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Hi there!
Sorry for the radio silence. It’s been.. almost 2 years since the last post on Tripsget.
Takeover of ChatGPT
I took this time off to figure out what to do with the blog. You see, this blog has always been my passion and hope for a steady passive income, but since AI tools like ChatGPT and Google Gemini took over, the views on the blog have plummeted, and my dreams of even getting any income from the blog have been shattered completely.
I didn’t feel like creating any content because.. well – all that hard work will be crawled by AI tools, converted into their knowledge and never seen by anyone – it just felt unfair. So I disappeared.
How it started – writing for fun
But then… I always liked writing. I started this blog because I liked to write, I loved sharing useful information (believe me or not, back then, there was actually a lack of information about certain destinations), and I was never chasing money – I did that for pleasure.
Blogging was fun when it started. I didn’t care much about SEO. I just wrote what I wanted and shared my views and photos. Tripsget was my personal version of Tripadvisor and Google Reviews and I was jubilant when people occasionally found my blog and left genuine comments.
When I started treating it more seriously and attended my first couple of travel conferences back in 2017, I was hooked. A lot of people did travel blogging for living and were making way more than what I did working as a Marketing Specialist. So I thought, why not try to make it more professional, follow all the SEO and keyword research best practices and well, try to become a “proper” travel blogger, too?
Things took off
And I did. I was already working in Marketing, so I learned all I could about SEO and applied it here. I watched countless videos with tips and advice, joined dozens of Facebook groups and tried really hard to make content that ranks well on Google. Even if it meant writing wasn’t fun anymore. I would follow a proven-to-work post structure, then spend more time editing the post for SEO and uploading all the correct alt-codes for the images and all that jazz. And it killed all the fun, joy and happiness this blog was bringing me. Creating content became a chore. I was never making enough to quit my job – $1000 a month during the prime years of Tripsget – not enough to have a nice lifestyle in London, so I kept working full-time and it was draining me.
How it ended
When my job became more demanding and I eventually started managing people, I stopped having enough energy to write new articles – there was zero creativity involved in it, it was always the same exact process of creating new content. All the blog posts were blending into one and I could no longer differenciate. I stopped sharing my personal views (not to offend anyone) and personal photos. I started hating it, but kept doing it because I didn’t want the work of 7 years to go to waste.
And then it happened. The new Google algorithm and ChatGPT completely killed the whole industry. Some people survived, but maybe 10-20% of full-time bloggers that used to make a living from their blog. I lost 90% of my views and 95% of my income (that wasn’t super high anyways), so the ads are now paying for the hosting and the domain to simply be able to run the blog. Naturally, I was kicked out from the Booking com’s affiliate program (“we are terminating your account”) and well, it felt like a natural end of this blog.
New team member
While all this was happening, I was also pregnant. In January this year, we welcomed our first child, our baby girl Mila. The first 6 months were an emotional rollercoaster and I was in a survival mode pretty much all this time. The future of Tripsget was probably the last thing I cared about – but now it’s on my mind again, so, I guess, I’m back?
What’s next for Tripsget
Screw the SEO best practices and posts that rank. I just want this blog to bring joy again. I will treat it as what it was originally – a blog. So expect some random posts, rants and honest opinions. Really short travel posts that aren’t super useful – I won’t cover everything (how to get to the airport and all that stuff – you have Google and ChatGPT for that) and I don’t have time or energy to edit existing content – I might delete some *especially* ridiculous posts or things that are so terribly out of date that they are wrong and misleading.
I won’t be posting regularly, that’s for sure – life with a 6.5-month-old baby is unpredictable, but I won’t delete this blog. At least for now.
I think I probably lost all the regular readers (if I had any to start with, the last few years of Tripsget were soulless), but if you ever remembered about this blog (or us) and visited from time to time and were wondering, what happened to us – well, that’s what was up!
Thank you for reading this awfully long post (well, after not writing for ages, it felt like a really long one, but in reality, there are articles here that are longer than my Master’s dissertation, lol).
