We celebrate two years of Atlas & Boots

We celebrate two years of Atlas & Boots

While we reach the two-year brand, we take a moment to take stock, celebrate our successes and look forward to the upcoming challenges

When we officially started Atlas & Boots in August 2014, we agreed that it would be a blog for travelers, not a blog for bloggers.

The way a website works is certainly of interest to a minority of readers, but we wanted to spend our time talking to travelers and not looking inside.

highlights

reach 100,000 users per month

We reached 100,000 monthly users for the first time in February this year (103,143 to be precise) and have done this repeatedly in the months.

In fact, we managed to reach 180,000 users in July, but since this was due to a single article that was slightly viral, we count 100,000 as our basic number.

The most incredible is that someone is always on our side. In this second it is 16 visitors from five different countries. Know that at any time somewhere in the world someone reads something that we wrote is just incredible.

appointment as the "best of the travel blogs" by National Geographic

In February 2015, National Geographic selected one of our posts for their two -month function "Best of the Travel Blogs".

We were thrilled to have been selected by one of the most respected names in the field of travel and adventure.

The article in question, a return to India, was written by Peters father and followed his trip back to the country 45 years after his time there as a teacher at VSO. It is a touching homage to a country that he clearly loves, and to the son who brought him back there.

Cooperation with Lonely Planet

We came to Lonely Planet in 2015 and had a fantastic time in working with their online and social media teams.

Here is an excerpt from everyday life along the #mekongdelta, recorded by #lppathfinder member Kia, @Atlasandboots, during a recent #Mekongriver cruise with @gadventures! It is a water world that moves in the rhythm of the mighty Mekong, where boats, houses and markets swim on the countless rivers, channels and streams that pull through the landscape like arteries. Here, buffalos are sitting in rice fields, with coconut nuts and fruits loaded boats slowly float over the mud -brown water, and the exploration of the narrow streets on two wheels is rewarded with a real taste of rural hospitality (and delicious river fish). To see more of KIAS Journey, follow her on @Atlasandboots. #travel

Dream time

The collaboration with the pioneers of the Himalaya guiding was an extraordinary highlight

We even interviewed the CEO of Adventure Consultants, Guy Cotter, for our article on the etiquette of mountain guides. Guy was heroically presented in 2015 in the adventure film Everest, one of the best mountaineering films of all time.

Foundation of our company

I've always had an entrepreneurial streak, so much that Peter gave me the nickname "del boy" in our relationship early on ("We will be millionaires next year!").

I like to try out different projects and jobs, but I was not sure whether we could turn a travel blog into a serious business. In April of this year, however, we registered Atlas & Boots LTD at the Companies House. We are almost profitable for ramen and striving for the coming year.

It took a long time to come from "This is my project" to "This is my business", but now we are here. We are business owners and that is both exciting and terrifying.

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press

It feels extremely unbridically saying that we were satisfied with the press, but let's be honest: attention is important for every young company.

Last year we performed on TV, radio, online and print. We were addressed by Business Insider for a syndication deal and are currently working with Matador Network. This is not as exciting as the other highlights on the list, but we were still satisfied.

Interview with greats of mountaineering

In addition to working with Adventure Consultants, we have record -breaking climbers such as Edurne Pasaban (the first woman who has climbed all 14 eight -thousanders) and Eric Larsen (the first person who has completed a summer expedition in the Arctic) interviews ice cream). It was incredibly encouraging that these great discoverers let themselves down to speak to us.

READERPOST

between Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, email and comments on site we have hundreds of interactions with readers every week. Every now and then we get messages that really worth the effort.

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Our inexpensive travel guide to the Galapagos Islands helped readers to reach this remote angle of the world

There was the reader who managed to take his new woman about our detailed contribution about how to visit the Galápagos with a budget to take the Galápagos.

There was the nervous diver who completed her diving qualification with our step-by-step instructions on the passing of the Padi Open Water Diver course, and also the enthusiastic couple who sent us a picture of Nevis Peak after it was climbed with our instructions.

introduction of our first products

Our contribution to the existence of the Padi Open Water Diver Course has been read since the publication of over 30,000 people.

At the beginning of this year we summarized the mail together with our other diving resources in an open water Diver Course eBook and sold a few hundred copies, and the trend is rising. It is not a large number in the large scheme of things, but it always gives us a thrill when we sell one.

edit 16-Sept We have just brought Don’t Offer Papaya: 101 Tips for your first time around the world and are excited about the feedback from the reader, so write us when you buy a copy!

challenges

Skalize the pages stable

When the website grew, we found that our server failed several times within a week. When we contacted our hosting company, they informed us that the threads would run out and that we would have to upgrade to a more powerful package. We soon grew beyond this level and had to upgrade again.

In addition, we had security problems with bots that tried to access our dashboard by transmitting the registration page for thousands of times with different passwords, only in case they got the right one. We have installed WP Cerber and have not had any problems since then.

say no to lucrative link exchange

First, the request for link exchange gave us a feeling of confirmation. If PR agents urged us to accept their customers on our website, we certainly had a certain level of gravitas.

We said yes to a few links in the early days - after all, it takes two minutes to add a link and you get $ 200 for it - but we soon noticed that they were harmful to our brand and were dishonest to the readers. Since then we have rejected all inquiries about the exchange of links, as tempting as they are.

growing our social statistics

social media was a bit like a slog. We have a total of over 20,000 followers on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram, which is…

We grow every month, but not as quickly as we want. Part of the problem is that we are not a natural superuser of social media. We do not live and breathe Twitter and we have no compulsion to share everything on Instagram. We want to improve, but we still have a long way to go.

Monetarization of the website

This is the greatest specter of all content sites. We have a fair income from advertising, sponsorship, affiliates and product sales, but there is a lot of space for improvements. The dream is that our trips would carry us comfortably and we are not quite at our destination.

recognize that this can work!

As mentioned above, it took a long time to come from "This is my project" to "this is my business". Blogging boomed in the 90s and early 2000s, and we thought we had missed the connection for a few years, but we managed to accumulate a decent followers through durability and honesty. The biggest challenge was perhaps the realization that this can work!

the future

At the moment we are taking a number of short trips - namely to Turkeyvietnam and Cambodia - while we are planning our next long -term trip to Africa.

We have just released a new e-book, Don’t Offer Papaya: 101 Tips for your first time around the world, and are excited to see how it is accepted. The biggest challenge of the next two years will be monetization (but we promise not to paving the page with advertising).

One of my goals as editors is to publish deeper, well -researched articles with direct quotations from experts. We have created a number of research -intensive articles such as our mountaineering calendar and expert tips for learning several languages ​​and would like to follow this example. It will be difficult to find the resources, but everything it is worth.

In the meantime, we would like to thank everyone who shared our content or marked with “Like”, subscribed to our newsletter, followed us on social media, leave a comment on the website, saved an article in Pocket, send a link to a friend by email or sent us an encouraging message. You keep us up to date and we hope to see you out there!
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