In March and April I lost all my freelance work (because of Covid) and so began putting every hour of every day into writing content for my travel blog instead.

This is the 2020 traffic for my main site, and traffic is currently doubling month on month.

I was in such a shit place emotionally in March and April, as were most freelancers who lost their work.

Luckily I had enough savings (money I had held back from last year) to support me financially.

And I had @paddymoogan (and my dog) to support me emotionally.

Anyway...

Focusing on 'the future' and building content for my websites is what got me out of that big hole of despair and stopped me feeling sorry for myself.

I essentially became the yoda of keyword research and have a new addicition to @ahrefs.

Side note: Yoda is also a great visual representation of my appearance during lockdown.

"Wear makeup and do hair, you must not"

At times, it did feel weird writing travel content in a world where the travel industry was shutting down.

But I'm ever the optimist, so even if I knew no one would want / need to read the post for 12 months (maybe more), I still wrote it.

I also built some new websites (alongside adding to my existing travel site) - and those are now making money from affiliates too, which is really cool.

It gave me something to do, a purpose, and gave me a focus when client work wasn't 'a thing' anymore.

And I really didn't know when client work would become 'a thing' again.

I had no idea when any freelance work would return, especially as I work primarily with hospitality brands & small businesses.

I needed to just blindly trust my instinct that I was doing the right thing.

Worth mentioning - the other new sites I set up were as far from travel as I could think of, just to be safe.

I'm an optimist, sure, but also wanted to be sensible where possible. I also now know about some super random niches, which did me well in lockdown zoom quizzes.

Next year, if I can carry on along this trajectory, my 'side projects' might make enough income, to justify being my full time thing, which has always been my goal and seems to be actually possible now.

So I guess, even though lockdown sucked, and 2020 has been the most fucking awful year ever, something good came out of it for me, which I guess I wanted to reflect on.

There's just no way I would have had the time to prioritise my own side projects like this otherwise.

I feel like I need to give a takeaway from this, for this tweet thread to be actually useful.

So basically, if there's a thing you keep putting off, or don't have time to do, try and do it. Because in 6 months (give or take) you'll be super chuffed you did.

If you read all of this, here's a photo of my dog to say thanks.