Travel Yourself

For Cailin O’Neil, the travel bug hit early in life.

“Growing up, my mother worked for a major airline company,” she explains. “So I was able to travel a lot more than other people.”

The traveling continued into adulthood when she started working professionally in the film and TV industry. Thanks to her irregular schedule with weeks or even months between gigs, Cailin was able to take long trips, including a two-week tour across Europe by bus. On that Euro trip, she met a group of Australian friends, who she then visited on subsequent trips to Australia.

“My parents were always wondering what I was doing on these trips,” says Cailin. “So I would go to internet cafes on my trips and create a little blog where I could update my parents with what I was doing.”

No, her blog posts on Travel Yourself weren’t elaborate. She might write a few sentences about eating vegemite (which she wouldn’t recommend). But these posts got her in the habit of writing about her travels. Plus, it connected her to the larger world of travel bloggers. Soon she was befriending these bloggers and learning from them.

“We slowly started making our sites better and began to realize there was a business to all of this and money to be made,” says Cailin.

It was convenient that Cailin had recently attended a blogger conference where many colleagues said they were embracing hyper-local content. Instead of documenting their far-flung travels, more creators were making blogs focused on their hometown.

So in July 2020, Cailin started posting on Nova Scotia Explorer and monetized with Journey by Mediavine. After years of globe-trotting, Cailin would turn her focus to her own backyard.

“Nova Scotia is not very big at all but there were places I'd never been because everyone thinks home will always be there and you can always explore that another time,” says Cailin. “I loved that I finally got to explore places I'd never been before and never even heard of.”

“It just kind of took off from there and I had a lot of PR around it,” she says. “So I was on the news and I had a lot of people coming to the site and then just started creating a lot of Nova Scotia content.”

In fact, the blog is so popular that Cailin regularly gets recognized around Nova Scotia.

“Half the time I get people looking at me like they know me from somewhere but can't pinpoint from where or might be too shy to say something,” says Cailin.

With the pandemic in the rearview, Cailin has resumed her international travel. Today, she faces a challenge she never expected: balancing content creation on two popular blogs. It’s not an easy balance, but all the experience she’s built up since 2009 has made it easier.

And that might be what Cailin is proudest of: just sticking with these content efforts for so long. Along the way, there have been plenty of curveballs. The digital content ecosystem is always changing. New social networks are always popping up. And, yes, the pandemic came along out of nowhere and made things very difficult for travel bloggers big and small.

But if traveling has taught Cailin anything, it’s that you can’t plan ahead for everything. Oftentimes, these unexpected moments give you a chance to think outside the box and embrace spontaneity.

“That’s why you can’t plan everything to a T on a trip,” advises Cailin. “Leave some room for happy accidents — because you never know what will happen or who you’ll meet along the way. So just have fun with it.”