Happy one year and 8 days to our Life Of Doing blog! We can’t believe that a year has passed by quickly. It’s been quite the journey when we launched the blog on November 1, 2016 and have enjoyed every moment! In the beginning of our blogging stage, we stayed up late to write content due to the excitement. Sometimes we were stuck on figuring out a new Wordpress plugin. We’re still blogging newbies and the experience is worth it.
Our readers are amazing! We love you! Thank you for sticking with us as we continue to figure things out! We launched the blog to share our global travel excursions, itineraries, photos, and helpful travel tips. Plus, we wanted to share how travel is possible when working at full-time jobs.
Here are our ah-ha moments and reflections from the past year of blogging. Cheers to more years to come!
1. Blogging takes dedication, patience, and lots of effort.
It’s no joke that blogging is hard work. Whenever you learn or start something new, there is a huge learning curve. Passion and dedication was in our minds when launching the blog, and we continue to embrace with the blog. It took us a month brainstorming ideas for our blog domain name and Justin said “Life Of Doing” on a whim. After finalizing our domain name, we signed up with a self-hosted Wordpress account. This is a must so you can have full control over your website!
Who knew a blog had so many components to think about such as widgets, plugins, contact forms, and more? Let’s give everyone who manages a website a round of applause! We’re often stuck on how to do something. Our motivation allows us to figure things out and leveraged Google searches and YouTube videos.
Blogging is our “second” unpaid job. Juggling a full-time job, home life, exercising, and working on the blog during the evenings is challenging. Yet, we have fun with it and have our moments in the “blogging zone”. We try to have new content out on the blog at least weekly, but some weeks are busier than others.
Hard work pays off just like when we reached the Mount Whitney summit
2. It’s a learning process every single day.
We still don’t know what we’re doing 95% of the time. We’re learning something new about blogging, social media, or general travel tips every day. It’s fascinating to read about ways to improve the blog – SEO optimization, best times to post based on social media platforms, and much more. Learning is fun!
3. Collaboration is key.
Justin and I support each other 100% with our blog posts and collaboration with the site. We both contribute to the blog and enjoy having an extra set of “eyes” to review and brainstorm ideas. One of our goals for the next year is to contribute guest posts on other sites and even have them on our site too!
We also participate in various blogging groups on Facebook. It’s the extra motivation for sharing kudos and asking questions to other bloggers.
4. Consistency with social media is key.
We’re not very good with social media and keeping it consistent. It’s hard to keep track of the various social media platforms. As of now, we have Facebook, Instagram, and Pinterest. We don’t have a Twitter account (the horrors!) There are companies to streamline the channels, schedule posts in advance, and increase Pinterest “pins,” and much more. However, we’re not ready to commit as we have small amount of viewers to the site. This is a work in progress and we’ll have a better strategy for this new year!
5. Stop comparing with others and focus on small wins and personal goals.
We’re not famous, nor do we have a huge following or visitors. It’s natural to compare our site with other blog sites and nitpick how we don’t have the latest glitz and glamour. It’s the perfectionist in us.
We came across blog post that stated how after one year of blogging your site should have solid traffic and 500-1000 email subscribers. Wow! That is impressive. The huge metric made us question our efforts considering our tiny audience.
In perspective, it’s about the small wins that we do have and to stop compare. Everyone’s blog is at different growth stages. It was exciting to have our first comment on our Beijing layover post. It was another celebration when our Instagram page reached over 100 followers. WooHoo! We’ll continue to focus on our personal goals of doing our best and creating awesome content. Bloggers are here to inspire others and help them reach their readers goals!
Thank you again for your support! We can’t wait to continue this journey with you.
Let us know what you would like to see on our blog or places we should travel to. Comment below.
