The Beginning

Last summer, on a site that I started mainly to teach myself how to start a site from scratch, I wrote about the camaraderie of the travel blogging community.  Despite the fact that it was written a mere 6 months ago, it feels like an eternity.

Since that July day, I have designed and launched this site, written a good amount of articles for BootsnAll, continued working at American Floorcraft for my father-in-law, and been as active as I possibly can in social media.  Twitter, Stumbleupon, and the TBEX forums are sites I use on a daily basis to try to promote this site.

As a green, wide-eyed newbie, I wrote about how awesome the travel blogging community was and wondered if it could possibly last.  Would we continue to share ideas with each other, answer questions, and support each other?  Or would we go the route of most other businesses and become more cut-throat, wanting to keep the money to ourselves.

While 6 months is certainly not a long time to gauge what the next 2, 5, or 10 years hold, being active in the community for that long gives me hope.  Great hope.  I truly believe the people I am in contact with on a daily basis are good, genuine people, and I am excited to continue to work with those people as time goes on.

The Present

Which brings me to now.  Todd Wassel, one of those people I work with, runs several blogs/websites, including Todd’s Wanderings, and has recently started a new site, the Travel Blog Challenge.  The goal of the site is to teach people like me how to monetize their blogs and websites.  It’s a fantastic idea (one I wish I thought of ), and one of the biggest parts of the site is the 1000-1000 challenge.

What is the 1000-1000 Challenge?

The goal of this challenge is to get other bloggers to get 1000 visitors (or page views)/day and earn $1000/month from their sites.  The premise is simple enough, right? Through different tasks and assignments, along with the input and support of each other, we hope to reach these goals more quickly than on our own.  Monetizing travel sites like this is still a relatively new business, so any ideas that we can bounce of each other are very helpful.  The cool thing about a business like this that is so new is that there is no one tried and true way of being successful.  It truly promotes creativity, and there are tons of creative people working their asses off trying to make this their career.

My Numbers Now

Part of the challenge is being open and honest about the number of people coming to the site and how much money we are actually making.  How we get the traffic and money is also something we are all going to share with each other.  There is a forum on the site where we can talk about this without actually putting it all up there on the web, but I might as well throw out my numbers now at the start of the challenge.

Monthly Income: $0  – So, yeah, I have a long way to go on this front.  I have had one advertising enquiry, and we went back and forth for a while, then he just started ignoring me.  I thought it was kind of weird since he contacted me, but hey, what do I know?  I know this site is still relatively new, so I am trying not to get frustrated.

Monthly Traffic: This site went live in August, and my visits have increased each month (according to Google Analytics).

• August: 500
• September: 1742
• October: 3805
• November: 4546
• December: 6275

So taking December as my model, I had about 202 visitors/day, so not as much work needs to be done here as with the money part, but still a long ways to go.

The Balancing Act

I’ve had this conversation with my wife and other bloggers numerous times, but I have found it frustrating at times to try to balance everything that goes into blogging.  I am not even close to a web designer, so just setting up the site and keeping up with the technical aspects has taken a lot of time.  Add the social media into it (twitter, facebook, stumbleupon, reading and commenting on other blogs, and everything else that goes into trying to get traffic), plus writing guest posts and articles for sites that actually pay (like BootsnAll), and working my part time job that actually pays me, and that leaves little time for actual writing, which is obviously the most important part.  I am very, very fortunate to be able to devote as much time as I have to my site without having to work a full time job, but I’m going to have to start bringing some money to the table sooner rather than later to give my wife some relief.

So I am quite excited to take on this venture.  I know a lot of others who are also taking the 1000-1000 challenge, and I am looking forward to working with all of you and helping each other out.  I think this is a great idea, and hopefully we can all get on the right track and actually start making a living with this.