Introduction
Like I mentioned in a previous article, I wanted to adopt MrBeast‘s tactic of finding a group of beginners to have mastermind meetings with. I thought to myself what a brilliant and more enjoyable way to work instead of grinding alone. If it worked for him, then it can work for arguably any aspiring content creator (not necessarily a YouTuber). For all I know, it could also work for anything in life. Still not convinced? Let me explain down below why you should be…
How Life-Changing It Can Be (In Theory)
I am an absolute noob at blogging having begun six months ago. I never succeeded at content creation and I never had any successful entrepreneurial ventures before. So far, I wrote and published 71 articles on my own. I did everything myself and manually such as: translating articles, designing the logo , editing and proofreading, taking pictures, filming and editing videos, etc. My travel blog has no traffic, almost all of my videos got less than 30 views (only one got 1000 on Instagram). I only have 3 YouTube subscribers and 1 Facebook follower as I am writing this. I have been doing all of this anonymously and I am completely self-taught through online resources.
If I were to meet with another travel blogger in the same shoes and with the same following goals:
- To earn a living through blogging and content creation
- To travel indefinitely no matter where and when
- To achieve any financial goals no matter where
Then we could effectively cut in half the amount of time it would take us to achieve those goals by having mastermind meetings. During such meetings, we would discuss our mistakes, work methods, progress and formulate proper action items for each other at the end. It is true we can find answers on the Internet, but they are not as useful, because they do not always apply to our specific situations (especially as beginners). Assuming we both start at the same level, we could rack up twice the amount of experience and within a year, hypothetically, we would be two years ahead of someone working alone. Most articles out there that cover timelines of blog success cases ALL mention that it will realistically take 10 years for anyone to earn a comfortable living through travel blogging. Many of them even mentioned that you should not expect to make any money for the first 3 years 😰. However, hard and consistent work paired with the mastermind meetings can shorten that 3 years into 1.5 years provided we all stick around for that long. If done within a span of 3 years (which is ambitious, but still somewhat doable if all the group members want it badly) we can shrink that decade-long success within that timeframe. I don’t know about you, but I would much rather succeed in 3 years instead 10.
My Initial Noob Approach
Three weeks ago, as soon as I decided to look for early travel bloggers, I asked myself the question: “What would an idiot do?” The immediate FIRST thing that came to my mind was to write a relatively long post detailing how I was looking for people. It is still out there if anyone wants to read it. Afterwards, I copied that same post and shared it on Instagram, because I thought more people would see it.
I then changed my entire blog home page into that message so that it could be the first thing people would see if they ever landed on it. After discovering that some of my videos got more views on Facebook than on YouTube and Instagram combined, I decided to create a Facebook group just to try. With all of these four things put in place, I continued working on my blog while waiting for people to reply. Two weeks went by and nobody still replied nor viewed any of them. To be honest, I almost gave up completely on finding people after that experience. However, I realized that ,fundamentally, my strategy to find them was wrong and not the act of finding them itself. I figured it was delusional to wait longer than two weeks for someone to reply. With these unsuccessful approaches, I read several online articles about how other people did it and all of them recommended joining Facebook groups. When I say that all of the articles I have read mentioned that, I really mean it. Now, on Facebook, I had a lot of options. I could either:
- Join private groups and message people on them
- Join public groups and message people on them
- Search random people and cold message them (ones that had “Travel blogger” as their profile descriptions)
I decided to join public Facebook groups with lots of members and not private ones (more on that below). To find them, I typed the following keywords on the search bar: “Travel bloggers, digital nomads, work and travel, online traveler network.” After finding five large enough ones, I made five public posts on all of them with the exact same, but shorter message than on my YouTube and Instagram ones. I kept working on my blog while waiting another week for a reply.
What Happened After My Public Posts?
To be honest, because of my horrible first experience, I thought nobody would reply. To my surprise after one week, one guy messaged me back saying he was interested (that was bonkers!!). We successfully had one online meeting together and it seemed promising. After that experience, I was now convinced that Facebook was the best way to find people. Had I done that from the very beginning, I could have saved myself two weeks, which was crazy to imagine. Afterwards, I thought to myself: “Since I can speak French, why not just make those same posts on Facebook groups for francophones?” After doing that on two other groups, one girl messaged me back one day later and we had another successful meeting together. Afterwards, I directly messaged two other people on groups I found and they replied back to me and right now, I am working on scheduling some meetings with them. So far, the two meetings I had have been very beneficial. I don’t know for sure if the two people I found will stick around long enough until we succeed, because it is still very early, but I am betting on the fact that they will. To be honest, I will never blame them for a lack of commitment, because I have no control over their lives, but I can always focus on my blog and message them back once in a while. Because of those two positive experiences, I then made seven new public posts on seven new public Facebook groups and I am keeping an eye out for those. I am also considering attending online or in-person networking events to meet early travel bloggers. Fingers crossed more people will join me along the way 🤞.
Are My Online Meetings Really Worth It?
100% yes . Even if I did not achieve any of the previously stated goals to serve as an undisputable and tangible proof, I am still a big believer of it. One benefit I got from the girl was that she would be willing to connect me with people she knew with similar projects. Another benefit I got from meeting the first guy was that he introduced me to Canva to make better YouTube thumbnails (I might try Google slides someday too). Small details like these might not seem like big deals, but they add up over time and you certainly always learn new stuff from each other. Once you find someone, even if they are not willing to meet with you frequently, you can always ask them to refer you to someone else who would or tap into their profiles to cold message relevant people from their networks. You can even ask them questions from time to time once you established some trust between each other. There is always something you can get from online meetings with like-minded people as long as you are relentlessly resourceful and motivated.
Before You Look For Early Travel Bloggers…
It might sound like a flawless strategy, but there is a catch to it. For it to work properly, all members (including you) need to be hard working, fully committed and willing to contribute to each other’s successes in any way possible (even the tips and feedback with good intentions that aren’t 100% useful are better than nothing). Without those, it will feel like one person is helping the other unfairly more. Having online meetings with strangers online is a bit of a surreal thing to begin with, but if people are willing to go out of their way during the week, reply to you, schedule meetings with you and actually meet with you, chances are they are good enough fit. I did not hesitate to do it and it did not feel odd to me at all, because that’s how badly I wanted to succeed. Don’t overthink it too much and just do it. I can’t guarantee you that every meetings will always go perfectly, but they are still better than working alone. The good news is that all members will improve on being more productive over time. Now, I want to remind you that my approach was to ask myself: “What would an idiot do to find early travel bloggers?” Theoretically, you could follow this same approach and figure it out through trial and error, but based on my experience and mistakes here is what I have to suggest.
First of all, to have the best mastermind meetings as possible, you imperatively need to have the following three points in common:
- Occupation (in my case: travel blogging + content creation)
- Short-term goals (in my case: publishing articles and content + growing a following + getting website traffic + lifestyle of traveling simultaneously + learning Spanish)
- Big vision/North Star (in my case: earning a living from blogging and content creation + achieve any financial life goals)
As you might have guessed already, you will need to assemble a group of somewhat remarkable people. That being said, the three previous commonalities are so important, because they will dictate if the conversations you will have will be relevant and worthwhile to all parties. You need to make these clear in your first meeting with them. Nothing speeds progress better than a string sense of direction.
For the rest, it is okay to have diversity in other areas such as in:
- Locations
- Experiences
- Skillsets
- Backgrounds & Back-stories (educational, previous jobs, talents, etc.)
Don’t worry too much about these differences though, because as humans, you will realize that we are are much more similar than we are different. The reason why you need diversity in these sorts of areas is, because you need to know what the other person is predisposed with. It is important, because it will widen your own perspectives and ideas. (For example, that it is possible to achieve your dreams no matter the kinds of disadvantages) On your own, you would be limited by the ideas in your head and eventually you will drain them before you realize it. In addition, you will have a lot of false assumptions about your work based on what you’ve read or heard that will lead you astray. Working with the right person will help you snap out of those faster, because they will enlighten you on stuff that you overlooked and they will highlight your blind spots. To give you a concrete example, the girl I had a meeting with has already launched many successful online businesses over the span of three years. In our recent meeting, she told me that she started to get into content creation. She came from Morocco and has been to many more countries than me . Before all of that, she graduate with a bachelor’s degree in industrial engineering and she had worked for 4 years as a logistical engineer. Now that is quite the profile of someone drastically different from me. Her breadth of experiences and skillsets was so wide that by simply knowing more about me, she knew exactly the kind of work that I was into and how to best collaborate together given our mutual goals. A girl who grew up in Morocco ,studied Industrial Engineering and who succeeded with online businesses taught a lot to a guy who grew up in Canada with a different life path. That’s the beauty of diversity.
Where To Find Early Travel Bloggers?
To find content creators and more specifically travel bloggers, my recommendation is to use Facebook. I tried finding them on YouTube (you might find it funny that I did, but yes that’s true), Instagram and through my blog, but none of those worked. Facebook has by far the most powerful network effect when it comes to attracting travel bloggers. Once you log into it, you have to search for groups by typing the following keywords or variations of them:
- Travel bloggers
- Digital nomads
- Travel blogger network
- Network of bloggers
- etc. (whatever related keywords you can think of)
You will immediately stumble on public and private ones. To my knowledge and after my own extensive research, there is arguably no such thing as a Facebook group called “Early travel bloggers who want to have mastermind meetings together”, because it is too niched down. There is nothing wrong with niche groups, but for the purpose of finding a crew to meet with frequently, in my opinion, they are not ideal. I also tried finding niche groups on LinkedIn for early travel bloggers, but a lot of them have been unresponsive for many years. Even if you do find such group, most likely, it will be inactive with only like 20 members, because they either achieved their goals or stopped working altogether. If you find a group with a last post published one year ago and with a last member joined a year ago, don’t bother with it. Make sure it has a somewhat constant inflow of members and posts. Beware of groups that remain active, but were abandoned by their respective administrators. Even though they have lots of members and posts, people are mostly sharing random unrelated stuff like someone selling their cat or something. Most large groups are purposely left generic to include as many people as possible with miscellaneous goals, problems and walks of life. Just make sure that they have enough members on them so that enough people can see your posts and potentially reply. I avoided the private ones, because I found them to be too restrictive and exclusive. Most of them wanted me to perform tasks for their administrators which quite frankly, were useless (before joining and once joined). If you are an early blogger or content creator, your primary goal is to succeed with your projects while traveling. No need to abide to random private Facebook groups that will pressure you to come back frequently and do stuff for them or else they will kick you out. Everything you will do for them will be fake progress while getting back what in return? 2 or 3 pageviews and no one to actually meet with? what a waste.
How To Find People
It all boils down to the fact that you NEED to put yourself out there publicly.
Once you joined the right public Facebook groups, you have to write a public post mentioning what you are looking for or need help with. There is no perfect template, but just to give mine as an example, it looked like this:
Anyone who started their travel blogs this year and who is interested in joining forces? I started mine in April and I have been working on it intensely since then, but I am looking for other serious travel bloggers to have online meetings with once a week to share our work and mistakes until we succeed.
DM me if interested
PS: Admin (or anyone), feel free to delete if this kind of post is not allowed or something.
Make sure your message is short, simple and straightforward so that people know EXACTLY what you are looking for.
After spreading it across several Facebook groups (at least 5), you now honestly have to wait until someone replies. This may take two days, a week, a month, who knows, but to put it bluntly, you don’t have any control over that. In my case, it took one week for one guy to reply and during the following month no one else reached out to me from these same posts (they disappeared into the void). MEANWHILE, keep looking for other groups and post your messages on them as well. Another thing you can do is search for posts similar to yours anywhere ideally written within the same year and message directly the people who wrote them. For example, if you stumble on posts that say stuff like:
“I launched my travel blog, please check it out.”
“I decided to pursue my dream of becoming a travel blogger.”
“Hey everyone, I want to become a travel blogger.”
“One month ago, I decided to follow my dreams of traveling and blogging”
(and several other variations of these)
Chances are, these people are at the same level as you. Again, there is no guarantee they will reply back, but you gotta take chances nonetheless. If you still can’t find anybody after doing everything I mentioned over the course of one month, my advice then would be to repeat the process once a week at least (with maybe some tweaks in your messages) while reaching out to people you come across in real-life during your traveling experiences. Let these people know you are a travel blogger looking for early travel bloggers specifically. It would work best if you go to places where they are most likely to gather (like special conferences or popular destinations). While actively looking for them, NEVER STOP WORKING on your blog to the best of your abilities while learning online. If you try everything I have just explained consistently and you persist, it is almost certain that you will find at least one person. Don’t worry about the stuff you can’t control such as anticipating a reply, worrying that someone will think your message is stupid, worrying that someone will say no to you or whatever negative reactions it might cause from people. The one person who will GET IT will unlock another door for you to many others and you can keep growing from there. You can do this!
(As a sidenote, if Facebook never worked for you, but something else did like Reddit, Quora or some place like that, then more power to you and hit me up on how you did it!)
Bonus Tip
One thing I avoided on purpose was cold messaging successful people who are well-established with 5+ years of experience in travel blogging (or famous people for that matter). When trying to contact them, a majority redirected me to their coaching services or courses. I realized that they are too successful to even bother reading cold messages from unknown people. I had plans of writing articles for them, following, liking or sharing their channels to show appreciation, but I would rather redirect that time into my own work and finding people like me instead. I don’t like waiting after people to make progress that’s one thing about me. More successful people have built networks for themselves with successful life playbooks and so replying to cold messages are the least of their concerns. As unfortunate as it sounds, it is the cold hard truth. They can walk away much more easily from people like you and me than we would from them.
Important Conclusion
In hindsight, yes I could easily say that I should have looked for people as soon as I started, BUT I always think it is better to start something on your own and be self-motivated. It is the only test to know if you can carry on with the necessary hard work, because nobody else can do it for you. Have a feel for the craft and really try to understand if you enjoy the daily labour or not EVEN when no one else is around to motivate or mentor you. If you wait after someone before doing anything, you will never get anywhere. Once you discover an interest or a passion for it then you should without any hesitation look for like-minded people who will push you. Just remember, they are only there to polish you and not define you.
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