Blogging,  General

My Blogging Experience

September 16, 2020 / 54 Comments

The beginning of September 2020 marked the 6 month anniversary of my new travel blog launch. I want to take this opportunity to share with you my blogging experience thus far and what I’ve learned.

Anyone who says it’s simple to start a blog is not being 100% truthful. It is quite an undertaking if you want to do it correctly, especially if you want to monetize and make money from your blog.

I had many motivations for creating my travel blog:

  • to share my travel experiences with others
  • to organize all my travel photos in one place along with my written text about the trips
  • to learn a new skill on how to create a blog and website
  • to occupy my spare time in my early retirement
  • to build a community of people who share my joy of traveling and adventure
  • to hopefully get sponsored trips one day that I could write about and share on social media
  • and yes, to make a little money on the side with this new hobby

So, after 6 weeks to learn the technical aspects and put it all together, I went live on March 1, 2020. Little did I know that we would have a world pandemic which would halt travel for the majority of people this year.

But I didn’t let that stop me. I continued to create a new blog post each week (well, almost) and sent regular emails to my subscription list to inform them about my posts and also share a bit of what was going on in my life.

It’s been fun. Has it been hard? Not really if you love what you do. I haven’t made any money yet, but I’m not giving up. There are a variety of ways you can make money from a blog. One way to earn money is through affiliate programs (where you gain a small commission if people click and buy using your links, e.g. Amazon).

Another way to earn money is through ads on your website. I chose not to do this, because I personally don’t like seeing random ads all over someone’s website. It’s distracting and ugly in my opinion.

One of the most popular ways to make money from a blog or website is to offer a service or sell a product. I chose to offer my Travel Itinerary Planning services, because it’s what I love to do and I think I’m pretty good at it. Due to lack of people traveling this year, I’ve had no customers… YET.

I will recap my Lessons Learned from my first 6 months to hopefully enlighten you and anyone interested in going down this road.

Technical Set-Up of a Blog

The technical set-up of a blog is probably the most overwhelming aspect of creating a new blog, especially if you are not tech-savvy. I spent my 35-year career in IT and computers, but I never gained experience in the website creation domain.

Thankfully, nowadays, there are sophisticated software packages (like WordPress, SquareSpace, Wix, etc) that make it easy for you. You don’t have to be a computer programmer because the software is user-friendly and allows you to easily create your site.

I chose to go with WordPress.org (not the same as WordPress.com) as it’s one of the most popular platforms and offers great support. You will also find many YouTube videos and websites that explain how to use this software.

In addition to choosing your website software platform, you have to choose a website service provider. I chose Bluehost as my website provider and got a special price through an affiliate Bluehost program. I did some research on my own to check other service providers (e.g., Siteground is another popular one), but finally decided to go with Bluehost. The cost of a 3-year contract was around $200.

Not as technical as this thank goodness!

I have to say that the technical set-up was pretty straight forward and within days of following the step-by-step installation instructions, I had my own website! It was a great accomplishment and very satisfying!

Domain Name

The next challenge I had to face was to come up with a domain name (e.g., xxxx.com) using best-practice guidelines and the availability of the name you wanted. It didn’t take me long to choose ‘Janadventures.com’ as I wanted my site to be personal (with my name in it) and to represent what I love (Adventure!).

The domain name and the WordPress.org software was included in the price of Bluehost. If you had to buy a domain name separately, you can find them as cheap as $12 a year. If you want to know more about why I chose the name ‘Jan Adventures’, check out my first blog post here.

Theme Selection

For me, choosing a theme was probably one of the most difficult decisions. WordPress offers free themes as well as paid themes. What is a ‘theme’ you ask? It’s a template that provides the look and feel of your website. The theme controls how you can create your pages and the formatting options provided.

It seems like there are a zillion themes to choose from, and it’s not so easy to know what each theme can and can’t do. I ended up choosing one of the standard free themes called ‘Ashe Theme by WP Royal’. So far, so good. I’m happy with what it offers.

Whatever you can’t do with your selected theme, you have to use either plugins or Html code. What I’ve learned is that almost everything is possible in WordPress without having to be a programmer!

Plugins

Another technical aspect that I had to learn was which plugins I needed. No, it’s not the kind of plugin as shown below. Plugins for blogging software are like an adapter with a pre-programmed software code that enables you to control the functionality or appearance of your website.

They say not to overload your website with too many plugins as it could slow down the performance. I only chose the essential plugins to keep the size of my site small.

One example of a plugin I use is the Instagram Feed I have on the right column of every page.

Another plugin I had to research and find is the geographic map I included on My travels page.

It is important to use a plugin like ‘Social Warfare’ that allows people to share your posts on Facebook, Instagram, or Pinterest.

Blogging Courses

I have to say the biggest help I had when setting up my new blog was following blogging courses. I stumbled upon a few courses that I really liked. The courses are run by ‘It’s a Lovely Life’, a nice couple (Pete and Heather) with three daughters who live in California. I liked their training style, friendliness, and helpfulness. They offer a free course as well as paid courses to build your money-making blog.

Following these blogging courses was KEY to flattening my technical learning curve. ‘It’s a Lovely Life’ provides a couple of Facebook Groups where you can ask technical or business-related questions. For this reason, I became an affiliate for their program and highly recommend their courses. If you are interested, you can find more details on my Blogging Course Page or directly on their site HERE.

SEO

If you don’t know what SEO is, you will definitely need to learn about this when creating a blog. SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization. It’s basically the skills that you need to drive traffic to your website. SEO is based on algorithms that show your website based on keyword searches (e.g., Google search).

It’s critical to use popular keywords in your blog post title and text. You can use dedicated software that will help you with SEO. I chose to use KeySearch software based on different recommendations. It cost me $135 for a year subscription. I think it is worth it. The software allows you to search keywords and see if they are overused or if there is an opportunity for you to integrate them into your post for more visibility.

Social Media Integration

I’ve had to learn the value of integrating my blog with different social media sites. The main reason for doing this is to drive traffic to my website. WordPress allows you to link your site to Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and Pinterest.

I already had most of these social media accounts, but I converted them into ‘business’ accounts. This doesn’t cost anything but allows you to get analytics on the traffic to your account.

If you haven’t checked out my other sites, you can follow me there!

I pin all of my photos within my blog posts to my Pinterest account. Pinterest has been a great source of advertising for my site. I never used Pinterest much before but have learned that it is a great search engine for whatever you are looking for. I use it myself much more now to find websites and blogs on different topics.

Another way that I’ve been able to drive people to my website is by putting my post links or Instagram link on different Facebook Groups for bloggers. I can’t believe how many bloggers there are in the world! The nice thing is that we all try to help each other out to increase our traffic and build up our subscriber list.

Creating Interesting Content

One of the challenges in creating a good blog is coming up with interesting blog posts on a regular basis. For me, this was quite easy as I have so many travel experiences I want to write about. I also have tons of photos from all these trips that I love sharing.

I’ve been lucky so far to have plenty of ideas for my weekly blog posts. I try to come up with an article that is relevant to what is going on in the world. Examples of these kinds of posts are 20 Things You Can Do in 2020 and Safe Vacation Ideas for 2020.

Some other blog posts I’ve published are recent trips I’ve done this year. I have been staying close to home in Switzerland and have discovered so many new places! You can read more about these in my below posts!

Persistence

As they say, persistence pays off. I do believe this. I am trying to be persistent with my blog and know in my heart that with hard work and time, it will pay off. I am fortunate that I am self-motivated and very determined by nature. It may take years to have a profitable blog or online business, but I will continue down this road or up this hill as shown below.

At the end of the day, I am learning and that is a good feeling! Maybe someday I will promote my learning experience by helping other beginner bloggers. Thank YOU for reading my posts and for encouraging me every day to continue my quest!

My Lessons Learned

As you can see, there are many required elements for creating a blog. It’s not for the faint-hearted if you don’t put all your effort into it. Here is a short summary list of my tips based on my six-month experience!

  • Get technical and business help by signing up for free or paid courses
  • Experiment and don’t be afraid to ask for help
  • Join blogging Facebook groups to learn and help promote your blog
  • Find your special niche and an audience who will appreciate what you blog about
  • Be consistent and don’t give up!

If you would like any help to create your own blog, feel free to reach out to me! I would love to help any other entrepreneurs who are starting out like me! You can contact me at jan@janadventures.com!

If you are looking for assistance to plan your next trip, I am here for YOU! I love to plan travel itineraries for myself and others. For more details on how I provide this service, please check out my Itinerary Planning page and drop me a quick email at jan@janadventures.com to get started!

MY FAVORITE PRODUCTS… I get asked often which products I use when traveling so I created a page of all my favorite products. You can check it out here

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