Don’t Forget To Move Celebrates a One Year Blog Anniversary

 

 

Yay it’s our birthday! Well technically we’re a little late, but there’s a good reason. The anniversary of Don’t Forget To Move also falls on my birthday, so the celebrations of last weekend had me temporarily sidetracked. I must be getting old, because I certainly don’t recover as well as I used to. But I’m back on track now after a small break.

As we sit back (within our respective countries) and reflect on the year that has been, there are a couple of really great accomplishments we’re proud of. Our stats are improving, our numbers are growing and our awesome readers keep coming back and showing us love.

Back in July 2013 Don’t Forget to Move was born out of our attempts to make something more of our own personal blogs. We both enjoyed writing, photography, collecting stories and of course we loved travel (I guess sharing our insights, tips and recommendations through a travel blog was inevitable in the end).

But many of you probably don’t know that the travel blog wasn’t the first thing we attempted. In October 2012 we had a crack at filming a travel show focussing on backpacker travel in Northern Colombia. We collected hours of video to cut and edit, but in the end it still sits in our archives for another day (although probably not because we’re slightly embarrassed by it).



In 2013, after months of discussing what to do, we finally decided on a travel blog. In the early days of June, working off an iPad and a super old netbook, we started putting together our site and writing our first articles. After 6 weeks of research, planning, trial, error and somewhat success we launched on July 12th 2013 from a funky little café in San Pedro, Guatemala over a couple of birthday beers. Since that time we haven’t looked back on our quest to inspire the traveling world.

For the next 6 months, while we were still traveling Central America, we learned a lot along the way. I mean A LOT.

  

Analytics, social media, SEO, marketing, HTML and web design. At this stage our focus was mainly on building up engaging content, and we didn’t worry as much about networking. We wanted to make sure that if somebody did happen to land on our site, they wanted to stick around and read through.

When we entered the second half of our one-year plan our focus shifted to networking and expanding our social media avenues. We had a little experience with a sponsored post from within the travel industry and successfully secured our first product review. We started collaborating with other travel bloggers and in February we started a Facebook group called The Under 1000 Club for new and aspiring travel bloggers. The aim was to connect travel bloggers with each other to help network and to learn how to grow. Today that group stands at around 700 members (and growing), with travel bloggers from all over the world participating in weekly interaction threads and promotional activities.

We’ve also significantly grown our social media in the last six months. At the end of our first year we have over 6000 followers across a range of different social media sites.

  

On top of our social media presence we’ve also developed a strong readership and improved our site traffic. It still fluctuates more than we’d like, but slowly it’s becoming more consistent and stable.

Google Analytics Monthly Stats

Visitors: 3500

Unique Visitors: 3000

Page Views: 6000

In other Internet jargon;

Google Page Rank: 2

Alexa Ranking: 294,000 (140,000 in the US)

Page Authority: 40

Domain Authority: 29

MozRank: 3

 

Overall it’s been a very rewarding, challenging and exciting learning curve. We’re rapt to have the first year under our belt, and we have no plans on stopping just yet. Over the next couple of months look out for our brand new tales from Australia!

We’ll also drop a big announcement very soon! We’re planning our next trip and have just about finalized our next destination!

 

How’s your travel blog shaping up? What’s been your proudest or hardest moment?

 

Published by

Julian Hatfield

Jules is an avid traveler, community development worker and a surfing addict. He's spent the past four years working in non-profits throughout Latin America and Southeast Asia, with a lot of island pit-stops and wild adventures along the way. Adventure travel that respects and gives back to local culture and environment is his main priority...and Mexican food. Wanna know more?

12 thoughts on “Don’t Forget To Move Celebrates a One Year Blog Anniversary”

  1. Congratulations, guys! Your numbers are looking good. I wish I’d had those kind of numbers at year 1. Looking forward to your big announcement!

    1. Thanks Sam! That’s good to hear from you! It’s really hard to figure out where we stand especially because people are usually so hush hush with their stats. And definitely stay tuned to hear what we’re up to next!

  2. Hey guys, great article. Congratulations on the one-year achievement! You’ve achieved a lot in that time. Look forward to hearing all about your new adventures.

  3. Great to read about your blogging journey! You have come a long way in just a year 🙂

    It’s been just a little over four months since we started our travel blog. It’s a lot to learn and more work than we thought it would be, especially while travelling full time, but a lot of fun as well 🙂

    1. Yep it’s a big commitment! There are so many little factors that you wouldn’t really think of if you weren’t a blogger. But we’ve had so much fun learning and developing our skills. Hope you guys are enjoying it as well. Thanks for commenting Espen!

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