Inspiring Travellers Turns One!

It’s our website’s birthday today and we’re excited to celebrate. In honour of our milestone, we thought we’d share some thoughts about the site, how we began and where we’re headed.

franz josef glacier new zealand

Posing at the Franz Josef glacier in New Zealand

InspiringTravellers.com was born out of an idea Andrea had to feature travellers who were doing interesting things while on the road. The original plan was to host a magazine-style website of traveller interviews and we launched the blog in February 2010. We’d already been planning our own long-term travels and had finally accepted the fact that we were both nomadic people. This seemed to be our niche in life, so why not embrace it and get more involved with other people on the same path? By August we decided that we would also feature our own travel stories and experiences since we’d confirmed that we would be travelling for the whole of 2011, with plans to take up residence in either the Middle East or Asia after that. The name Inspiring Travellers can work either as a verb or an adjective. We want to inspire travellers, whether they are people who never thought they could take off on an extended trip or travellers who are somewhat dormant and stuck at home, looking for the ideas and inspiration that travel brings. We also feature inspiring travellers: travellers who are doing something really special with their time. Usually we feature projects or people engaged in a special mission like volunteering or focussed travel. It’s always a treat to find travellers who are working on things that not many people know about because they don’t blog themselves.

Hanging out in Auckland

We don’t consider ourselves personally to be “inspiring” travellers. Yes we are travelling and we would one day like to do some volunteer work or a special project in a foreign land. But that’s not the focus of our current travels. We do hope, however, that some of the adventures we have may give our readers ideas or tips for their own journeys. So the blog has a split focus: examining the lives of the unique people we meet and also a travelogue of our own experiences. This is probably the place where we should list some achievements, traffic, stats, how much money we’re pulling in, etc. We won’t do that because, as you may know from reading an earlier post on blog monetization, this isn’t really our purpose. We don’t want anyone to misunderstand us: we’re capitalists and have no problems with people monetizing their travel blogs or profiting. After all, blogging is an expensive hobby and many people successfully rely on the income from their blogs to keep them on the road. We are fortunate enough to have been able to save money for our travels and don’t need to subsidize that with income from blogging. We are open to banner advertisements, press trips and sponsorships. We sell an eBook for people considering migration to Australia. We may put more effort into monetizing this blog in the future, but at the moment we feel that pursuing the business side of travel blogging will take time away from our travel objectives.

Enjoying a sunny day in beautiful Opononi (Northland, NZ)

So what lies ahead? We are currently on a ‘round the world trip and will continue to blog about our experiences. Andrea wrote about our future plans back in December. We will return to Australia briefly in early 2012 to prepare for our next adventure. It is our plan to do an expat stint abroad, which will make for plenty of interesting content as we immerse ourselves in a new culture long-term. We will also endeavour to continue to bring you stories of other travellers doing interesting things around the globe. It has been a lot of fun so far and we’ve really enjoyed meeting so many other travellers through this blog. We would like to take this opportunity to sincerely thank all of you who are readers, subscribers and fellow travellers – your support has encouraged us and kept us going over the last year. We’re always open to your suggestions for content on this blog and feedback on what you love (and don’t love) about the site; we read all comments and emails submitted and will respond to you personally. We wish you happy travels and hope all is going well wherever you are in the world. With thanks, Andrea and John

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