Late-blooming Adventure Bloggers Coleman Concierge

Ed and Jennifer Coleman of the Coleman Concierge travel blog are trying to give it their all when they are on the move and share “amazing adventures for ordinary people” to inspire others to get out and explore. They split the duties between them as a couple. I caught up with them at the first TBEX conference in two and a half years, in Washington State, to get their story.

There’s an image in the popular media–partly driven by Instagram–that travel bloggers are young, beautiful, and bopping around the world as nomad. Those of us actually making a living at this pursuit know it’s a different story in the real world. Many of us are on our second, third, or fourth career when things start to click and our travel blog begins earning real money to bank.

Such is the case with Ed and Jenn of Coleman Concierge.

What else have you done for a living before becoming travel bloggers?

Jenn – I came from outdoor recreation, working as a ski instructor and ski patrol for 20 years (including Copper Mountain, Alta, Mt. Bachelor, Whitefish) and also worked in whitewater rafting for 7 years. I was going to become a helicopter skiing guide but bad genetics got in the way. When I found out I was going to have to have both knees replaced I pivoted to personal training, fitness, massage therapy, and became a concierge at 5-star hotels.

Ed – I studied physics and became a rocket scientist with missiles and radar. I still work at that, three weeks out of four each month.

How did you get started running a travel blog?

Ed – We got married in Tucson, Arizona and my conditions were that I had to have a short road to getting out of corporate America and we had to get out of Tucson. I worked out a job move to San Diego and while we were there, Jenn went up to the Women in Travel Summit when it was in Irvine, CA. She came back going, “Honey, this is a real thing! We could actually make money from travel blogging!”

Jenn – That conference really blew my mind. By the end I had our website name, what our core values were, and who we wanted to speak to. Then we spent about a month researching how to build websites and learned all the things we needed to know. We had a friend who had a ski condo in Durango, Colorado and he let us use it during “mud season” when it wouldn’t be rented anyway. We took those two weeks and just hammered it out: got the design done, created content, set up social accounts, etc. The rest is history.

How long did it take you to start getting traction and start earning any income from the blog?

That’s hard to answer as it’s still a work in progress. There’s still a lot of uneasiness and FOMO with us. When I was a massage therapist it was so rewarding because people would tell me, “Wow, that was the best massage of my life!” on a regular basis. I was always getting these “attagirl” reinforcements. With blogging, you have months on end where you feel like you’re just pissing in the wind.

You wonder, “Is anyone listening? Is anyone caring?” Then all of a sudden something will hit and it feels amazing and it makes it all worth it. It’s so gratifying when some reader e-mails us saying they used our post or YouTube video to plan their trip and it worked out great.

How do you monetize your work?

It’s a mix of income streams: ad network, affiliate marketing, and a bunch of influencer networks and agencies we belong to, including your 360 Degree Travel Network. Oddly enough, we have taken part in a few research studies where companies have found us on social media.

We do the odd sponsored post or campaign here and there. Oddly enough, I did a social campaign with Zimmer Bionet artificial knee replacement company and it wasn’t very big but the reach was incredible, especially in the comments on Facebook.

Now you’re based in Huntsville, Alabama. How did that come about?

Ed – After San Diego we moved to Orlando, Florida because I got a job offer there with a great salary and Jenn was able to quit working three jobs like she was in San Diego and go full-time on the travel blogging after that. We never really liked Orlando and its traffic though and my job situation was a bad corporate fit. So we started looking for a place where we could make the numbers work as the blog grew and earned more. We visited Huntsville when the TBEX conference was hosted there and really liked the set-up there, how close we could be to biking trails and the outdoors–in a high-tech job area.

One of the tourism people in place at the time of TBEX introduced me to a recruiter for a company there and I sent out a bunch more resumés on top of that. It happened quickly after that and now Huntsville is our base.

What are your plans moving forward as content creators?

Ed – I’m planning to retire at 55 and we’ll both work on the blog full-time. Ideally we’d like to do longer, dedicated campaigns in a place so we can really get to know it. We’d like to spend enough time in a place to become real experts on the area, which you can’t do on a quick press trip. I think that takes one to three months in an area to do in-depth posts, e-books, videos and other offshoots.

Then it takes another few months on the back end to process all the research and get the content finished. So in between we’d like to spend three to six months more living somewhere as location-independent workers, somewhere that allows you to stay that long while you’re getting the work done.

Jenn – We would also like to focus on less-developed areas, places like Madagascar that could really use the help in tourism development, where we could help economies that could prosper from tourism but don’t have the knowledge or experience to create a digital presence. Places that are really putting that money into the hands of local residents.

Any advice for new bloggers, based on your experience?

Ed – The most important advice we have for new bloggers is to really establish your core values and to have a plan for how you’re going to show up and pitch, how you’re going to grow your readership. What is the structure, what are the silos? Know who you are and be true to it, then balance that with the time you have.

Jenn – And get started, now! The Google Sandbox is a real thing. Just launch your website and build your content. Start everything right away and then build and improve later.

Ed – Perfection is the enemy of good. Our first two years of blog content were horrible, but hardly anyone was reading it in the beginning anyway. The content got out there and got indexed, getting us rolling.

Jenn, out of all the places you lived as a ski instructor and patrol person, which one did you like the best from a lifestyle standpoint?

I’m a chronic non-repeater, so the only thing I’ve repeated is years with my husband. But if I could pick any place to live and retire in, it would be Whitefish, Montana. That’s the place that has my heart.

Jenn and Ed Coleman run adventure travel blog Coleman Concierge, focusing on sharing the joy of learning and discovery. See their blog here and follow them on Instagram, Pinterest, Facebook, or Twitter.