Busy, busy, busy – that's how April sticks out in my memory. For the first time in two years, I feel like April began to give us a sense of returning to some normalcy. I spent a lot of time on planes, some of it not even wearing a mask; I went to conferences and events, many of which not even wearing a mask; I ate in restaurants and went to parties and traveled almost-normally...

After a six-month break, I'm back to publishing these income reports! I've had some requests for them, which I know is just y'all being nosy about my income – but it's cool. I understand that having benchmarks to compare your strategy and success is important, which is why I want to continue to share these reports. There aren't many bloggers doing that, and we all need it to help understand how our industry is growing and maturing...

October is one of my favorite months of the year... which is a good thing, as this month was pretty tough for my business! While my site is still growing in the long term, October continued the trend in September (well, really, it was a trend that started in June) and continued to decrease in traffic and income. That's okay though: I was busy working to ensure that next year reaches both higher peak traffic and higher low traffic...

After a roaring summer, the autumn slump has begun. This is a pretty common thing for travel bloggers to experience at this time of year, but it's still hard to see your business contract and have no control over it. The reality is that people just travel less during this time of year – myself included – so the volume of people searching drops for almost every business in the travel industry...

Well, here we are: the 18-month mark of the pandemic. It's hard to believe that it's been a year and a half, and I'm still here, reporting on my little travel site which has undergone the most dramatic rollercoaster of its 8-year career – and there's no end in sight...

After a few months of limited travel as we adjust to life here in Ohio, July finally saw my return to the open skies and open roads – just in the nick of time! Not being able to travel has been hard for my mental health and my business, and sneaking in a few trips before the Delta Variant began sweeping across the country helped soothe that discomfort some...

Once is an outlier, twice is a coincidence, three times – that’s a pattern. That’s how I’m feeling this month as I look at my traffic and income, and am awed at how far this site has come in the past few years. The beginning of July marks the anniversary of when I left my last full-time role to strike out as a full-time blogger/freelance writer – and I have so much more freedom (both personal and financial) than I ever did when working for other companies...

Each time I sit down to write these monthly recaps, I replace the one from a year previous. That means that for the next few months, I'm reliving the stress and uncertainty of the pandemic's impact on my business – and reporting on my recovery (and growth). This month, like April, is one that gives me a lot of faith that my persistence has and will continue to pay off.

Sitting down to write this recap, I looked back on last year's numbers and my thoughts surrounding them. This time last year, we were in the first few months of what would become a years-long pandemic. It was incredibly stressful to watch the business I'd built over the past seven years evaporate overnight...

Well, after last March, anything has to be better, right? You may or may not recall that my March 2020 recap was very dour – I was angry and depressed that my business was decimated by the impending pandemic... and little did we know what was still to come from that!...