Running a travel blog in … uncertain times

A few months ago, after a double shift first at my regular work then at my side job, with four hours of commuting in between, I sat on the train, knackered, and instead of playing Merge Mansion, I took a view at my blog from my mobile, and, shock, horror, it looked a mess.

Normally, I write and publish my blog posts using a desktop computer, and it looks fine there. I rarely look at it on my mobile phone, but I probably should more often, because whenever there is some update, it goes wonky. And I am here, reading loads of advice on the internet, on how to fix it, because well, my blog is a hobby one-person show, and often I am too tired after working my main job and my side gig to attend to the blog.

As I grappled with technical issues, the “Site Health” plopped a message, saying my Critical CSS is outdated, that I should use MySQL8… what??? For a minute, I felt like giving up – or at least switching back to a free plan.

The thing is… this is played on repeat on a regular basis, and I am wondering whether to keep running a “traditional” self hosted blog as a hobby with not a lot of technical knowledge is the right way forward for me.

So, long story in the making, but I am ready to hit “publish” and am curious about fellow travellers and bloggers insights.

My Blog is a Hobby, not a Business

I have always loved writing. I never saw writing as my work, though. I remember when asked in secondary school, one of my class mates said he wants to be a writer. The school counselor huffed “well, Erich Weinert was a Carpenter…”. Turns out Erich Weinert was a machinist, and that class mate continued writing but chose a more conventional career first.

As a first-generation university student in my family, I was encouraged to study something STEM and something that would give me a decent income in the years to come. So this is what I did, and my writing, often restricted to the completion of scientific work, became adapted to the scientific style. Only when I was travelling, I would fill my diary with rambling entries. And when I started a blog did I tried to make the best out of the two – giving factual information by trying to write well and entertaining.

So this blog was born quite some years ago, on a free hosting plan, and went through several iterations since. At some stage I went from a free plan to a self-hosted blog, since I wanted the freedom – and take ownership of my wiring and photography to a certain extent. In 2022, my INstagram got hacked while I was travelling – it may have been the free WiFi, it may have been something else – but I ended up losing that account because Instagram was basically useless. So, after that, I wanted to have a secure web site even more, and I wanted to learn how to run it – on a small scale.

It’s been fairly useful, although I am struggling to keep up with all technical developments. Even though I am middling at best, I do see myself more on the creative side when it comes to blogging, rather than dealing with the technology, but I want to understand the basics. However, with the little knowledge I had, I successfully managed to set up and run several non-profit websites until I could hand them over to a professional web designer.

My Travel Style is slowly changing

Years ago, when I started this blog, I only had a few posts to replace the hand-written notes I gave friends and colleagues when they asked me about travel destinations.

I lived in England, worked a full-time job, and divided my free tie between sailing at the local club, occasional trips into the countryside and to London, Cycling, visits to my mum in Germany, and one bigger trip once a year.

Now, with some more responsibilities, both at home and with family, I work no less but have more flexible hours with a small amount of working from home. I would say I travel a little bit more often.

My husband is not into travelling, so a lot of my trips I write about there are solo trips. Therefore, when I travel by myself, I take shorter trips more often. I am also becoming more aware of physical limitations, and for a couple years, between 2022 and 2024, I had to be extremely careful with my destinations, because I was physically unable to do some things I was able to do in my Twenties and Thirties, yet at the same time, now some of these issues have been addressed, I do want to climb that mountain or walk all day, because I am not sure how much longer I will be able to do it!

My trips tend to be more expensive due to the price of airfare, and some pretty expensive hobbies I took up, like SCUBA Diving and Sailing, so I stick to pretty good value mid-priced accommodations. I also have done some charity work in Bangladesh, studied in Japan and will continue to do some charity missions, but I will only write about them occasionally.

Honest and Straight

I call a spade a spade and since I have not much to promote, I will speak the truth. I always appreciate honest advice. Fake reviews have always been around on the internet, and I think it’s not getting better, so I appreciate honest advice and will do the same on my blog.

While trying to stay honest and truthful, this does not gel well with being paid to promote a destination, accommodation or experience. Some might say that’s a lot of sour grapes here, but at my work, we have a Code of Conduct which also includes not accepting monetary rewards or non monetary gifts for using a certain product or service. I even have to get special permission to attend educational events sponsored by drug company, such is the strictness of my employer.

So, the majority of my blog post feature a destination, a few restaurants (no kickback here), a handful of hotels, most of which I actually stayed in – and affiliate links to ONE vendor. I am aware that by giving honest opinions, I am potentially shooting myself in the foot when I don’t recommend a place enough I might not get a click. Also I am very aware that unfavourable reviews impose the risk of libel action, and I have better things to do than deal with “Cease and Desist” letters. So, honesty, yes, but treaing carefully at the same time.

The Issue with Residency, Tax and the (Lack of) Transparency

I get it, a lot of travel bloggers are nomadic, a lot of travel bloggers run a reputable business and I admire them for their dedication, continuous production of posts and beautiful photographs.

Quite a few I have come across, especially blogs I found via Social Media, appear to run their business outside Germany without paying any tax at all. Bit of shitty behaviour, especially when school and university in Germany are free, having your education paid by the state and then buggering off out of the country. Really not naming names here, but it’s basically shit behaviour, so I went on an unfollowing spree.

Staying in beautiful properties around the world, flying anything but Economy Class, and no disclosures at all – do they get a free stay, is the airline giving them upgrades for clicks? I understand that businesses promoted by these bloggers get something in return, but at least disclose. I do not underestimate the power of Social Media, and the reason why destinations and airlines give these services to people with a large online following

Am I envious? Of course. I want to fly Business Class and stay in a fancy villa sometimes, too. Or, in my case, a top notch Kyoto ryokan. But ey, I rather do this the hard and honest way, saving up from my job, paying my tax where I reside, and contributing to society. I am not uncritical of government, our social care system, the healthcare system I work in, but I contribute and have the freedom to exercise certain rights, small as they seem sometimes.

Improving the appearance of my blog

Here, we have a work in progress. I am one for clean lines, clean font, nice big pictures. I think I have done okay, with a free theme I have been using for years, which does okay with most elements on my blog and yes, it’s free.

However, it does something to my photographs on mobile view, which makes them appear a lot smaller, and I have not yet been able to resolve it.

For someone who’s been into photography for years, my photography has not really evolved. I look at my pictures and feel somewhat frustrated. Too flat, not crisp, almost muddy looking. How easy it all seemed with a basic DSLR and cheap Photoshop Elements. Firstly, I ran a few Lightroom Classes – I seemed to do everything right. I switched editing software only to eel a bot overwhelmed -and my pictures weren’t looking any better.

Lastly, I upgraded my very bashed-up camera with a full-frame one last year – and a couple new lenses. I see a definitive improvement with the prime lenses, but I am still a little disappointed with my photographs each time I look at them on my blog. I guess, more practice is required, and I might just be one of these middling photographers that have hit the ceiling, but I want to bring the fun back into my photography.

So, I am working on making my photos better – and resize them correctly, and try to improve the way they are shown on the blog. 

But I am not even anywhere near the lovely professionally-run blogs with structured menus that always work, and beautiful photography. One thing is for sure – I am not messing around with any annoying advertising posts and pop-ups, so at least that is keeping my posts clean.

Selective Social Media Use

I have never been big on social media. As a longtime Flickr user who later switched to Instagram, I lost interest in Instagram when video was given preferential treatment over photographs. In 2022 I had both my Facebook and Instagram hacked while travelling, and never managed to recover what had been quite a decent small account with a small nut lovely following.

I just ended up creating new accounts and basically did a massive involuntary purge of contacts on both platforms. This incident encouraged me to maintain my own site that I pay for, not some external platform, but I felt I could not do away with these two platforms altogether.

Recent events and the emphasis on further discouraged me to spend time and energy on Facebook and Instagram. I never even tried other video platforms – I am a stills photo person, not a video person. So, I should be okay limiting my use of them, once I can get over my boredom scrolling… to easy on the brain! Play more Merge Mansion, perhaps?

So I use social media mostly to stay in touch with people I met at some point in my life – the way they were originally intended. I reactivated and upgraded my Flickr account to share photographs, and I use Facebook sparingly to connect with others about travelling and other interests.

The question of Monetization

When <I started this blog, it was going to be a side gig at the very best. Now quite a few years later, I have come to the conclusion that firstly, I am not really making any money with this blog and secondly, I don’t really want to any more.

Why is that? 

One of my personal traits is that I am quite direct and speak my mind and I am honest and straightforward. Also, I am terrible at selling myself These two traits together are not really suited for running a commercial blog.

So, what I did instead was to find another job to funnel my passion for travel into, and to generate some extra travel funds. It’s now a win-win situation for me, as both my travel and non-travel job nicely complement each other, my travel job has flexible hours – and I can do part of it while travelling – if I wanted to.

And yes, more expensive accommodations bring more commission on booking sites, but that’s not me. If I stay somewhere and I like it, I will recommend it. I will not add a bunch of pricey hotels without knowing anything about them if I know nothing about them. Only occasionally do I recommend accommodation that I haven’t stayed in.

So, minimal theme, sparing use of Social Media… I can do it, all, without bending over backwards trying to please potential sponsors or selling stuff I don’t use myself. I don’t read advertising, so I am not going to have it in my blog, I don’t buy on Amazon, so I am not using Amazon links. I can do what I want and what I consider ethical and appropriate.

Last year, I made some small changes and instead of using direct affiliate links to Booking, I signed up to Stay 22, just as an experiment at first, but when I started making some fairly decent commissions on posts I already had up, without any extra hawking and linking random hotels, I was sold. My content is free, of course, but there was now a way to include discreet affiliate links the way I had done before, and this income allowed me to pay for some of the blogs running costs – which I had kept very trim, but now I could justify paying for some extra services, too.

This, of course, will have tax implications, but I have researched this before I started earning, and made the appropriate changes as far as my tax liabilities are concerned. I still see this as a hobby, though and despite feeling the temptation of earning more and maybe working less in whatever else I do, I’d rather write a nice post that people like rather than have more affiliate links and turn each and every post into a sales pitch.

And that, dead reader, is how I run my blog. I am in the  minority, and a total lightweight in the travel blogging world, but I am happy with that!

Technical Things: SEO and Visitors

At present, I seem to be doing something right with SEO, as the vast majority of my visitors come here based on Google Searches.

I am not kidding myself – the content that does well is on rather niche subjects where there are simply not many other posts. However, one Google Update and all can be in ruins. I am thinking of adding a newsletter, in order to drive visitors to my blog. And I really appreciate any returning readers and subscribers to my blog – I cannot thank you enough for sticking with me.

Artificial Intelligence and blogs

You cannot ignore it – Artificial Intelligence (AI) is gaining land and in the blog world, this has been viewed critically. We all use it now, whether consciously or unconsciously, in everyday life. I mean, spell checker is a low form of AI. Trying to optimise for SEO and keyword searching is basically involving AI. But for me, it has taken over a bit too much.

I changed my search engine over a year ago because every time I looked something up, I got a couple of bullet points of AI ” researched” slop at the top of my page. Then, first page, a load of fairly irrelevant and useless posts, where, when I click them, they appear outdated, but have somehow been messed with to show them as current. No, thanks. I get that at work ALL the time when people put their symptoms into a popular search engine, and then come running to my casualty clinic thinking there is something wrong with them. I try to reassure them after confirming all looks fine, and I get “but I read…” – time-consuming, frustrating, and… not very expedient when you might have some actually sick people to take care of.

The AI Crawler bots… don’t even get me started on them. They bother me. I got into a rabbit hole reading about them, and about ways to stop them crawling your site, but it was a rather frustrating read. Is there any stopping them?

And then, let’s not even start about what AI can generate. Blog posts! I may sit here for a Sunday, and write a reasonably well researched post, and if I input a prompt into ChatGPT, I can get a similar post, with probably better keywords. Yes, I have clicked on them. But a few sentences, and I can see that content has quite clearly been written by a clanker.

So, AI-generated blog post? No, thanks. Not on this blog. Not even prompts. Every time I search for something on the internet, I am inundated with spammy, clearly AI written “ultimate top tips” on first page. I did let ChatGPT write a single one of my blog posts, clearly marked as AI-generated as a bit of an experiment, and it turned out the most lacklustre beige text.

And let’s not start on the amount of computational power and energy this AI, especially generative AI, is using up. We are switching to reusable everything and turn ur heaters a few degrees lower, while getting hiw with all this AI slop we haven’t asked for that’s consuming incredible amounts of energy.

So, there will definitely no AI-generated text on this blog, Ever. I even deleted any photo editing programmes where they use so much AI that pictures look a bit too tuned.

Alternatives to classic blogs

I have had a blog since… forever, and have been self-hosting on WordPress for the past eight years. More than once, I considered returning to the free WordPress.com format. It is tempting – no technicalities to deal with, easy layouting, you can concentrate on writing and photography.

But then, I don’t think I have read any good blogs in the past year that run on WordPress.com – or, they are rather not on my radar! So, this would be a sure way to disappear, now I have gathered a nice following and even appear on the first Google page sometimes.

Also, I would probably my affiliate income, and instead, WordPress would display advertising on my blog that I would have no control over. This bothered me the most, so for the time being, I will be self-hosting, even if it means a greater expense (helped by recent affiliate earning), dealing with technical issues and never getting a good grasp of SEO.

More into the writing and photography side of travel stories, I recently looked at alternatives to a classic blog. Everyone said blogging is back, so, ta-da, there are a number of services that will help with that. I created a Tumblr Account that is a dead file – I prefer Flickr instead.

I read some posts on Substack – the format is certainly interesting and easy to read, so I created Substack account, and imported a few blog posts there, and will see if I like it or not. In terms of monetizing, I am just not very sure what I can offer on Substack that is worth paying for – my posts have always been free to read, and personally, I don’t really do paywalls. So, we will see about Substack – I love some of the writing there, but all I read there myself so far has been free, so it feels somehow wrong to set up paid subscriptions.

So, in conclusion…

Thank you for making it this far on my rambling post! I tried my best not to sound angry, ot frustrated, but rather give it the Gallic Shrug treatment. It is what it is, I just need to deal with it.

I am going to stick to my profession and the job I am fairly good at and continue writing the blog as a hobby and write for fun. It means that layouts might still be wonky for days on end, and that I may not respond to comments and queries immediately. It also means that I will never feel the pressure of adapting to market demand or popular styles, and can publish my blog the way I want it, with the aesthetic I like, on my very own domain.

I want this blog to be credible and give useful information – and connect myself with other like minded travellers. I have stopped trying to make money on this blog, but that doesn’t mean that I will skimp on quality – I might just post fewer and even more niche posts. I do, however, not want some AI Crawler bots go all over my lovingly written texts and turn them into cultural oatmeal – and make money from it.

So, while I am happy to publish my content for free in general, I want it to remain my intellectual property and I have been thinking about a paywall, diallowing bots (seems like a bit of a Sisiphos task) and using technical solutions I have yet to understand to tell the AI bots to bugger off.

The core of this blog is affordable travel in relatively short time, focusing on slightly off-beat destinations, culture, food and nature. I try to minimise negative impact at my destination and prioritise locally owned businesses, plant based food and minimal but meaningful shopping. I am not perfect, and I know that I still fly a lot, but until I see reasonably high-speed train routes available across Europe, this is unlikely to change. The lure of cheap flights proves too big.

And some posts… they will never see the light of day. I use the writing to sort my thoughts and ideas, and many are too personal, too critical… in general, unsuitable for public reading and not suitable for what is essentially a small independent travel blog.

Any one interested in a any of the destinations, any one who wishes to work with me, is always welcome to contact me, and I will respond. I probably won’t accept free trips, free stays, free tours, unless it is something I would have paid money for anyway, and everything received this way will be declared for tax and clearly marked as advertising.

I also want to include more regional posts over time, and I have considered rewriting and publishing selected posts in German and perhaps some other languages I am learning.

Yeah, I realise I am a dying breed here but I consider myself lucky that I can write for fun all I want, be forced to keep up with at least some technicalities, and rest assured in the knowledge that no Artificial Intelligence or algorithm can mess with my main job, and perhaps I am a dying breed ,one of the lucky ones, in that sense as well!

I am always happy to talk or answer your questions, and connect with like-minded travellers, and if this blog was good for anything, it was to give my photographs a home, hone my writing skills and wallow in happy memories!

The Small Print

This post was originally written some time in 2025 and finally published on March 22, 2026. This does not have so much to do with travelling as with blogging and ways of sharing some nice photos ut also travel routes and genuine honest tips. There are no affiliate links in this post.