When I quit my job and moved to Brazil for six months, I decided not to update my social media. During that time, I posted on my Instagram a grand total of three times. I hardly gained any followers. Most people outside of my family and closest friends had no idea what I was up to, or where I even was in the world. Dozens of gigabytes of photos and videos went straight onto my hard drive, strictly for keeping memories, never to see the light of day on social media. It was a golden opportunity to attempt to grow my social media channels: “Millennial quits jobs and sells belongings to travel the world.” But in spite of the chance to aim for the sky of influencer stardom, I chose not to.

I come from the professional world of digital media. I was, for the most part, the sole person speaking to hundreds of thousands of followers across various social media platforms for nearly seven years. I was tired of it, all too familiar with the enormous effort it takes to create engaging content and grow an account. I also knew the consequential toll that effort takes on one’s mental health.

So when I started my travels, I made the conscious decision to throw social media to the wayside. I wanted to focus on my trip. I didn’t want to be constantly checking social media, engaging with followers, and spending more time editing photos and videos of my experiences than actually enjoying the experiences. And I don’t regret it. However, when I see travel influencers who have hit the big time doing similar, or even less intriguing, adventures than mine, I sometimes wonder, “Could I do that, too?”

That said, despite my initial social media silence, I kept this blog active. I updated my website twelve times during my first six months in Brazil. The difference was that I love writing. It didn’t feel like work. On the contrary, I enjoyed the challenge and process of taking abstract thoughts that floated in my mind and turning them into the art of the written word. I would share these blogs on my private Facebook account, but I steered clear of Instagram’s dopamine abyss.

When I started this travel blog eight years ago, my first posts were pretty mediocre and only my close family and friends read them. But over the years, with almost no effort to grow it, the blog’s traffic has surprisingly blossomed from about 1,400 visits in 2016 to 25,000 visits in 2022. From originally having my mom as my only subscriber, somehow there are now 248 people — most of whom are strangers — who subscribe to my blog. The largely unintentional, organic growth of the blog has inevitably made me wonder if I could turn it into a money generator.

I quickly learned that the amount of money that 25,000 visits can generate in ad revenue will hardly even offset the costs of upgrading my website to be able to accommodate said ads. Even that small investment just didn’t seem very pragmatic. There are also other ways to generate revenue, like Substack — a platform that puts your blog content behind a paywall. But who really wants to pay for stories about … me? The other option is brand partnerships, but that would require actually trying to grow my platforms and the aforementioned negative side effects that come with it.

So, my blog is still free and ad-less as it was when I started. However, after my initial social media break, I did start to ramp up my online presence. Since I started freelance writing professionally about a year and a half ago, I have been trying marginally harder to promote my content, stepping more into the realm of social media. To build a successful freelance career you really need to shamelessly self-promote. It’s a fine line that I have not fully leaned into yet, but I have experimented with it a bit. Creating a successful freelance career without a consistent web presence is next to impossible in this day and age. Thus, I have reformatted my blog posts into more consumable content for those flying by on their Instagram scrolls. I’ve made more videos as well. It hasn’t been as draining as my previous marketing career, as long as I do it in moderation. And as much as I hate to admit it, I can attribute a couple freelance gigs from editors who followed my work on social media. That validation means I have to keep trying, I guess.

The heyday of travel blogging died long before I started my site. I always knew I was late to the game. In 2023, if you want to create a relatively realistic path to being an influencer, you need to go to where the audience is (social media) and create bite-sized content with the potential to go viral. You need to pick the best click-bait thumbnails, respond to comments, stuff descriptions with keywords, research hashtags, follow all the trends, and pray that a big account shares your post. I am very aware that there is little appetite for 2,000-word travel blogs when people want someone’s trip summed up into a sexy, 30-second Instagram reel montage with inspiring, uplifting music (I am guilty of making those, too).

There are plenty of travel bloggers/influencers out there who are successful in this space. They’ve learned to leverage social media well and the emphasis of their work has largely shifted from written to video content in the past decade. Some make a lot of money, get free stays, and receive free products from brands. Kudos to them. But for every successful travel influencer, you can find dozens, or hundreds, whose work is not massaging the algorithms as well. It gets lost in the noise of social media and the financial returns are meager or nonexistent. For someone like me, who does not genuinely enjoy constantly updating my life on social media, imagine going through all those motions only to find that it didn’t work. It’s not worth it. It’s not my path.

I have largely chosen not to attempt to turn my travels into profit, but I also somewhat float in this noncommittal grey zone. I am constantly, whether consciously or subconsciously, probing the balance of posting just enough to genuinely share (some of) my travel experiences with others, while not posting so much that I grow to despise it and forget why I travel in the first place. Maybe one day that will change, but for now, I am perfectly fine with continuing to write for the 248 followers of my microblog, throwing my words out into the depths of the internet for those who can find them.