The road to 3,000.
I’ve now blogged over 3,000 times on Vagabond Journey.
The first post went up on April 1, 2004, and it was nothing to speak of. It was really the most unpromising beginning to something that would eventually take on career-like proportions.
I had no idea at that time that over twelve years later I would still be pushing the publish button almost every day. I had no idea that blogging — which was something sort of embarrassing to do that you didn’t tell anyone about at that time — would become my sole source of income for a four year period and that my family would fully live off of it for two years. I had no idea what I was getting into. I also had no idea how much I would enjoy it.
What started out as a way to show my parents what I do when I travel grew into a business and then descended into what it is now: something for me to do to relax a little between writing articles and working on books, a way of recording the little in between stories that would probably otherwise be forgotten. Oddly, I make more money off of this blog now than I ever have.
Besides travel funds, this blog has given me the most significant professional opportunities that I’ve ever had — and, really, could ever imagine.
My first book deal came from this blog.
My first job in big media came from this blog.
My job as a research editor — the highest paying per hour job I’ve had yet (minus public speaking) — came from this blog.
If anyone told me that this is what blogging would get me when I first started I would have keeled over in laughter. In actuality, nobody would ever have said anything like this — it would have been just too ridiculous.
“You’re like a teenage girl trying to get discovered in a shopping mall,” the woman who would someday become my wife once berated me for my obsessive blogging regimen in early 2009 in Istanbul.
I brought this statement back up to her recently, seven years later.
“I guess that really happened,” she said. “You really did get discovered in a shopping mall.”
3,000 blog posts.
But how much is 3,000 really?
3,000 is roughly the amount of miles between Bangor, Maine and Quartzsite, Arizona, Paris and Tehran, or Beijing and Kabul.
3,000 is how many days there are in 8 years and two and a half months.
3,000 is the number of roubles Dmitri Fyodorovich stole from Katerina.
3,000 is a lot.
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About the Author: VBJ
I am the founder and editor of Vagabond Journey. I’ve been traveling the world since 1999, through 91 countries. I am the author of the book, Ghost Cities of China and have written for The Guardian, Forbes, Bloomberg, The Diplomat, the South China Morning Post, and other publications. VBJ has written 3723 posts on Vagabond Journey. Contact the author.
VBJ is currently in: New York City
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