Things Will Get Back to Normal… Eventually

We're Not Dead, We're Dormant

Prior to the global pandemic more or less screwing with everyone's lives for the foreseeable future, we had planned on starting new blogs. We shared more about that in the previous article, but to quickly recap we think operating multiple brands independent of each other is a safer business decision in the long run. If this site crashes, much like it did at the start of the pandemic, others could pick up the slack to carry us through (and, as we mentioned, our local blog did just that).

But beyond this, one of the reasons we've moved into having new sites is also because they are simply that much easier to market.

The way the blogging industry is going, with niche specializations becoming key to growth, bloggers launching sites that go on deep dives into very focused topics. Our Pittsburgh blog is a good example of that, and it is something we wanted to replicate with our new sites. Sure, the Pittsburgh content could find its way here and kind of make sense. So could our wine content. Or even our coffee content. In fact, we've written about all of these topics on Living the Dream in the past. But the question that we had to face was simply this: does our branding make sense for that kind of content?

Does promoting wine reviews on a blog called Living the Dream make sense? That name recognition does not inspire any sort of authority on the topic of wine. Do we seem like we could be topical experts on Pittsburgh with Living the Dream too? Not really. What about coffee roasting or blogging tips (or other new blogs)? When this content is in a sufficient enough volume, the answer is, of course, no.

When we've written about these topics here in the past, they were often in the context of traveling and made some sense. But some of those never quite sat well with me for the branding we were going with on this site. So when we decided to dive down deep into all those topics, it made a lot of sense to no longer write about them here and spin them off to their own dedicated spaces. This opens up a world of new branding opportunities to allow that content to thrive.

Now we get back to the problem we're facing at the moment. 

In having divested many of our major interests into their own dedicated websites, and no longer wanting to write about them here, we're back to having Living the Dream being purely about travel and lifestyle design. We're still a little ways away from being able to ethically travel again (at least to the point of generating content worth sharing), and the main things we're enjoying at home now have separate blogs of their own. 

To put it simply, we have nothing to write about right now.

The divestment process we went through to start our new sites, in a way, backfired on our ability to generate content for this site during the pandemic. So while we'd love it if you checked out our other sites (Discover the Burgh for Pittsburgh, The Grape Pursuit for wine, Doctor of Coffee for coffee, and This Week in Blogging for blogging advice), we in a bit of a holding pattern here until things improve.

This is why we paraphrased a quote from one of our favorite flowers from our local conservatory at the start of this article- we're not dead, we're dormant.

Living the Dream has been sharing travel advice and stories from around the world since 2008, and I've been running these blogs as a full-time job since 2018. This is not changing. But in our effort to keep this site purely in the realm of travel, for the time being, things may be a bit quiet.