As some of you may have noticed over the past year, I’ve not been updating this blog anywhere near as much as I used to. To be quite honest, I’d kind of lost my passion for it. It was getting harder and harder to make a professional income from travel blogging, and to be honest, having to always think about how I was going to monetize this blog was taking the interest out of it! I mean, if the whole point of doing this and travelling the world was to have a more fulfilling life, how can you do that when you’re spending every waking minute thinking about money? I kept thinking I would get my mojo back if I just gave it some time, but actually what I started to realise was that I had changed, and either this blog needed to change with me or I needed to move on.
I want to concentrate on making something I’m actually proud of rather than counting pennies so I can make my next trip.
What prompted the change?
One thing that being a pro blogger over these past 5 years has given me is the chance to see the world, and in particular, to witness some of the great inequality that exists on our planet. There are just certain sights you can’t get out of your mind once you’ve seen them, and the Eiffel Tower is not one of them. The 10 year old kids working in Bolivian mines however, most certainly are. The elderly homeless lady lying in her own urine on a Belgrade street is another one. I’ve had this ever-increasing feeling for a long while now that I should be doing more, but I guess what I was struggling with was the what. What should I be doing to help? What could I do that would actually make a difference?
Baby steps
The first step was going back through the Open University (last October) to start a degree in International Studies. There is a large focus throughout my course on the causes of global inequality. I figured if I knew more about what causes such extreme depravation for millions of people around the world, then I’ll have more chance of coming up with something viable in the future that might actually help people! Long term I’m interested in going into politics (although more likely in a research position than going into it directly as an actual politician.) However, in the mean time I thought if most of the problems I’m going to be talking about are global, and I already have a readership of people interested in destinations around the world, then why not utilise that to inform and raise discussion about social issues happening around the world right now?
Becoming a travel AND social issues blog!
So with all of the above in mind, I’ve decided to make a key change to this blog and that is to stop talking so much about destinations for the purposes of tourism, and start using this platform to talk about the real issues affecting people around the world today. Since coming to this realisation, it’s the first time I’ve felt genuinely enthused about writing this blog in over a year! I feel like that’s got to mean something!!!
Secondly, I no longer have an interest in making money from this blog. I’ll decide over the coming weeks whether I’m going to remove the banner advertising completely from this site, but certainly as far as in-content advertising goes I’m really just not interested in doing it. I’ll earn my money from freelancing or taking on another job if I have to. I’d rather be earning less money and feeling good than feeling terrible and having a full bank balance. It’s just the way I am. Money is not and has never been something that has motivated me. I’ll be forever broke (probably) but it’s hard to be a capitalist when you’ve got a socialist’s heart.
So what can you expect going forward?
The first article I’m going to cover is on the EU migrant crisis currently going on in the Mediterranean. It’s a humanitarian disaster, people are dying, and there’s a simple way to solve it if Northern European countries would just chip in some of their budget to help Italy with the search and rescue! I’ll go into that much more next week when the article is published though.
In general, my aim is to post at least once per week (give or take) going forward. If I have time to write more I will, but we’ll see what happens. I’d also like to start publishing some more video content, so you can look forward to some of that too!
Anyway, I just thought you should know about the coming changes. I hope you stick around to see how it grows.