There are three things you should know about me right off the bat:
1) I love to travel
2) I do not have a trust fund nor am rich
3) I am in my twenties
It’s important to know this about me because when I started The Pin the Map Project, I had nothing more than an unwavering determination to go from a 9-5 job in advertising to a full-time career of travel writing & blogging. After living in New York City for 4 years, I felt I had spent one too many days chained to a desk dreaming about all the things I could be doing with my time instead. I tried on careers like hats as I moved from public relations to advertising to marketing; always starting each job with the highest of hopes that I had finally landed my perfect job. Eventually, I grew frustrating as each “dream job” seemed to fizzle and fade into monotony and frustration; making me realize that applying for yet another 1-year stint at a company maybe wasn’t the answer. I decided then that if I couldn’t find my perfect career, I’d create it and so I pressed publish on my first blog post of the The Pin the Map Project.
When I started my website, my world had become inundated with blog posts and articles of how other travel bloggers had become successful in their work. Ultimately inspired by a gift I received-a National Geographic pushpin map inscribed with the quote “to travel is to live”-I wanted to create a project for myself to add more pins to my map and prioritize seeing the world. I devoured tips and tricks to mastering the art of blogging, building traffic and increasing engagement until I realized that my speed date of jobs in PR, advertising and marketing had left me with 3 extremely valuable tools: how to market myself, how to work with advertisers and how to grow my brand. I began building The Pin the Map Project from scratch-taking notice of what worked for other bloggers and using what I had been paid to do to grow the following of my own budding travel site.
Since I started this website a little over a year ago, I have been on assignment to Colombia, had a life changing experience solo traveling to Argentina and Uruguay, reviewed various hotels in London and Paris, attended press trips to New Orleans and Miami, learned about indigenous tribes in Panama and am soon headed on assignment (solo!) to Morocco and Vietnam on behalf of travel companies. Becoming a travel blogger opened my world and not only gave me the priceless gift of travel but taught me the countless ways to make travel affordable now even as a twenty-something woman struggling to make ends meet in New York City. My passion project of travel writing grew into the online destination it is today reaching thousands of readers each month that continue to encourage my work. Let this website be a testament to the fact that if I can grow this website from a readership of just my parents, then anyone with a passion for travel and knack for writing can do the same.
So to the dreamers and artists, the writers and renegades, to the ones sitting at their desks dreaming of traveling, to the ones waiting for a flight home and wondering when their next adventure will be; The Pin the Map Project is for you. The pages of this website are filled with stories and advice, tips and tricks to saving on travel, discovering destinations and starting your own travel blog-in hopes of inspiring you to see the world one pin at a time!
