I hiked the W-circuit in Torres del Paine, Chile on my first South America trip and it started my love affair with hiking.
Twenty-something Anna had a pattern of quitting jobs to travel. This blog was a byproduct of one of those adventures. In the fall of 2014, I started backpacking through Central and South America. Thanks to my relentless frugality—I’d spent most of the year renting my friend’s living room for $230/month to save up for my adventure—I’d stashed away $15,000, a huge feat considering adding avocado to a sandwich was a huge financial decision for me at that time.
Let’s jump back to 2008 for a little context: My journalism career was skyrocketing—I was a contract photographer for Southern Living magazine getting paid to travel soon after graduate school—until the recession gutted the media industry. I took advantage of the abundance of time I was given and moved to Australia on a year-long work visa. (I’d saved $10,000 for this trip.) In the years following, I’d struggled to find consistent journalism work and bounced around between Alabama, Southern California and ended up in Austin, Texas.
This is what started my pattern of saving up money, quitting my jobs (I was only making $20-30K/year between multiple jobs) and traveling until I ran out of money. If my career wasn’t going anywhere despite my persistent efforts, I focused on traveling. I did all of this with zero debt because I’m good with money, which I talked about in my book.
Alfred the Globetrotting Gnome has been to all seven continents with me. For more of his adventures, including Easter Island, check out his travel gallery.
How I Started a Travel Blog
When I hopped on that one-way flight to Mexico City in 2014, I had no idea this bold decision would launch my travel journalism career. After all, life is often a sum of little moments and scary decisions that only hindsight can confirm are the right decisions. (Plus, without this trip, how would I ever have fallen in love with Buenos Aires?)
Early in the trip, I decided to start a blog to share what I’d learned—how I saved for the trip, the best places to visit and how to travel on a budget. The goal was to help inspire others and provide practical travel information that I had trouble finding online. (I literally tracked every dollar and peso I spent and made pie charts when I got back!)
I hunkered down in Panama City, Panama over the holidays to launch the first version of my blog in late December/early January 2015. My main goal was to help people. The thought of possibly monetizing the blog came later, which I didn’t start doing until 2018 with a few affiliates that earned me pennies.
While the blog is named after me and I talk about my experience, I don’t showcase myself in photos like many bloggers and influencers do. (After schlepping camera gear up a mountain, I’m a sweaty mess and don’t want to be photographed, so you’ll rarely see me in posts.)
Soon after I started the blog, a friend from grad school was working at the Denver Post saw my social media posts and reached out to ask if I wanted to write a monthly travel column about my adventures, which ran for about six months. I jumped at the opportunity and added my blog to my byline. To my surprise, people started signing up for my email list! This added more pressure for me to post consistently and learn email marketing.
While I was traveling, I was constantly pitching magazines and newspapers with little luck in the beginning. The trip became my entryway into AFAR, a travel magazine I’d tried to break into for five years, which spiraled into work for other publications and led to a successful travel writing/photography career, including my first National Geographic story last year.
How the Blog Escaped Being Shuttered
When my Central and South America trip ended and I was juggling multiple jobs again, blog maintenance became overwhelming. I was a one-woman team donning many hats as the writer, photographer, web designer, copy editor, marketer and social media planner. (It takes a full day to put together a simple blog post and several days to compile a detailed location guide.) I struggled to keep the blog going consistently, originally posting twice a month but later dropping to once a month with some mental health breaks here and there.
It was also hard to write a story for my blog when I could write it for a magazine and be paid for it. Who wouldn’t choose the money? At the end of 2019, I decided that I’d give the blog one last shot for a year. If it was still draining me, then I’d shut it down. A few months later, the pandemic started giving me plenty of time to work on the blog. One thing about me—I don’t quit things easily—and my persistence has paid off.
Last winter, I started noticing an unusually high and consistent uptick in my blog traffic. This coincided with Google’s ongoing algorithm changes that have devastated many bloggers who’ve seen their traffic drop to a trickle, but yet somehow helped my blog explode. (During these changes, Google started emphasizing high-quality, user-centric content and thankfully, valued my detail-oriented posts. For clarity, my blog already had a high domain authority, one of the ranking criteria, because I’ve linked to it in every freelance story I published for the last decade.)
My Vietnam and Chiang Mai guides alone have consistently gotten 50,000-60,000 views a month combined recently despite being more than 3X longer than the usually 1,000 words that many bloggers aim for with SEO. And, my total blog traffic is 1,318 percent higher than this time last year!
Chiang Mai, Thailand is my home in the winter and currently one of my top blog posts.
The Future of TravelLikeAnna
I couldn’t ignore this dramatic influx of traffic and dove into updating older posts and helping popular ones grow, including my Southeast Asia guides. In October, my traffic became high enough to join one of the top-tier ad networks, which has strict standards for advertisers. The ad revenue, combined with affiliate income, allows me to keep the content free and prioritize my blog by taking less work from my freelance clients.
I’m currently a full-time freelancer. My income is diversified between editorial and commercial work [photo and writing], a photo instructor role for a luxury travel company [a couple months per year]and teaching a one-credit university business course on freelancing for media majors that I built from scratch. I currently travel almost full-time but save roughly 40-50% of my income, instead of living on savings like I did in 2014.
The tricky part of a travel blog is that I’m catering to different audiences—my email list members who (based on click rates) love my favorite photos of the year posts and my travel tips like hacking airline status or navigating two-step authentication while abroad—and my SEO traffic from Google often related to specific location guides, eSIM cards and travel insurance reviews. Don’t worry—I’ll be creating content for both audiences going forward.
My plan is to spend this year finding a balance of creating new content while also updating older posts and balancing my other work. There will still be at least one new post per month sent out to my email list. I’ve started outsourcing the tedious WordPress content so I can focus on creating with some exciting posts coming up soon!
Last week, I visited Khao Yai National Park, Thailand’s oldest national park and a UNESCO site, which is home to wild elephants.
How can you help support this blog?
First of all, I’d like to thank you for your support, especially those of you who’ve followed me since the beginning. You make this blog possible!
Share my posts! If you find something helpful, please share it on social media or with friends to spread the word. (I’m also on Instagram and Pinterest.)
Sign up for my email list! I send out one monthly email highlighting my latest post and recent published work. Sign up using the form at the bottom of the page or in the sidebar.
Give me feedback. It makes my day—heck, month—when I get emails from readers who found a particular post helpful. (Anna at TravelLikeAnna.com)
Use my affiliate links. If you’re planning to make a travel purchase, please consider using the links on my website. I earn a commission at no cost to you, which is reinvested in the blog. These links can be found on the Resources page and within individual posts for travel insurance, eSIM cards, travel clothing, Booking.com and more. I only recommend products and services that I actually use. (I get spammed by companies regularly asking to be included in my post that I constantly decline.)
Buy me a coffee or a beer. Your one-time contribution goes toward the operating costs of maintaining this blog!
Grab a copy of my book, Good with Money, for yourself or a friend!
