This month’s guest post comes from a fellow Aussie, the lovely Amanda Kendle. I wanted to be able to share Amanda’s story with you, because I believe it’s not only inspirational to people looking to make travel a bigger part of their lives or career, but it also shows that with some hard work and dedication, anything is possible. This is something I think we all need to remember every day, so am very thankful to her for obliging me this interview!
For those of you not familiar with Amanda – She is a travel writer, blogger and social media consultant who has lived in Japan, Slovakia and Germany, but calls Australia home. You can keep in touch with her travel writing life via her blog NotABallerina.com, through her Facebook page, and by tweeting with her @amandakendle.
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When did you know you wanted to make travel a bigger part of your life and career?
I’ve had the travel bug most of my life (thanks to my parents and my general curiosity about the world) but I struggled in my early twenties to figure out how to really get travelling. I had several false starts at moving away from Perth to other parts of Australia or overseas – I was anxious about doing it alone so I had to wait for the right moment and finally, when I was 25, my boyfriend wanted to leave his job and do something different and we saw ads in the paper for teaching in Japan. Very soon after arriving in Osaka I realised that life would never be the same again, and travel was always going to be extremely important.
How long has it taken you to get where you are today in your online businesses/career?
I first had a travel article published online in 2004, although I’d been writing them (and submitting them in a not very wise way) since 2002. For the first few years writing and blogging was very much something that was a sideline to my main job of teaching English – when I lived overseas I had to teach full-time to be eligible for the visas that enabled me to live in Japan, Slovakia and Germany. It was when I moved back to Perth with my husband (a different guy to the boyfriend at the start of this story!) that I actually put some real effort into it, as I was able to teach part-time and concentrate more on blogging and writing.
Ironically, it was after I had a baby and was unable to travel much at all that my online business really took off. I am determined to work in a flexible way so I can spend most of my little boy’s waking hours with him – and also so I can do some more travelling when he’s a little bit older – and so I’ve really concentrated on building up online writing and consulting work. Now thanks to my travel blog Not A Ballerina, and my experience blogging on other travel websites like Jaunted, Vagabondish and Europe a la Carte, I’m able to run training courses for people who want to learn how to blog, and I also do consulting in private and public industry on blogging and social media – and much of it takes place online, so it’s perfect. I think coming from a travel blogging background makes my work accessible to all kinds of people – who doesn’t like to think about travelling? – and then they can just apply my principles to their own areas.
So in a nutshell … ha ha … about nine years! But without really trying until the last year – although all the experience up until then is still a vital part of it.
What advice do you have to people who may be looking to follow the same path and integrate travel and their careers?
First of all, don’t do it because you think you’ll make money from it, do it because you love it. If you want to make money online, figure out a good stockmarket strategy or something. If you can’t get rid of the travel bug, and you’d like to integrate it into every aspect of your life, then do it. You have to be passionate about travel – properly truly really passionate! – to be able to make it a real part of your everyday life.
Secondly, be generous – get involved in the online travel community but without the idea of just doing it to get something back for you. For example, making comments on other people’s blogs just to gain traffic to yours may be effective in getting some traffic but it won’t help you the way making genuine, regular, interactive comments on a blog because you are truly interested will. I’ve met some delightful people online – and then in real life – and our friendships evolved from mutual interest rather than trying to get traffic – and these relationships have ended up helping me in so many ways.
And lastly, keep up to date with everything as much as you can, because you never really know where the next opportunities will be. I spent lots of time tracking down old travel companions and former students on Facebook because it was fun (and because I wanted to know about this “new thing”), and these days I get paid (well-paid!) to teach people how to use Facebook. Obviously this was not a potential career mentioned by my advisor back in high school. I’m very much one for keeping a finger in many pies, so to speak, and in the online area it really pays off.
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