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Last week, I was in Boston for TravelCon, a conference specifically for travel content creators. Matt Kepnes of Nomadic Matt created TravelCon in order to establish a space for travel bloggers and creatives to connect, network with brands, and master the crafts of videography, photography, writing, and blogging. The three-day event in Boston was only the second time that this conference has run, but you would never know it by how well organized and high-caliber the content was!

Now that I can officially call myself a TravelCon alumni, I am incredibly grateful that I had the opportunity to attend. Which is a stark contrast from my feelings in the weeks leading up to the conference.  

I almost didn’t go to TravelCon. 

As the days inched closer and closer to June 26 and the conference was quickly approaching, I found myself wondering, “why am I even going?”

I purchased my ticket to TravelCon on January 1st this year. It was a new year and I’d just made a ton of New Year’s Resolutions that focused on improving my travel brand and taking Airplanes & Avocados from a side hustle to a full-time income. I had plans to grow my YouTube channel, improve my newsletter, and become a better storyteller. TravelCon was going to be the first step in helping me to achieve these things. I was excited to learn, grow, and connect with other like-minded people. 

Six weeks later, my life went up in flames.  

Okay, in hindsight that’s an exaggeration, but at the time, it truly felt like the world was ending, and I used this personal shitstorm to rationalize my lack of attention to A&A. 

I tried to justify my loss of motivation by playing the victim card, blaming my inability to put in the work on everyone else: school, my friends, my other responsibilities. I thought that I was a victim to circumstance when in reality, none of these things were actively preventing me from dedicating time to A&A. I was making the decision to spend my time on these things instead because I’d lost my passion for my travel brand.

I lost sight of my “why”. 

I started A&A to make a difference; to have an impact that was greater than myself. I wanted to report on destinations all around the world, and tell the stories that no one else was telling. Which I did at first. Until I got sloppy and impatient. I wanted to see faster growth and so I resorted to writing “top ten” lists that you can find on literally every travel blog on the internet – telling myself that these surface level pieces would help me grow my brand and then I could go back to writing about what I really wanted to write about. I told myself that it was easier and faster to pump out this content, so I’d focus on consistency and quantity for now, then go back to focusing on quality.

Do you know what your "why" is? Click To Tweet

Have you ever been in an argument with someone and realized halfway through that you are entirely in the wrong, but you’ve committed to this argument for so long that you can’t back down now?

That was me. 

I knew that I was completely full of shit, but still, I tried to rationalize these superficial pieces. I was writing, but not really saying anything, and I knew it. 

Before TravelCon, I was writing, but not really saying anything. Click To Tweet

TravelCon was the wakeup call that I needed. It exposed me and made me realize that if I kept on this path, putting out content that I wasn’t passionate about, that had no purpose or objective, that didn’t tell a story, I was never going to succeed in this industry. 

And after being at TravelCon, I know now more than ever, that I want to succeed in this industry. 

Right from the get go I found myself reflecting on my values as a brand, when Clay Hebert, the opening keynote, brought up the importance of being intentional in our content creation.

Creating “learn from me” content as opposed to “look at me” content.

One scroll through my Instagram or YouTube is all that it takes to see that I’ve spent more of my time creating the latter. 

From the first morning of TravelCon, I decided that I was no longer going to publish content with a singular message of “look at me doing cool shit”. Instead, I want my messages to be more along the lines of “here’s how you can do this cool shit” or, “here’s why I’m doing this cool shit”. 

Are you creating "look at me content" or "learn from me" content? Click To Tweet

And taking that a step further, because as Mark Manson, the author of The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck, noted on day two of TravelCon, 

Travel doesn’t make you interesting, it just makes you a person who does interesting things. 

The Disappointment Panda really had me reflecting on myself as a person after this one. Am I actually interesting? Or do I just think that I am because I dove with whale sharks in the Maldives and smoked pot in Amsterdam’s Red Light District? 

This brought me back to my “why” and the goal of my content.

What’s the point? Why is this interesting? What do I want my followers to get out of this? 

These questions have admittedly paralyzed me in the past. I can’t count the times I’ve stressed over the little details, hovering over the “upload” button far too long out of fear of how certain things might be perceived. After all, I’m a writer, I’m good with words, but content creation is so much more than words, and I’ve often felt like a fraud trying to communicate via images or videos. 

Which brings me to the third knowledge bomb that was dropped on us on the third day of TravelCon by my blogging idol, Kiersten Rich of The Blonde Abroad: 

You don’t have to be great at everything. 

Wait, what? Seriously, as simple as this advice sounds, it was mind-blowingly refreshing to hear. When you start out in the travel world, people will tell you that you need to be on every platform: Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest, YouTube, Snapchat, etc. And while Kiersten didn’t argue against this, she pointed out that having a presence on all platforms is way different than mastering all platforms. 

There are just simply not enough hours in the day to be an Instagram, Pinterest, and YouTube expert. And that’s fine. There’s no point in taking your time away from something that you are already great at, to try and be good at something else. Kiersten’s talk was eye–opening for a lot of reasons, but my biggest take home from it was that it’s okay to not to be the best at everything, and more importantly, you don’t need to be the best at everything to be successful. 

However, what you do need to do in order to be successful is be uncomfortable. This life lesson came from Kristen and Syia of Hopscotch the Globe and Matt of Fearless and Far. These three are YouTube wizards and were sharing some of their learned mistakes over the years and how they’ve been able to rise to the top of the second-largest search engine in the world. They shared plenty of tips on video length, editing, music, and upload times, but the best takeaway from their presentations was just as Nike said it:

Just do it. 

Your first few videos are going to suck. Just accept it, take the hit, be uncomfortable and just do it. They talked about how consistency is king and quality can come afterward; uploading 2 good videos a week is far better than uploading one great video every few months. So, I hope y’all know what that means: you can expect regularly uploaded subpar videos from me in the very near future, because I am just going to just do it. And it will probably be awkward and painful for all of us at first, but eventually, it will all pay off.

If you want to be a great travel blogger, just do it. Click To Tweet

I realize that this may not have been the post that many of you were expecting. Yes, I also learned a shit ton about affiliate marketing, newsletter segmentation, video editing, pitching editors, and YouTube monetization from TravelCon. But you can read about that in anyone’s TravelCon recap post.  

I really wanted to tell you what I specifically learned from TravelCon, which honestly wasn’t what I was expecting either, but I think that re-evaluating my values and understanding my goals was far more valuable than learning about SEO. I’m glad that the experience was as confronting and eye-opening as it was. I know that it’s going to make me a better content creator in the future and I can only hope that I capture all these lessons in the content that I produce for you guys going forward. 

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I also met some really rad people at TravelCon – travel bloggers know how to party, that’s for sure!