TBB Podcast 4 Show Notes: Reflection from a year of blogging

It’s certainly been an interesting year for me at Going Awesome Places and Travel Blog Breakthrough so I hope you don’t mind me rambling on about how 2014 went. It’s been definitely extremely interesting to look back on the evolution of my blog to where I am now and I think there are a lot of learnings that can apply to most travel bloggers out there.

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Summary

With this being the holiday season, I figured what better time than to do a little reflection of the year of 2014 that just passed. I honestly didn’t have anything planned before I hit the record button so sorry in advance if it is a little incoherent.

All I had written down on my sticky note was the following on topics I wanted to touch on:

Reflection
Successes
Failures
Goals
Upcoming

In this particular episode, you will learn

What you will learn in this podcast

Reflection
- Taking blogging way more seriously this year
- Travel Blogger’s Toolkit
- Freelance writing with CopyPress and #HipmunkCityLove
- Sponsored writing bringing in most of the income and being careful about what opportunities I take
- First year doing press trips and having success pitching and recognizing the opening of doors
- 10K Twitter follower mark
- Starting of Travel Blog Breakthrough
- Focus on monetization
- The natural evolution of a travel blogger
Successes
- Travel Blogger’s Toolkit as an experiment – The “just do it” mentality
- The #TBB podcast
- Pitching success
Failures
- Stagnant growth of visitors (600-800 a day)
- SEO and link building
- Not being engaged enough on social media and sucking at Pinterest
Goals
- Diversifying traffic and doing a better job at Pinterest
- Income goal – $2000/month
- Travel Blog Breakthrough success
  - Growing the newsletter
  - Product success
- Create a membership site
- Build long term partnerships with brands
Upcoming
- Udemy course coming out soon on “The Top 10 Tools Every Blogger Needs to Know About”
- Travels in 2015
  - Affilliate Summit
  - Clearwater & St. Pete’s press trip
  - Orlando
  - #Sinternship
  - Quebec press trip
  - Whistler trip
  - China trip

Links mentioned in this episode

Resources

Going Awesome Places
Tweepi to for amazing Twitter growth
Udemy
Income Report for November 2014
Siteground (current host for Travel Blog Breakthrough)
#Sinternship (my embarassing video)
Affiliate Summit West 2015
One on one mentoring

As promised, here’s that letter I wrote to Siteground for reasons why I should go to Affiliate Summit.

Thanks for listening

Thank you for listening to the show! It’s really because of you that I do these so I appreciate all the support.

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