An Accidental Travel Blog

I started Travel Patch by accident. I was doing some research while planning a trip and couldn’t find the answer to a specific question I had. Eventually, I landed on a small, little-known blog - clearly someone’s personal project.

The blog gave me the answer I was looking for, but wasn’t particularly well written or laid out. Again, it was clearly someone’s personal project, a hobby.  Anyway, I thought that if this person can help a stranger on the internet just by writing something different to the big fancy blogs out there, then I could too.

At the time, I had just been made redundant and was in the middle of investigations for cancer, so I wasn’t in a great place. My wife and I had always planned to travel extensively in retirement, but I was now thinking that I might not even get there.

Looking for something to do to take my mind off things, I decided that I wanted to learn new skills, even if I would never use them; this was just for me.

I started learning Spanish, and still had this idea for a travel blog in my head, but I couldn’t think of anything original to call it.

After mulling it over for a few weeks and seeing some travel patches on Amazon while looking for something to iron on to repair a hole in a pair of jeans, I wondered if Travel Patch might be a good name. Oh my goodness, the travelpatch.co.uk domain was available and it’s only £1.20, I had nothing to lose by buying it!

I had no idea how to set up a website, but I had worked in the industry for decades as an accountant, so knew what the costs of websites were - domains, hosting, SSL certificates, that kind of thing.

I looked at the account I had set up on a whim to buy the domain, and looked at hosting costs. This is where I accidentally bought a year’s hosting and a platform package to make the site. Honestly, it was an accident. The website already had my card details from buying the domain, and I clicked through one too many screens, and… oh f* I just bought 12 months hosting!

Well, I’ve done it now, I had better set this thing up! I spent the next two months (when I was feeling well enough) learning how to set everything up. I wrote articles on places we had already been, I designed a logo and colour palette, learnt how to populate my CMS, and finally learnt about cookies, ad placement and affiliate programmes.

Friends and family have also become interested in what I am doing.  My brother-in-law, who is very well travelled and often travels solo, started contributing articles. Friends who enjoy unusual, independent trips have said they’d like to write too.

I have no idea if anyone will look at my site, but my ultimate goal is for ad income to cover my £20 hosting costs each month. 

Other long term bloggers out there claim to be making six figures a year, I’m not going to get to that, that’s for certain. These guys are always on the go!

I’ve recently read articles that tell me that the rise of AI has decimated blogging income.  The niche questions people once searched for and found via small blogs are now answered instantly by AI tools instead. Maybe that’s true. Maybe it isn’t.  Blogs aren’t getting the traffic anymore.

Anyway, things are looking up for me now, health wise, and there is now a future to look forward to.  One where hopefully we can start planning trips again, and I can write about them here.

Starting a travel blog in 2025, is it a silly idea?  We shall see!