Strangely, I am writing this from the same car park in Istanbul – Turkey, as I did for last months post. In fact today is day 64 in our car park, which we are starting to call home, and day 56 self isolating. What strange times we are in, and being self isolated in a 6m van is definitely creating some memories and will make a great story in years to come. As always we like to look on the bright side, and one positive thing that has come from the situation we find ourselves in, is we have spent less than usual as we are not moving or going out. It has also enabled us to spend time doing those things on our to do list, that we never usually get the time to do when we are on the road. Like designing new T-shirts for our online shop.
At this point in time we are still not sure how the world pandemic situation will affect our plans. We are taking it one day at a time, because we really can’t do anything else right now. There is talk that movement will ease in Turkey at the end of May, so hopefully we will be able to move somewhere after that date. We have also heard that the border with Georgia should be opening in June, but we need to make sure that if we can’t then enter Russia, we don’t get stuck in Georgia. As we will have stayed passed the maximum 90 day allowance to stay in Turkey, and would therefore not be allowed back in for 6 months. There is certainly a lot to think about, and in the coming weeks we will be having quite a few detailed discussions about this. We’ll be sure to share these with you.
We hope you are all keeping safe during these difficult times and we send you all clean virtual hugs !
Since being in Istanbul, we have made some wonderful friends and we are constantly blown away by the kindness and generosity of the local people. This is the beauty of travel. The kindness of strangers is very real and even more so during troubled times.
We are VERY grateful to RentnConnect for providing us with free unlimited internet. Self isolation would be a very different experience, without being able to keep ourselves busy online, posting videos and interacting online with family, friends and followers. So again, I would like to say a huge THANK YOU to RentnConnect.
What to expect from future posts
We will continue to share with you our our monthly costs, as we self isolate or continue to travel. When we decided to travel full time, there were very few content creators who shared their finances and social media income openly, so we wanted to be open and honest about our financial journey, as we travel full time. You get to come on all aspects of our adventures with us, and we hope that if you want to do something similar or just understand the costs of certain aspects of our travels, that these posts help with that. Hopefully you get to see how our incomes grow, as we increase our online presence and we will share the journey and decisions with you along the way. There really aren’t many travel vloggers that will share this kind of information with you.
So here is the April income / expenditure report from the road!
April 2020 - INCOME & EXPENDITURE
INCOME
YouTube £122 (Last month £129)
We have seen really good growth on our channel this month with a total of – 150,000 views compared to 85,000 in March. There are a number of reasons for this growth. The longer you produce content the better your content and editing skills are. We continue to push ourselves to learn and try new things, which in turn produces better videos.
(We have found ourselves in an unusual situation during a world pandemic and this creates, ‘how will we cope?’ This in turn, leads to a lot of media attention and we had around 17 interviews for both TV News channels and radio stations, including, BBC, CNN, Reuters, Show TV, ABC Australia, Show TV, Channel 24 etc. We picked up lots of new subscribers, in fact you can see on the screen shot below that we went up a massive 4.4k during April (it was 836 in March). We have been busy translating our videos filmed in Turkey into Turkish, for our new local followers and all of this helps engage with our audience.
What is interesting, that despite such a huge increase in our views our actual income from Youtube has decreased. This is due to the world situation, and the number of companies paying ad revenue at the moment has reduced. We know from speaking to other creators, that this is standard across the platform. The good news is that as the economy improves, then so will our ad revenue and as I write this we are already seeing a small recovery.
So if you are one of the 4.4k new subscribers, then welcome! And to everyone else who has taken the time to watch one of our videos (and the advert), then THANK YOU!, because without you watching the adverts, our revenue would be zero.
Tread Tribe £81.70 (Last month £61.29)
We started the TREAD Tribe, to create a platform for like minded people. It’s a place for those who truly love what we do and want to actually be part of it. We always try to respond to ever comment, message and email that we receive, after all we love talking to everyone. But in reality, as our channel grows we know that it will be hard to keep this up. We are only just keeping up with them now, and that’s whilst we are not travelling and exploring. Once we hit the road we will have even less time. Being part of the TREAD Tribe we give you priority – you basically have more access to us. In fact as well as doing live video hangouts on our TREAD Tribe facebook group, we are offering our Tribe members one to one video calls with us, to help us and you get through this self isolation. Our TREAD Tribe private facebook group is also a great platform for people to chat together and we are so happy that we created such a great group of lovely people.
At the time of this post we have 24 members ( we had 3 new members this month) and if you are one of them we want to say a HUGE THANK YOU, your support and friendship is really appreciated.
There are various levels of membership and in return we offer some added perks for example, access to the TREAD Tribe’s facebook group where we do live chats, and personal TREAD postcards from us on our travel. Membership starts from $1 (£0.76) per month.
For those of you who joined us for the live hangout on our Tribe Facebook group, we really loved chatting to you and answering all of your questions – we’ll do another one soon.
If you would like to know more about the Tread Tribe please
click here
House Rental £1,356 - (Last month £1,356)
It this is your first time reading our finance blog post – this is what makes our travels sustainable. Our house in the UK is rented out longterm and this gives us a more reliable income compared to Youtube and other sources. This month, we are pleased to say that we received the full rental amount and there was no maintenance work needed.
Merchandise Sales £177.54 (Last month £46)
We sell a selection of exclusive TREAD the Globe T-Shirts on our web site. Each T Shirt sold funds us for approximately 40 miles of travel and helps us fund this expedition. We use a print to order service, so we are still able to process orders from the road and we post WORLDWIDE !.
During our time in self isolation, we have spent time creating new designs. We got very creative, so make sure you check out our shop. We are also pleased to announce that we now sell the designs in a variety of different colours and have plans to create more over the coming weeks.
We only released these right at the end of April, but straight away we started getting an increase in orders. This month we generated an income of £177 compared to £46 last month. THANK YOU to everyone who bought one.
If you would like to visit our online shop to check out our exclusive merchandise then please CLICK HERE
