We hope you all had a productive and memorable October 2017! We sure had an extremely busy and productive month. Now that we’re on to November, we are one month closer to our scheduled full-time travel adventure departure in June 2018!
Here’s what we were up to this month:
Santi’s Birthday
Our little boy young man turned 5 years old this month! It’s been such a pleasure watching him develop from a chunky monkey baby to a smart and hilarious boy. Although Santi has never preferred large birthday parties, we were still able to convince him to have one and invite his closest friends and family. We had a joint birthday party with his best friend Ben (they were born 5 days apart) at Little Monkey Bizness, where Santi was able to play with his friends for an hour, and then celebrate by eating pizza and cake. For us parents, we were delighted to not have to set up and clean up a huge mess at the end of the day, haha!
The weekend after, Santi was able to keep celebrating his birthday (thanks to Nana and Ampa) by going to the Great Wolf Lodge, an indoor water park resort which recently opened here in Colorado Springs. We’ll have more details about this experience in a few weeks since we’re going back in November for a collaboration, so stay tuned!
Our First Giveaway
As we continue to grow our brand, we’re going to try different marketing methods and ways to increase not only the value that we provide, but the engagement and sense of community throughout our social media channels. This month we decided to try and see what effect an Instagram giveaway would have on our engagement, and wanted to give away something awesome that we use as well, so we bought a GoPro Hero 5 Session J. We asked for three things: 1) like the Giveaway Post, 2) follow our Instagram account, and 3) tag 3 people in a comment on the post.
To be honest, we didn’t know what to expect in terms of increased engagement. We were hoping that by tagging 3 people on the post, we’d be able to get a lot more people to view the giveaway and our page in general. We ended up getting about 100 entries and new followers into the contest over the 5 days that it was open for. We’re not quite sure yet if the giveaway itself was worth it for the results that we got. However, we are thrilled to see our lucky winner (@valeria8998) use her new GoPro to capture some amazing new memories and share them with us!
Colorado Travel Family Meetup
One of the great things about Instagram (and social media in general) is the ability to find and connect with like-minded travel families that live close to us. We were able to organize a weekend meetup at the Cheyenne Mountain Zoo with 2 other families (@rubioswander and @boldintentionallife). All of us are in different stages of our family travel adventure, so it was great to hear their insights into what works and doesn’t work for each family in terms of planning and adventuring. We were all glad to see that the kids got along really well and they enjoyed seeing the animals together. If you’re a travel family based out of Colorado, feel free to reach out to us at [email protected] so we can include you in our next meetup (which will most likely be somewhere in the Boulder area) coming up!
Facebook Page Launch
As we deliberately plan and launch our social media channels, the Facebook Page was up next. We first started with an Instagram account (which we launched April 2017), a Pinterest board in June 2017, then followed up with our blog and YouTube channel in September 2017. Now we unveiled our Facebook Page in October! Each of our social media accounts serves a different purpose: Instagram for sharing photos and quick videos, our blog as the hub for all of our content (including written content), and YouTube for hosting all of our vlogs. Now, we designed the Facebook page to not only share the content from our other social media accounts, but also to share family travel-related content from other great blogs and media sites that will add value to those that are trying to live out a family adventure!
The last social media channel that we’re planning to roll out in the near future is a Facebook Group. Why have a page and a group, you ask? Well, one of the capabilities that we’re missing is a place for our community to gather and hold valuable discussions, share tips, victories, and plans. The Facebook Page itself isn’t really the best vehicle for that type of community building, so a Facebook Group is the perfect answer. We’re designing the group to be a hub for anyone that is interested in, or currently living out a full (or part) time family travel adventure. Stay tuned for more details on the group launch!
Statistics
This month we’re introducing our new statistics section! Here you’ll be able to see what kind of growth we’ve been seeing on our social media channels and how many collaboration opportunities we’ve worked on. In October, we continued our steady Instagram growth, with almost 1,200 new followers. Our blog had a big bump in visitors, mostly due to sharing some of our posts with some Facebook groups that Jessica is a part of. Finally, it’s not captured on the graphic above, but we started selling our stuff this month and were able to raise $829!
Coming Up Next Month
Next month is shaping up to be a very exciting one! We have a few fun collaborations coming up as well as a Thanksgiving trip to San Diego to visit my family. Finally, we’re going to be laying the groundwork for blog content in 2018 and solidifying our first six months of full-time travel. If you have any other topics that you’re interested to hear about, don’t hesitate to reach out to us! Feel free to leave a comment below. Have a great November everyone!
