My Journey: Travel Agent & Blog Update
Blogging has been a whole new adventure for me that I have very much enjoyed sharing with all of you. This post is going to be more of a personal update for those following along in my journey towards blogging and becoming a travel agent. Now is an ideal time for a blog update because I hit my first major milestone of writing 50 blog posts!
I started this journey about four months ago when I decided to share my passion for planning. At the same time, I decided to pursue becoming a travel agent for my favorite place on Earth: Walt Disney World. You can read about that in one of my old blog posts on becoming a travel agent. It has been a fun, yet challenging task to learn how to design my blog, manage social media, and promote my services. I have always tried to be pretty open in my approach to this blog, so below is my plan for setting new goals for the upcoming quarter of the year.
Evaluate Blogging Goals
My first goal after launching my blog was to write fifty blog posts, which I am happy to say I met earlier this week. From all my research, I learned that writing consistent and quality posts will be the most successful way to gain an audience. Being a mom of two in addition to trying to consistently write has been difficult. We took a trip to Thailand in the middle of all of that, which was great but it was hard to get back on track after that. Nonetheless, I did meet my initial goal of 50 posts and have been fairly consistent in publishing posts every few days.
They say that 80% of blogs fail in the first 18 months because people don’t see any traction and they give up. It has certainly been a learning curve, but my blog has continued to steadily grow. I am determined to beat those odds and keep my blog going for the long haul.
Evaluate Travel Agent Goals
Becoming a travel agent isn’t particularly difficult to get started, but it does take time and dedication to get through a lot of online training. Thanks to a family friend, I was able to book my first Disney package earlier this year, which was my first big goal as a new travel agent. I thought I wanted to just specialize in planning Disney trips, but I continued to train and ended up expanding my booking capabilities to include Disney, Expedia, Universal, and various cruise lines. Training is an ongoing process, but I was happy to meet my first goal.
New Goals
When I started this blog, I made sure to have clear SMART goals. SMART means creating goals that are specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-based. Below are my next set of goals I will strive to achieve in the next three months:
Promote Travel Services
I have been extremely focused on getting my blog up and running, which has meant that I haven’t promoted myself as much as a travel agent. So, for this next quarter, I hope to put more effort into getting my name out there locally to help clients beyond friends & family book their dream vacations. My specific goal will be to use social media to post new deals at least once per week. I will also be reaching out to more local groups online and promoting my services there.
Write 80 Posts
I was thrilled to meet my writing goal of 50 blog posts. For this upcoming quarter, I want to continue to write every 2-3 days aiming for my next goal of 80 blog posts. I will be backing off some from my original writing pace, but I hope that it will allow me to be more consistent regardless of what life throws at me outside of blogging. I fortunately have A LOT of upcoming posts planned out and I am extremely excited to share them with you all. If there are certain topics you would like to see featured more on my blog, please be sure to email me or comment below.
Grow Audience
I want to continue to grow my audience for my blog particularly focusing on social media as an avenue to do so. While I have traction of people searching and finding my blog, my social media following is currently standing at only around ten people despite my best efforts to be consistent with posting. I plan to focus my efforts on sharing and connecting with people via social media as a way to continue to expand my audience. So, I am setting a lofty yet achievable goal of trying to reach at least 50 followers on both Instagram and Facebook for this next quarter.
Help me reach my goal by following me on social media using the links below!
Thank You
Lastly, I want to say thank you to everyone that has supported me in this venture so far. Special shout out to my husband who has helped me with my numerous technical issues and been there for my many late nights which I spent blogging. I hope that this blog has added some value and helped my readers out in some way. If you like what you see, please continue to support me by sharing my posts and subscribe below to get monthly newsletters.
Happy planning!
-Kristin
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