Jeremy

Jeremy founded Living the Dream in 2008 to chronicle his long-term trip around Asia. Since then he has been on two long-term trips, visited 69 countries, and is just getting started. He is now on a Lifestyle Design quest to build businesses to pursue a life of travel.

Travel Instagram Strategies to Take Your Profile to the Next Level

For those who don’t know me, you should know that I am an engineer as well as a travel blogger- which at times is a very dangerous combination. When I try out something new to help my brand grow, I put together a test and log everything so I can get to the real reason for why something works. (We then write about it in our Blog Your Trip series to share it with you).

Over the past year I’ve been conducting many successful Instagram tests, and they’ve been picking up in popularity thanks to this social network’s continued rise in prominence.

As I’ve had some time to reflect on our most recent tests (find the one on Instagram hash-tags and the one on gaining targeted Instagram followers here), I need to tweak some of the recommendations I wrote about in those posts to form our game plan moving forward.

So, before reading any further, I highly recommend you read through both of those first. Finished? Good, let’s recap.

Read more

Don’t Start a Travel Blog, Start a City Blog

Downtown Pittsburgh

Over the years we have worked on many projects in the travel world to try and get our name out there and earn a living from our work.   Out of all of the projects we’ve worked on, this site- a global travel blog focused on long-term travel, and our newest site Discover the Burgh– a local blog for the city of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, have grown the most.

The interesting thing about these two blogs is not their differences in how we run them.  To be honest, we run them almost entirely on the same business model.  What makes them unique is that the potential for growing and earning revenue on our local blog far eclipses anything we’ve been able to achieve with our global site.

As such, we wanted to share some of our thoughts today as to why that is, and what you need to consider when launching a local blog of your own to try and get into this (relatively) untapped marketplace.

Let others chase down the global marketplace all they want- city blogging is the next big thing.

Read more

The Best Easter Island Hotels for All Budgets and Styles

Ahu Tongariki on Easter Island

If there was one thing about exploring Rapa Nui that surprised us the most, it would be that there was an incredible range of accommodation options available for visitors.

For an island so remote, we thought we’d be paying an arm and a leg to stay there, and as it turns out there are options available for everyone- from the most frugal budget traveler to those wanting all the bells and whistles (except for good internet- that one is impossible on the island, unfortunately).

As this information is often lacking in most reviews of visits to the island, and may be the deciding factor on whether or not you visit (you should), we wanted to publish this guide to Easter Island hotels so you know just what you are looking at when planning a visit to this incredible spot in the middle of nowhere.

Read more

Travel Blogging Niches – Are City Blogs the Next Big Thing?

Downtown Pittsburgh

Since returning home from our long-term trip, we’ve been brainstorming a number of business ideas that we could pursue from home. As much as we love sharing our international travel stories here, which we plan on doing for a long time to come, we needed to do more in order to meet our income goals and achieve financial independence.

One of the ideas we had was launching a new travel blog focusing on a specific city. After researching the idea further we realized that the potential for these style of websites in the travel niche is far greater than anything we could do with this global travel blog, and Discover the Burgh was born.

Like general travel blogging, running a city blog does have its pitfalls. You have to be active in the city. A lot. 

This means frequently going out to restaurants, trying every attraction there is, and spending a lot of money before you may bring that back in. It may sound a little daunting, but this one came easy to us.

We were going to do that anyway.

So other than enjoying the city you live in, why should you consider launching a city blog and why did we do it in Pittsburgh?  These are the questions truly worth answering.

Read more