202: What 12 months of full-time travel taught us about marketing

We have been officially travelling full-time for the last 12 months.

All while building and growing a content marketing agency (and supporting multiple clients)

We have 3 lessons to share that can help you create better (or what we call good) content in the future for your business!

All part of our new campaign - Around the World in 90 days - your ticket to good content marketing! 

Welcome aboard flight CQM222, I am your pilot, Mariah - you have your ticket to good content marketing in hand. 

While on this flight the flight attendants will be here to assist you to get off the content creation hamster wheel and onto a new way of marketing to help you live a more freedom-based lifestyle. 

Each week you will be given a new stamp in your passport and by the end of the 90 days you will be on your way to explore the world of Content Marketing as a solo traveller. 

This is week two - get ready, it is going to be a wild ride! 

If you LOVED this part of your trip (the episode), make sure you share this on your Instagram stories and tag us @contentqueenmariah.

✨ ⁠⁠GET YOUR TICKET TO GOOD CONTENT MARKETING ✨

KEY EPISODE TAKEAWAYS 👇

  • The 3 things we learnt in 12 months of full-time travel that can help with your marketing

  • How to integrate these lessons for your content creation

  • Your ticket to good content marketing

SHOW RESOURCES 👇

If you like this episode, don't forget to share it to your Instagram stories and tag me @contentqueenmariah!

Other than that, enjoy - chat next week 💕

PODCAST TRANSCRIPTION 👇

This is your pilot speaking. My name is Mariah, and welcome to the special series of the Content Queen podcast. You have ab boarded flight CQM 2 22, and you have in your hand your ticket to good content marketing. We hope you have a safe journey on this 90 day trip. Strap in and get ready to experience all the strategy and learnings you need to enter 2024 with a direction on how you create content that is unique to you and your business.

While on board you will have complimentary access to all the learnings that will help you attract your new passengers to grow and expand your own trip. While on this flight the flight attendants will be here to assist you to get off the content creation hamster wheel. And on to a new way of marketing to help you live a more freedom based lifestyle.

Each week, you'll be given a new stamp on your passport. And by the end of your 90 days, you'll be on your way to explore the world of content marketing as a solo traveler. Seatbelts on, we are ready to take off. Hello gang, welcome to the flight. I'm so excited to have you here today. So we are about to embark on our new Set of travels and it's so crazy looking at my phone 12 months ago from now We started traveling full time.

I kid you not as I record this podcast. We were in Vietnam It's just wild like So there's so many reflections and that's what I want to go through today and share those. But as you heard, we are doing this really special campaign at the moment around the world in 90 days, your ticket to good content marketing.

You can sign up by the link in the show notes and you'll get a passport each week for each episode. So I'm very excited. If you sign up to this live from the episode, you get your stamp in your inbox. So super, super excited about that. So first I really want to share the, The 12 month traveling journey, a bit of a story around that.

And then I'll go into three things that can help you with your marketing off the back of these lessons. So let me go back to August 2021. And if you listened to last week's episode, you'll know that I started my business for travel. I've always been excited about travel and really what happened was a health journey, COVID.

I moved to the Gold Coast finding my life Life partner. That kind of obviously slowed down the process of this full-time travel. But August, 2021, we were at Airly Beach for my partner Mitch's birthday. We went and did the reef sleep. We slept on the Great Barrier Reef. It was incredible. Oh my God. We loved it so much, and as we were about to leave.

We, that morning we got up, we got a coffee. We sat by the rocks on Ellie beach. If you've been there, it's sort of near that lagoon in Queensland. It's a beautiful place. And we're sort of talking about our love for travel and. How we, we loved it so, so much, but at the moment we felt like we weren't really doing enough.

Um, we did have our Vietnam trip booked. So we knew we were doing that. Um, but we just wanted that free lifestyle and it was a plan for us to do, but we'd obviously committed to a lease. Now, whilst we were on the reef, we did get an email from our travel, our real estate agent to say that we had been, um, Offered another 12 months.

And I sort of said to myself, if the universe offered us another 12 months, we would another six months. Sorry. We would take it. If it was higher rent, we would deny. Now this email said it was going to be an increase of 50 per week. Not unreasonable, but still a lot. 200 a month is a big increase for us at that time.

So we sat on these rocks and we discussed that. And I said, Let's just travel. I had this vision of us sleeping in the back of Mitch's SUV and traveling around Australia before we left to go overseas, which we were planning on doing Europe in the summer. So I'm like, let's just start now. Why are we waiting until Europe?

Like, let's just do it. And he's like, Yeah, let's do it. So we got the bus to, um, Possapine Airport, and we just, we were talking about the whole way there. We were talking about, you know, how we were gonna do the van, we could have fairy lights, or the car, sorry, fairy lights, and as soon as we, we ended our lease, we'd go to Vietnam, we'd come back, we'd pack up our house, and we'd start this travel.

And we'd go home, back to my parents, set it all up, and off we went. So we were so excited about this. Now, what I had built in this time, so I was able to go offline in Airlie Beach without any stress, um, during the week too, might I add. And, um, we were able to do that because I had created this Strategy plan with myself and my clients and the systems and everything.

Obviously, I'd set up my business for this, which I worked with my coach on. And I did a post on this on social media. I'll pop it in the show notes about how in 2021, um, sorry, 2022, I actually just said that was August, 2021. It's 2022. So this happened in 2022, but in 2021, I'd had a. Conversation with my coach, Leticia, who said, you know, if you were able to travel tomorrow, would you have the foundation set up?

And I said, absolutely not. So we worked on that from a business standpoint, but I also worked on that from a content and marketing standpoint. I had systems get set up. I had processes, the strategy refined and everything. So it was no more hamster wheel work, sleep, repeat. It was all about creating sustainability for my business.

So that I could travel. So I'd already kind of set up those foundations in place so that making this decision was super easy. So when you look at what you really want, then you can create this action plan to move forward. And that was something that I'd done in 2021 and then was ready to take on this adventure of full time travel in 2022.

And I want to share more about that, what we did and all the things. But I want to share with you the three things that I'd learned from the beginning of our travels. In December, oh sorry, in November, and then coming back, packing up, and leaving. From November, it was like November 19, November 20, to now of full time travel for 12 months.

So, obviously in that time, we have done Europe for 4 months, we have lived in our car for 4 months, Um, we were at my parents for a little bit, just getting things, like, set up, and now we're about to literally fly out, as you listen to this. I'll be on a flight probably, um, to Columbia for five months in South America.

So obviously we come home every now and then because of my health and all sorts of things. And actually it's a really nice grounding exercise. And when I say home, I mean like my old bedroom at my parents, which doesn't look like my old bedroom anymore. It's like a guest bedroom. And we stay here for a couple of months, um, just to sort of settle.

Actually, we've been doing a lot of traveling because we've been doing a lot of house sitting. So it's still not fully grounded, but it is definitely enough. But from all these different experiences of Um, I've been living in a car and camping to live out of a backpack and hostels and Airbnbs in Europe.

There's some really beautiful things that I've learned that can really help us with our marketing. So the first one is be open to possibilities of change and things never being what you expect. So it's all about rethinking. Thinking expectations. So what happened to us, um, in places like Barcelona, for example, when we were traveling there, I remember the last time I went to Barcelona was 2019.

I was really on a girl's trip, party, drinks, like. So much fun, and I remember when we got to Barcelona, sitting on the beach with my 2 euro mojito, which, who knows what was in it, I didn't see them selling it this time, so, probably illegal now, and I remember sitting there and looking out to the beach, and was just like, oh my god, I'm so Present.

And this is exactly what I want. This is why I'm going to keep working at my business and my side hustle when I get home. This is why I'm going to like quit my full time job. Like this is it. Like I am so excited for the future, but I'm just so grounded and present right now. So I had this visualization of Barcelona, even though my phone got stolen there, I was just in awe of this place.

So I remember talking about it with Mitch over and over and over and being like, Oh my God, you're going to love Barcelona. You're going to love it. It's so good. So when we get this overnight bus to Barcelona, We get off at 6, 5am, 6am, whatever it is. We're so tired. We get a train to near our hostel. We try and find a cafe.

Nothing is open. Our backs are killing us. When we get to the hostel after we've eaten something, we buzz. We leave our bags. The woman was super nice. We go and have breakfast. We come back. We just sit in sort of the kitchen area and do some work. And I think we were able to have a shower. Anyway, when it was 2pm, and Well, just before that, Mitch went up to the woman in Spanish and asked for some questions and she was really rude.

So Mitch was really disappointed and upset by that. And then when we went to check in, we went to line up and she yelled at me in Spanish and I was like, and she speaks English. She wasn't a native Spanish speaker. I don't think, but anyway, she says. go and sit down and I'll call you and Mitch was so upset by this.

So then this sort of started the Barcelona thoughts and then of course like we were a little bit out of town and when we went into town like it was just, it wasn't what I had in mind. pitch put into Mitch's head and it wasn't what I remembered either, so we were a little bit disappointed by this. We had to really reassess our expectations on our travel.

The same thing happened sort of in Morocco. We decided to book one month of um, accommodation and that was, we then had to open up to the possibility of cancelling, cancelling that accommodation, losing our deposit and finding somewhere else because it wasn't quite fit for a whole month of staying. Like it was fine but there was no real air circulation.

Um, we were there on our own most of the time. It was in an area where it wasn't. That's central for what we were looking for. The wifi wasn't great. Um, the kitchen wasn't super clean. Um, which is fine for a couple of nights, but for a whole month it was like, okay, we have lived in our car, but you know, this is probably a little bit out of our comfort zone.

So we had to open up to the possibility of changing that. And then of course living in our car, I never expected to enjoy that. I never expected to love it so much. Right. So there's like the good and the bad of like having this, like not having any expectations when you have. You know, when you have high expectations, you can be disappointed.

When you have no expectations, you can be so surprised. And things were always changing on some of our trips. Like, for example, we were gonna go to the Amalfi Coast. I'd kinda seen some stuff about it being really busy. Um, and then also, Mitch's cousin invited us to a salsa festival in France. So we changed our plans.

Now, if we weren't open to the possibility of change, these would have been really hard things to do. And if we had too many, well, we did have to rethink our expectations after Barcelona, but then also there was things in other countries that surprised us so much. So we created this sort of like expectation ritual at every airport to talk about what we're really grateful for at that space, and then let go expectations of the next place.

Otherwise we would have been really hung up on the. Like the result. Now with our marketing, this can be massive. So numbers, engagement, all of these things, when we are so set on the expectation of, Oh, this is going to do well, this is like thinking and expecting things to go well. This is when it can really hurt us when things don't perform.

Right. And this is all about learning to pivot when things aren't working and doubling down on what does. But remembering things change and evolve. So especially like it's going to be all business in general, but with marketing, we need to iterate all the time. So expecting, you know, um, a type of content that you created five years ago to work now is not always the case.

And then when things aren't working, changing it. But when things are. Doubling down on that, but then also understanding that this will change over time. Things won't always work when they, you know, if something works now and you double down on it, you might exhaust it and then it doesn't work anymore, but that's okay because you have to pivot and move forward.

And when we're open to these possibilities and these things and understanding that nothing is ever permanent, nothing is ever guaranteed to us, then this will really help you with your marketing, especially when it comes to results. And also what works for other people might not work for you. You know, I saw on the Amalfi coast, some influences on this beautiful beach, but then we see those stories where it's like Instagram versus reality.

Right. So really understanding that and not being so. I guess caught up in the result, caught up in this is where I have to do and this is exactly how I do it, will allow things to change and evolve. And this is where things like, you know, speaking with your target audience is really important because, you know, you might have in your head a certain marketing or certain message or how you want your business to be, you know, like How you want things to go.

And then you talk with your audience and your clients, and you actually realize that there's a gap somewhere else. So not being so hung up on thing that you wanted to do, of course, we always like want to do what we're passionate about, but understanding there's other avenues that are going to help our business.

And if, as long as you're passionate about it, you know, go down that Avenue. Like I really wanted to go to the Amalfi coast, but I wasn't like. So passionate about it that I had to do it. If I really, really wanted to do it, I would go, but instead the sales festival ended up being so, so fun. And it's like a highlight and I'll never forget it, but maybe in the Amalfi coast, I could have had the same experience, but it's really, you know, also following what you feel like is right for your business.

But then talking and doing your research and understanding, like I did my research and like people kind of were like, you know, because like. You know, it's good. But, and I was actually looking at a lot of, um, Australian creators because obviously we have really beautiful beaches in Australia. So I wanted to get that kind of thought, but of course I'm so going to go to the Amalfi coast.

I think it's going to be beautiful. But at the time, knowing that things would change and being open to that really helped us get what we wanted out of that trip. And also Mitch got to spend more time with his cousin, which was why we went to Europe, right? So that's point one. Point two is about being present.

So have things in place to help with this level of presence. So if you want to do things or if you want to change things like what happened to us, then you have things in place to be able to do that. So managing work and travel, managing changes like that Airbnb, or what happened to us in, um, Morocco is we realized that we couldn't take our drone to Morocco and We found this out 9 p.

m. before our 8 a. m. flight or something ridiculous, like, but we would have had to be at the airport 3 hours before. So, for us, if we, like, we just had to take a breath. Be present and work out a solution from there. We weren't going to be able to work out a solution from being like from emotion. So I think I took a shower.

I think we had dinner and I'm like, okay, what are we going to do? It was just so lucky that we knew someone in Toulouse where we were in France. We could give them the drone. They could mail it to a friend. Uh, mail it to Mitch's Cousin. Happy days. Having that level of presence allowed us to navigate through the challenges that happened when we were traveling.

But of course, we made decisions off of emotion. Didn't end well. So, that reminder of being present is really helpful. When traveling and we're navigating the work that we had to do. We get somewhere, we get somewhere at 3, 3 p. m. We've got so much on the to do list. Okay. Take a breath, be present one task at a time.

Otherwise nothing's going to get done. The same thing in business. If you have a strategy, a plan, a foundation with your marketing, your content, your business, then You know where things can go wrong, and you're able to be present and fix them in a calm way. If you don't have a strategy, a plan, the foundations, you're then like, where do I even begin?

So for example, like in content marketing, perfect example with this. If I have a podcast planned, and like this one actually wasn't meant to go out at this time, so hear me out, I'll tell this story as well. So, I had a plan for my podcast, I knew what episodes were going to go out, I went out to the guests, I scheduled them in.

I had one guest scheduled like a month before the podcast was set to come out. Plenty of time. She unfortunately had to cancel until The future after that episode was meant to go out. So I have a strategy. I have a plan. I look at my episodes. I switch things around because I had a plan and a strategy. It was easy for me to switch things.

And then I decided to change this episode with another one. And sort of make it flow from there. If I had no plan, no strategy, I was relying on that person to come on that podcast next week. It would have been very stressful and I would have just created something for the sake of it. It wouldn't have been of good quality and it wouldn't have been in a level of presence.

There would have been no energy put into it and you would have been like, ah, that was a pretty garbage episode. So you can see where having a strategy and a plan can help with that presence. What happened with us with that sort of traveling is With the planning side of things, we could, like, if we weren't present, we couldn't sit down and look at our itinerary.

Okay, we're going to Austria. We do have that planned. We know someone in France. Like, obviously that having someone in France was luck, but we could have gone out and posted it. We could have, you know, made, you know, gone to Antarska and found someone to post it. But if we didn't know, like, have that plan of kind of knowing where we were gonna be, Then we wouldn't have been able to execute that, right?

So that's number two. Now let's go into three. So the third one is around perfectionism and learning to trust yourself. So as you've seen, a common theme, things didn't really go to plan how we wanted when we traveled, right? Like there was places we didn't get to go to. There was things that we didn't get to do.

Um, there was times where we had to prioritize work over travel and travel over work, vice versa. But when, like, I trust us so much when we travel, I trust us with our judgments, our money, our decisions to go places, things that we're going to do. Cause they all happen as they should. Right. For example, with the salsa going to salsa, we've got to spend amazing time with Mitch's cousin.

I got to practice more salsa. I got to practice more Spanish because we're going to go to Columbia. So that really worked out in our favor. And we also saved some money. Um, our decision to go to Morocco to spend a month there really helped us. And we really trusted that was going to be fine, even though we'd never been there before, we didn't do much research before.

We just really trusted that that was going to be okay. And the perfect holiday or perfect trip. Wasn't a holiday. The perfect trip and journey. It was whatever we did. It wasn't going to be, you know, if we made sure we, we had to go to the Louvre or, you know, if we didn't go to the Amalfi coast, it wasn't going to be this Instagram perfect holiday.

Like, of course there was times where like, I wish we did that, but we trusted that what we chose was amazing. We actually decided to go to Austria for a little longer than we just, we had planned. And we trusted that that was going to be a really good decision for us. Siemicz's cousin and Austria was one of our favorite places, but it was never in the plan.

Right? So we really trusted our judgment with this. And in the end, if it didn't work out how we wanted, it was what was needed. And this is the same thing with our content, especially with perfectionism, right? If you want to do a certain podcast episode, a certain reel, you want to use a certain trend, and it doesn't go how you want it, posting it how it is, is beautiful.

Because you just trust that the message is going to get there. You know, I've had clients that do the transitions and things and it's not perfect. But actually one client that did this transition that just did not work at all. It related to the post because it was about imperfect action. Beautiful out all worked out together, right?

So you can shift things, shuffle things and have a message behind why it didn't work. And actually that's what makes it unique and different. What made our trip unique and different is we did go to different places that we would never have gone to. You know, Austria isn't always like the big. Countries that everyone goes to, or you to Toulouse in France, or we went to Frankfurt in Germany.

Not the big highlight places that everyone would go, but they were needed to go. Like we stayed in Frankfurt. We got to go to Heidelberg. A friend was in Heidelberg that we'd met in Australia. We got to catch up with him. Like there's always these reasons why these things happen. If you learn to trust yourself and the whole perfectionism thing, like.

Imperfection of your content is what makes it unique. So roll with that, run with that. So they were my three big lessons being open to possibilities and changes and never. You know, rethink expectations, be present and trust yourself and let go of that perfectionism. And these are big ones in content marketing and creation, especially because it is such a creative process.

So we need to be present. We need to be open to change. We need to lose expectation and then just roll with the lack of perfection and learn to trust ourselves. So, go back, what happened with all of our travels? Now you've heard some amazing stories, but things that got to happen on this journey is, you know, getting off that hamster wheel, creating in my, like, I'm so creative when I travel, you know, we got to go to Uluru and I just like switched my phone on airplane mode for the whole weekend.

We're flying out on a Tuesday to go to South America, whilst yes, there are times where I'm like, okay. I'm not sure how I feel about this, but I'm going to navigate it, but I'm going to trust because I have, I'm going to trust myself. I have the foundations. I have the strategy in place and I can absolutely do this.

Travel was one of the best things I did for my business because it allowed me to learn all of these things that I had kind of lost along the way. You know, learning to trust myself, a big one and being in that creative space. So whenever we have an intention or something that we want to do, really trusting that, you know, you really will get the creative energy out of that.

And that's like space, you know, lots of amazing entrepreneurs talk about this. Creating space. We have a podcast episode on this. I'll. link in the show notes, but really creating space for ourselves is where the magic happens. But really, the common theme was really having this strategy and plan. And it doesn't mean like the strategy and plan with our travels wasn't knowing what we're going to do for the next three months.

It was sort of having this plan, iterating and growing with the plan. That's where strategy comes in. Having a strategy in anything we do in life is, is key. Um, but when it comes to things that consume your time and your energy, they really do help you and then adapt and grow from there. So we have so many fun episodes coming up in this series of round the world in 90 days.

And this was just my own personal experience in the anniversary of traveling full time for 12 months. We have some incredible guests coming up to really set the stage for you. But I really wanted to lay the groundwork first and talk about my own experiences before I bring people in to share theirs. So we have, um, PR even in the mix.

We've got, um, an episode about, you know, creating content in other spaces on earned channels. We have Instagram for 2024, Facebook for 2024. We have stuff about branding and design. Uh, marketing, campaigns, all sorts of things. So be a content queen or king and remember that developing your strategy and story develops your business.

Thank you so much for joining me on this flight, stamp your passport and please don't forget to share this with all your business and entrepreneurial friends. or your travel buddies. You can do this by adding it to your insta stories and tagging me at contentqueenmariah or to simply tell them about it.

I'd love to know your key takeaways so make sure you reach out or you can pop them in the review below. You can comment on this episode on Spotify or leave a rating and review on Apple iTunes. I'll love you forever because this will help me get more guests and really expand this content. Follow me on Instagram and TikTok.

Let me know if there's any topics you want me to talk about in 2024. I'd love to cover them for you. Wish me luck on my flight and I will see you next. I'll be joining you from Columbia.

PodcastMariah MacInnesmarketing, marketing advice, how to be authentic online, business ownerComment