It’s time for another Superstar Interview! Each week we feature an interview with a member of the Superstar Blogging community. These interviews highlight the ups and downs faced on the road to success, illuminating helpful tips and tricks along the way. If you want to get inspired and succeed in the world of travel blogging, video, writing, or photography then consider these interviews must-read material! This week we are featuring Justin and Tracy from the Business of Blogging course.
Tell us about yourself!
We’re Justin & Tracy, the owners and operators of A Couple for the Road. We started dating in 2007 when we met in Nashville, Tennessee, and currently reside in South Florida, where we’ve been for the last three years. We’ve been to just over 20 countries together, largely in Europe, all of which has happened since 2013. We’re not full-time travelers yet, as we work day-jobs and are growing our blog with every spare minute we have! Both of us have written our entire lives, which is one of the things that really bonded us when we first met.
How did you get started traveling?
We’ve both been obsessed with the idea of travel our entire lives, although it’s only been in the last four years that we’ve been able to make that a reality. In our early years together, we would talk and daydream constantly that “one day” we would see the places we dreamed of seeing – we just didn’t know how.
It was only when we finally came to the realization that, in fact, there wasn’t anything actually keeping us from traveling that we decided to do it. Having already known that we didn’t want to live the white-picket-fence existence, we scraped together every dime we could and booked a flight to London. After that trip, we were hooked, and we’ve been using every dollar we could to see the world since.
What are some of your favorite places you’ve been to? Any particularly memorable experiences or highlights?
Picking a favorite travel experience is kind of like picking a favorite pet, you love them all even when they’re very different! Of all of our adventures, however, the most memorable would have to be our first time in London, and our trip to Peru to visit Machu Picchu. For us, London was that romanticized, ethereal vision of travel that we’d seen only in movies at the time. Our first step out of Victoria Station was the moment we became true travelers. On our first night, we walked for hours in the chilly mist of the city, finding one memory after another along its historic streets.
Once hooked on exploring the world, we started to look further, and when we arrived in Peru, we knew it was the beginning of a life changing trip. Cresting the entrance to Machu Picchu was a visceral and emotional moment; that unique feeling where you know you’re in the presence of something inexplicable.
Where are you heading in 2017?
We’re really excited about our upcoming travel plans this year! After visiting the Bahamas in February, we’re changing it up and heading to the Yucatan Peninsula in Mexico this Spring. We’ll be touring the ancient Mayan ruins, including Chichen Itza, Tulum and Ek Balam. As fans of history (especially the mysterious kind), and after exploring the wonders of Peru, we knew we wanted to see more of the same — locations so indescribable that only personal experience will do!
In the summer, we’ll be heading to Columbia to visit Cartagena for the first time, along with a possible leg in Panama. Later in the year, we’ll be venturing across the Atlantic to see the beauty of Finland, Estonia, Prague, and hopefully back to Amsterdam, one of our favorite cities! We try to organize our travels to be adventurous, culturally rich, and of course, inspiring!
Tell us about your blog!
We first came up with the idea for A Couple for the Road last April, but really didn’t launch the website until December. After some changes in our professional situations caused us to take a step back and evaluate our lives, we started to think about a question that many people ask themselves before they dedicate themselves to blogging. “What do we really want to do?”
We had tossed around the idea of combining our love of writing with our love of travel, but it wasn’t until we did the research on what it would actually take to do it well that we decided to take the plunge.
What has been your biggest success so far?
Recently we wrote an article on one of our favorite Caribbean destinations, the island of Bonaire in the Leeward Antilles. It was an informative review of our stay as well as a personal dialogue, as Tracy had spent time there as a child when her grandparents lived on the island.
After it was published, we shared the link on Twitter and tagged the Bonaire Tourism Board in the text. Soon thereafter, they not only re-Tweeted our link, but then posted it to their Facebook page within the first couple days of publication! After 24 hours of their Facebook mention, we went from 3 shares to almost 250 and over 2,000 views on that single post. As a young blog, we weren’t expecting such a response for an article on an island only 24 miles long and a population of less than 18,000!
As of this writing, it is up to 300 shares, and is still the most viewed piece on the site! It goes to show that even if you feel your post might not be relevant to a large audience, engage the right resources, and you might be surprised. Write from experience as well as from the heart!
What struggles have you had during your blogging career? How have you overcome them?
One of the main struggles we’ve run across as first-time bloggers is time management. At present we both work full-time, 9 to 5 jobs, in addition to the daily hours dedicated to our brand, as is the case for so many bloggers. While having the advantage of partnering up in this venture, we know in order for it to be successful, we still have to forego a lot of that post-work “down time” that we were accustomed to!
Initially, it was quite a change of pace, going from simply loving to travel to being passionate enough to actually alter the way we lived on a daily basis. Sharing our experiences via our site has been an amazing transformation that we don’t think we expected, however, only fueling our desire to see the world and continue on this path. Our routine has become more refined and manageable as we’ve learned more about social media, which is great. We use HootSuite as a simple, easy to use tool to schedule our daily or weekly posts. Another way we’ve found to save time is to front-load our writing. That is, take time to create a few quality posts for your blog, then schedule their release so that on those off-days your site isn’t lacking in content!
We’ve also learned, much through the writing on Nomadic Matt’s site (in which he chronicled his personal experience regarding the stress of constant immersion) that you have to be able to step away. We work hard, very hard, but we’re conscious to step back and enjoy the small successes along the way.
A lot of people think using Wix or Squarespace is a better choice at the beginning than using Word Press. Can you speak to that?
We can speak to this extremely well, and it’s the reason we didn’t have the blog truly started until December. Prior to starting A Couple for the Road, neither of us had any experience in WordPress, but had built sites in GoDaddy and Wix in the past. These were personal sites for small projects, however, and building an audience and being SEO relevant weren’t things that were important, so we didn’t know the issues that come with using these platforms.
We started our blog on Wix, and spent a few months building the design and even put up a few articles. As we learned more and studied already-established blogs, time and time again there was a function that we wanted on our site that was impossible to have with Wix. To say that Wix is limited in comparison to WordPress is generous. In fact, once you pick your template in Wix, that’s it. That’s your template, forever, unless you want to shut everything down and pick a new URL.
Another aspect, which we found out through further research, is that the way Wix is coded is very cumbersome and frowned upon by Google. In fact, you can’t even run Adsense on Wix because Google’s bots can’t crawl Wix sites. Once this became evident, we realized we had to make a change, bite the bullet and learn to do it the right way – even if that meant a steady uphill climb in learning WordPress (which, by the way, isn’t so hard to learn after all).
If you want a successful blog, it cannot happen with Wix. Wix is great for local businesses or personal projects where you can drive all the traffic you need by handing out business cards, but for a truly international site that you want to reach the far corners of the world, it’s actually an impossibility to get anywhere. Use WordPress from Day 1 and save yourself a lot of time and money, even if you have to learn it from scratch. The learning curve isn’t as steep as you might think, and it’s actually quite fun working with WordPress once you get the hang of it.
What do you enjoy the most about blogging?
Writing is cathartic, in general, but the freedom of expression and having a platform where you can share your experiences with other dreamers and like-minded people is incredibly cool. Doing this as a couple brings us even closer together, gives us a sense of purpose and has defined a very clear goal for us of making a living doing this. Our apartment looks less like an apartment and more like the boardroom of a start-up software company – even down to the whiteboards! We both love that vibe. We love the wild creativity and the feeling of being boundless with what we do.
We love everything about it, even the difficulties like having to learn a new technology or overcoming a design issue, because the feeling of accomplishment on the back-end of those issues is incredibly gratifying. In the end, if we’re able to share our story and inspire more people to explore, it’s a success.
Do you have any tips for couples working together?
Working in tandem on our blog has really allowed us to discover our individual strengths and weaknesses and build on the areas where we excel.
Once we figured out how to better spend our time we really increased our overall input. The key is to for both people to start out learning something about every aspect of what it takes to create a successful blog. Learn a little about everything at first – from the site design, to social media platforms and techniques, and the style of writing and photography you’d like to focus on, just to name a few. Once you’ve done that, you’ll start to find out in which areas you shine, and in which areas your other half is most beneficial!
From that point, you’ll make progress faster if you “divide and conquer” according to your strengths. That natural synergy becomes a time saver and a path to becoming experts at your specific responsibilities. As they say, two heads are better than one!
In addition to this course, what other resources do you rely on for help/information?
From a technical standpoint, we picked a great theme by Kriesi that has a great support team and answers a lot of our questions about coding and customizations. That’s one point of advice we can give also – pay for a good theme with good support. It’s worth it.
We’ve relied a lot on established bloggers such as Nomadic Matt as well as non-travel blogs that focus more on SEO and digital media like Neil Patel’s blog for information on SEO and crafting a site that Google loves. We also read a lot, in general, to get inspired. If you write, you should read as often as you can. Everyone needs inspiration and reading is like retuning an old engine with fresh parts and oil. Particularly, we love the old Beat writers like Kerouac and Ginsberg, as well as Hunter Thompson and poetry by people like Dylan Thomas.
Why do you keep blogging?
The vision keeps us going. It’s not even a question of whether or not we’ll continue doing it, we definitely will! Because we love what we do, love what we write about and feel compelled to take the next step every day. It’s not “pushing” ourselves, it’s just responding to a natural urge to continue down the path. To dedicate yourself to something like this, you really have to love it. We love doing this, love traveling and are committed to taking this as far as we can.
Blogging has become a fun and exciting creative outlet for both of us. It’s encouraged us to push beyond our comfort zones, learn new things and inspired our wanderlust even further! In addition, we can both say that it really bonds us and is great to do together.
What is one thing you wish you knew before you started blogging?
One thing we wish we would’ve known before starting our blog is that not all web hosting is created equally!
Starting the site on Wix cost us time and the frustration of having to start all over. We really can’t stress enough that new bloggers do it correctly from the start and use WordPress.
What are your blogging goals for 2017?
By the end of 2017, which would be about one year of actually having the site going, we would like to have the site working according to the vision we have for it now. Many of those goals rely on content, so we’ll keep creating valuable content and products and continue learning about building backlinks and perfecting SEO. One of our resources for this goal is a book we found titled “SEO Made Easy”. And, as with every ambitious blogger, we’re constantly working towards a viable and recognizable brand! We’ve realized that we can’t monetize a site, we can only monetize an audience – and we have to grow that first.
What is one thing you can’t travel without?
As corny as it sounds, each other! We’re more than just spouses or writers together; we’re also best friends. Our connection is what makes the relationship, and the blog is only a bi-product – this is what makes the experiences worth it.
(Oh, and we can’t travel without earplugs. Good for long-haul flights and the possibility of noisy hotels!)
What camera/video gear do you travel with?
Our trusty Nikon D3100 and GoPro Hero5 will be going with us as we hit the road this year! We’re relatively new to GoPro, but it’s indispensable when planning travel where water is involved. The iPhones are always a staple for quick captures as well!
What’s one piece of advice you’d give to a new blogger?
One piece of advice for bloggers entering the foray for the first time is: DON’T GIVE UP. It’s easy to get discouraged when the progress seems slow, as it typically is for brand new blogs.
If you’ve never blogged before, expect it to be harder than you first thought; there’s going to be more to learn than you’ve considered. These unknowns will make a lot of people want to quit, but don’t. Expect to work hard. You’ll begin to see the fruit of your labor, and when that happens, all those frustrating moments will be worth it.
If you feel your results are not meeting your level of input, continue writing, researching, and finding ways to bring viewership to your site. Review your content, consider your site design, make changes where necessary and learn from any mistakes. Just don’t slow down – renew your passion however you can and keep going!
Tell us about your blog and where we can find you on social media.
A Couple for the Road aims to inspire others to explore the world through our personal experiences with travel – history, art, food, drink and culture!
We have social media presence on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest, and recently started delving into Google+.