A Look Back
April 10th, 2016 is the day I published my first post on this blog. I was extremely excited to start writing and sharing my story with you guys. Watching the way the blog has grown has exceeded all of my expectations to this point. There are hundreds of new subscribers and followers since the first birthday two years ago and the second birthday last year.
It has been a very fun and eventful three years since the blog began. In the past three years we’ve lived in:
- Dublin, VA
- Fort Chiswell, VA
- Middleboro, MA
- Mansfield, MA
- Fayetteville, NC
- Newport, NC
- Harpers Ferry, WV
- Whittier, NC
- back to Newport, NC
- Hubert, NC
- and finally Fredericksburg, VA
We also semi-retired last year and spent 5 months last year traveling around the world to 11 different countries!
Whitney is caught up writing about our Travel PT adventures in each place we’ve been so far, and we have a ton of articles about our international travels in each place we’ve been, so if you’re interested in what we did in each location, check out those posts! We’ve taken weekend trips all over the east coast from Bar Harbor, Maine all the way down to Savannah, GA. We also took an amazing free vacation to Jamaica back in September of 2016, and I took my brother to Aruba in December of 2017 which was also mostly free with credit card rewards. Credit card rewards were also vital for keeping costs low on our long international trip last year and allowed me to spend only $6,000 in total over a 5 month span traveling!
Financially, I have charted my progress toward financial independence with monthly updates. The stock market has jumped significantly since I first started this blog, which has been very helpful for my net worth, although there have been plenty of ups and downs over the last few years. Stock market gains combined with high paying travel assignments, working overtime when possible, credit card sign up bonuses, and bank account sign up bonuses allowed me to increase my overall net worth massively since finishing physical therapy school in 2015. This has allowed me to go from a broke grad student to semi-retired in only three years! We will be continuing the semi-retirement this year, as I plan to work only 10 weeks this year while we spend another 15 weeks traveling through Europe as well as potentially spending more time out of the country near the end of this year.
We started a new website in 2018 called Travel Therapy Mentor when I decided to move future travel therapy articles to that site while keeping this site for finance articles and more personal blog posts.
Stats
Now let’s look at some blog statistics since inception. The stats from the end of year two will be in [brackets] and the stats from year one in (parentheses) beside the new stats for year three.
Year 3 [Year 2] (Year 1)
- Total posts: 180 [96] (47)
- Total page views: 185,332 [103,529] (26,754)
- Total visitors: 88,476 [53,207] (15,441)
- Total followers: 571 total = 364 WordPress + 207 email [308 last year]
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- I’m also up to 1,367 followers on the Facebook Business page for the blog! [811 last year]
- Most popular post of all time: What is the Pay Difference Travel PT and Permanent PT Jobs? at 12,429 views
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- Coming in second this year is Thinking about Travel PT as a new grad? at 10,594 views
Looking Forward
It’s amazing to see that the page views and visitors have both continued to increase significantly over the past year. That’s even with spending so much time on the new website which is growing quickly as well. Search engine results have driven more traffic to the site despite me not spending nearly as much time on social media marketing compared to the first two years. And, last year this website brought in enough income to cover all of my expenses for the year, which really blew me away!
I have really enjoyed writing on this blog for the past three years. I have had well over a thousand people reach out to me in comments, Facebook messages, and emails. Most of these were people interested in pursuing travel therapy, but I have also gotten questions about finance and student loans which I love to talk about as well.
I appreciate each and every one of you who have read my posts the past three years, and I’d like to give special thanks to those who have taken the extra step to communicate with me individually.
I’m looking forward to next year and hope to continue producing helpful and entertaining content for you guys both on this website and on Travel Therapy Mentor! Whitney and I will be spending more time going to conferences and taking road trips around the country this year and can’t wait to meet more of you guys in person!
Fifth Wheel Physical Therapist 