Hey readers, it’s been a while!
We’ve been super quiet on the blog lately – so much so that many of you have emailed and messaged us asking are we alright and why we’ve not been posting updates (thanks for your concern btw!) so we figured it was time to do a quick update on what’s been happening.
Where are we now?
Right now, we’re in Budapest, Hungary, and loving it.
It’s getting pretty cold now but it’s a really beautiful city that has lived up to all the hype that it gets.
Following Prague and Ljubljana, it’s currently ranked as the third most liveable city in Central-Eastern Europe. The ‘digital nomad’ scene is alive and kicking here too with working remotely being a thing of the norm.
The cost of living is low in comparison to other cities that we’ve lived in, there are so many cafes with super fast Wi-Fi for working online, the food is great, there’s lots to see and do, the locals are lovely and we got a great deal on an apartment in the city on Air BnB.
Apart from having to brave the cold, there’s nothing that we don’t like about living in Budapest.
We’re here for another two days and we then fly back home to Ireland for Christmas.
There’s something really special about flying home at Christmas time and we’re looking forward to seeing our families and friends.
So, we’re in Budapest and we haven’t written one post about it on the blog. Heck, we haven’t even put an update on Facebook.
Admittedly, we’re not being very good travel bloggers right now, and here’s why…
Why We’ve Stopped Blogging
‘Stopped’ sounds very final so it’s probably not the right choice of word (it does make for a catchy headline though, right?!)
The truth is that we never made a conscious decision to take a break from blogging as it just kinda happened.
We spent the earlier part of the year travelling continuously through the Balkan countries, which included lots of sightseeing, long bus journeys, writing blog posts, editing videos, taking and editing pictures, putting daily updates on social media, hours upon hours of snap chatting, working with local hotels and tour companies and fulfilling commitments with the blog.
And all of that whilst trying to maintain our content marketing business.
The truth is that while we love the adventure of travelling and all that comes with it, we were tired in June when our trip through the Balkans came to an end.
Like, really tired of trying to juggle everything.
People still laugh and throw their eyes up to heaven when I say travelling is hard work but until you’ve stayed in ten different hotels in four different countries over a twelve night period, you can’t say it’s not tiring.
It might seem like it’s all glam from the outset but the reality of being a travel blogger is sometimes a lot more difficult than what it’s made out to be.
You see; although we’ve got great enjoyment from blogging in the past and it’s nice to have a ‘virtual home’ where we can share our stories, blogging is hard work and it doesn’t give us the financial rewards for the time and effort that it takes to consistently blog.
Well it does make us a little money, but we’ve never pushed to monetise it like we potentially could have.
That’s the main reason why we never really had to put in the effort that other travel bloggers do.
99.9% of our income comes from our online content marketing business that we created back in 2013.
We’ve always balanced travelling, the blog and our content marketing business pretty well, but we came to a point earlier this year where we had to decide what was more important to us:
- Continue to live out of a bag, maintain the biz whilst travelling and trudge on with writing our spin on (already overdone) travel related posts; or
- Settle down for a while and put 100% of our efforts into our own business, learn new skills, and expand with the hope of increasing our monthly income.
It was an easy decision for us to make.
And with that; we decided to spend two weeks at home with family and friends in June and we made a (some would say) crazy decision to live in Vegas for the summer in the searing heat.
We’ve got LOTS to say about our three months in Vegas but I’ll not get sidetracked in this post, and leave all that info for another.
Making the decision to ‘settle down’ for three months and stop blogging was the best thing we could have done.
Why We Haven’t Regretted the Decision
We became laser focused on work and ramping things up a little was top of our agenda, which is something that we hadn’t been able to do for the previous year due to lots of country hopping.
We shifted our focus from keeping ourselves busy with travelling, working and blogging to being productive with business and learning new skills.
We grabbed the opportunity with both hands and we left Vegas with the knowledge and skills that have enabled us to create a brand new business.
The New Business
We’re now helping businesses on a local level get new customers by ranking their websites better in Google, building them new websites (where needed), doing Facebook advertising and PPC, and we can also create effective lead generation opportunities that blow all others out of the water.
It’s still pretty new but we’ve already got three clients on board and we’re excited to be putting everything that we’ve learned into practice.
We’ve been doing the content for almost 4 years now so it feels pretty damn good (but a little scary) to be branching out and widening the net a little in terms of the services we offer.
Diversifying our income has been something we’ve wanted to do for a while now so it feels good to be doing something about it.
I like the ‘eggs in a basket’ analogy for this.
Having all your eggs in one basket (i.e. having one source of income) can be dangerous. What happens if that handle weakens and it breaks?
You’ll be left with scrambled eggs and nothing more.
If you’re smart and spread all those eggs out in different baskets, having one basket break wouldn’t be such a big deal, would it?
You might be left with scrambled eggs from the basket that broke but your other baskets will be full and will keep you in ‘eggs’ until you can get a new basket and begin to fill it again.
It makes perfect sense.
In January, we’ll be launching our new agency website to make things a little more official and having operated our business successfully without a website or any form of advertising, we’re excited to see what good things can come from it.
What lies ahead?
As our time here in Budapest was mostly spent in cafes for 10+ hour work days, we’re looking forward to taking some time out over Christmas and prepping ourselves for the new opportunities that 2017 will bring with it.
The rewards are there for the efforts we’ve put in as it feels good to be working even harder to build our own dreams and not someone else’s, which is one of the reasons why we made the move to live an alternative lifestyle to (what’s considered) the norm in the first place.
After the turkey has been eaten and the festivities are over, it’s a classic case of Next Stop – WHO KNOWS for us!?
We’ve no flights booked as of yet but after freezing our asses off for the last two months, we’re keen to spend the early part of next year in somewhere a little warmer.
At the moment, we’re thinking of Tenerife or somewhere in mainland Spain. We’re not too sure where we’ll end up but it’s certainly great to have options.
We’ve no plans to take long trips in 2017 as the idea of basing ourselves in somewhere nice and taking short trips from there is so much more appealing to us right now.
One of our many New Years resolutions will be to blog more too, so while we’ve ‘stopped’ blogging for now, you can expect a lot more updates than we’ve being posting lately (which wouldn’t be very hard as that’s been zero!).
That said; we’ll only be writing about things we’re genuinely interested in writing about, whether that’s travel, personal or business related.
The internet doesn’t need any more ‘5 Things to do in Paris’ articles and we don’t want to be beating a dead horse with the content that we put out there.
So on that note, big thanks for stopping in to see what we’re up to and we hope you’re all enjoying the run up to Christmas!
P.S. (SHAMELESS PLUG) If you know a local business owner that’s looking for more leads for their business, put us in contact and if we land the deal, you’ll get a nice referral bonus for your effort! 🙂
Great to hear your business is picking up! Since NSWK isn’t your primary source of income, it will be great to read more anecdotal perspectives about your travels and experiences rather than just more travel tips for your readers. Somewhere down the line, blogging lost that aspect and just turned into a “business.” I get it, but maybe it’s time for blogging to get back to its roots? Merry Christmas and best wishes for a prosperous 2017!
Thanks for your kind words Ray. 🙂
Totally agree with your comments about taking a more anecdotal perspective towards blogging, which is why we’re keen to take a slightly different approach with it than what we’ve been doing. It’s a business for many, and I get that too but it is nice to read real stories about travelling sometimes as ‘how to’ posts and ‘5 things to see in X’ posts are so overdone.
Wishing you a very Happy Christmas too and best wishes for the New Year. 🙂
Another great article .. well written.. I must admit I miss your blogs though! … looking forward to watching your new adventure take flight.. I know it will be a great success.. due to your hard work. Best of luck with it guys .. happy Christmas ?
Thanks a million Mel. We’ll be back in action in the New Year hopefully so you won’t have too long to wait! 🙂
Happy Christmas to yourself and Brendan also and looking forward to seeing you soon 🙂 X
Hey guys,
Great post. So get the whole moving, blogging and trying to work other jobs! I think this post says well the behind the scenes efforts of blogging. It sounds like you have been preparing well for the new business. All the best as that rolls out this new year! 🙂
Thanks Tiffany – best wishes to you too for 2017 🙂
Hey Carlo and Florence, I think stopped is the right word. How much blogging have you guys done since? I hope life is good! Best wishes. Jonny
Hey mate. All is well here. Currently in Plovdiv, Bulgaria for a month before heading back to Bucharest for a while. We’re actually planning our first proper travel trip for the rest of 2018. We’ve literally done nothing the past two years only work on building up our business.
We’re looking at taking a good swipe at central America towards the end of the year too, so will be checking out your blog for some details 😉
Hope all is well with you too buddy.
Happy to meet your site! Always great seeing what other full-time travellers are up to.
Like you we love Budapest (and Prague) and they’ve been our go to bases when we need a bit of stability from living out of the suitcase. They’re both easy places to live in and inexpensive. And tons to see.
Keep up the blogging!
Frank (bbqboy)
Totally agree Frank – I don’t think I’d ever get bored going back to Budapest! 🙂