need 1,000 loyal, dedicated “fans” to make a living as an artist (and bloggers count as artists these days). A blog is a great way to form those fans into a community and interact with them.

Ready to get started?

Does some of these reasons appeal to you? Do you have a unique story, passion or set of interests that other people can benefit from? Are you really excited to share it? Would you want to connect with like minded people through this journey? Well then blogging might be a project you might want to get on! To help you getting started today don’t forget to check out our step by step guide to start a blog.

As always, please let us know if this resonates with you and share your thoughts in the comments section below.