Falling Back in Love With Blogging | Miles Less Traveled

Online authenticity is all the rage these days. People are questioning the usefulness of those shiny light pink and deep blue Instagram posts and wondering what’s next for the internet world. 

And so are we. We’ve never been big on those glossy pictures, but we’ve spent the last year blogging learning more about who others think we should be than who we actually are. The jury is still out on whether social media is good for us or not, but we’re beginning to realize the effects of being fully immersed in this world via MLT. 

That shiny Instagram shot is hard to take, and the search for it is exhausting

The thing with starting a blog is that lots and lots of people are starting blogs, many of which become quite successful. The founders of these blogs then tell you exactly what to do to make your blog successful. This information has been a HUGE help in shiting our site from the scrappy thing it started as into one we are quite proud of. But we’ve been so caught up in this learning curve that we’ve forgotten why we started this whole thing in the first place.

Attending our first travel blogging and professionals conference this year really changed our perspective. The talks were filled with endless inspiration and insight into the worlds of those people who had made it, actually done it. These people gave us the how to’s but without the force. It was more storytelling: this is what I did, take what you want from it and leave what you don’t. The common theme from every single person we listened to was that each of these blogs that had transformed themselves into a fully functional business took a different route, each one was completely different from the others, and that we had to follow what was right for our blog, business, and ourselves to ever truly achieve the goals we had for ourselves.

After a full weekend of these talks, new friends, and an endless amount of tacos–it was held in Austin after all–we left with a renewed sense of purpose.  It felt like for the first time in a long time we were not overwhelmed with information and to do lists. Instead, we now feel ready to wipe the slate clean and really begin the journey to making our blog, well, ours.

We’ve been taking the time since this conference to really reflect on what that means and how we can create better content that we love and will be the most valuable to you.

Conference = Important, Tacos = Much more important

Mostly, this blog continues to be an evolution that matches our lives. It is our space to share the things that matter most to us. In the end, we want our blog to succeed and we are working every day to build Miles Less Traveled as a business and not just a blog. However, we want it to succeed because we are doing it the best we can as us. Not internet us. Not SEO us. Definitely not social media us.

Just us. Joe and Alicia.

This is our place to celebrate and struggle through our marriage, to revel in the joys of shared travel, and to unload every morsel of intel from our trips that we deem worthy of showing up here. In short, Miles Less Traveled is not just a passion project for us, it is one that also celebrates everything we love about our lives and each other. It is deeply personal to us, and we intend to get back to that.

We’re fine just the way we are, thank you very much

For starters, we won’t be afraid to share personal posts like this anymore. Or other aspects of our lives. Travel blogging is varied and diverse, and we intend to indulge in different components of it.

In addition, we will allow our site to evolve as our lives do. We did take a long-term trip around the world, yes, but we are home now. Working and building a routine. We are in our early 30’s, moving to a new city (shout out to Philly!), and our site will reflect this.

This will mean more posts about shorter travel, food-centric as always, and likely, as we eat our way through it, much on the Philadelphia scene. We want to share our day hikes in addition to our Indonesian volcano treks, the awesome New Jersey sandwich spots we know and that insanely delicious Cambodian crab dish we found, and more of the stories behind these journeys. We’re storytellers by nature, and we’ve lost sight of that a bit in search pf pageviews. The posts will likely be less frequent because we will be investing a LOT more time into them. We don’t just want good content on Miles Less Traveled, we want the absolute best content.

The whole process of blogging is forever challenging us to expand what we thought possible, helping us to grow personally and professionally. It is time-consuming, incredibly frustrating, and at times, downright maddening. But it is also a huge source of joy for us.

We’re falling back in love with our blog, and we hope you will too.

Welcome to the renewed Miles Less Traveled blog. What can you expect in the coming months?

• Fewer posts with better, longer, and more interesting content
• More from our home base mixed in with our travels
• A revamp of the newsletter – more on that soon!
• The same informative, honest, and insightful posts you’ve come to expect

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Alicia

Alicia is a freelance writer, bartender, and the MLT wife! She loves running, beaches, and tiny animals.