Three Years Of I'm Just A Girl - Travel & Lifestyle Blog

Last Updated on 16th May 2024

Today’s post marks three years since I first wrote a blog post on I’m Just A Girl. Three years of travel, beauty, lifestyle, blogging and the occasional delve into ~fashion~; it’s been the most insane three years and I really couldn’t be prouder of what this little space on the ‘net has helped me accomplish.

As I did with my one year and two year anniversary, I wanted to commemorate my special day by sharing the best bits of my blogging journey three years in.

It’s been an absolute whirlwind and it doesn’t feel like two minutes since I was writing my two year post, but so much has happened in the last 12 months that it only felt right to contribute a diary-style post to celebrate everything that’s happened.

Thank you for continuing to support the I’m Just A Girl brand; whether you’ve been a reader for three years or three minutes, I’m truly grateful for every single person’s support and I really hope I can continue to share my stories for a long time to come!

Related posts:

One Year of I’m Just A Girl
Two Years of I’m Just A Girl
50 Facts About Me
A Note About Belonging in the Blogging Community

Three years of I’m Just A Girl

Since my two year anniversary last year, my blog has blossomed and developed so much, that it actually allowed me to pursue my freelance travel writing career and travel blog full time and quit my 9-5 day job back in December 2018.

I’ll be totally and utterly transparent here; I will never be one of those people who says “I never expected blogging to become my full-time job” because honestly? I did kind of know.

I don’t mean this in an arrogant or obnoxious way at all and I really hope it doesn’t come across like that, but what I mean is that I always knew I wanted to pursue a writing career so I made myself aware of the steps I needed to take pretty early on.

Of course, when I started I’m Just A Girl back in October 2016, I genuinely had no idea of the kind of direction it’d go in or where it would take me; all I knew is that I really wanted to make a go of it and go after my lifelong dream of becoming a writer with all the passion and determination in the world.

In the last three years, I got a job as a digital marketing apprentice, quit said job as a digital marketing assistant to pursue freelancing and blogging full time, taken on various clients as part of my freelance writing business ‘We Write Your Content‘ and travelled to 17 different countries.

Oh. And I also left everything back home in the UK in April of this year to travel full time around the world with Matt. So far we’ve spent 3 months in New Zealand, 1 month in Australia, 2 months in Indonesia and we’re now making our way around the rest of South East Asia.

I truly believe that if I’d have never started writing on my wordpress.com blog back in October 2016, I wouldn’t be living the life I am now and gaining the most incredible opportunities that I could only ever have dreamed of.

In the last year alone, I’ve been tremendously lucky to work with some of my absolute favourite brands such as Marks and Spencer, Aldi, Osprey, Attraction Tix, Glamping Hub, Escape Rentals and Mad Campers just to name a few.

I also went kind of semi (but not really!) viral back in January 2019 when I mentioned on Twitter that I spent only £13 on my weekly shop. It wasn’t even something that I intentionally planned; I literally wrote The Tweet as I was on my way home from Aldi and so many people resonated with wanting to know how I’d managed it. This then sparked something in me that meant I knew I needed to help people in some way with their budgeting, travelling and life planning!

The opportunities that my travel blog has brought me is something that I can never quite wrap my head around and the fact that I can make a living from two of my greatest passions (three, if you include me sharing my obsession with garlic bread!); travel and writing, is something that I will never, ever take for granted.

Showing up almost every day and working on I’m Just A Girl in some way or another is by no means easy. Many people have the misconception that it’s simply a case of “writing a few hundred words on a website, hitting publish and then pissing about on Instagram for four hours” and while of course that’s a huge part of it, there’s so much more time, effort and resources than you imagine that goes into running a blog.

Related post: Ways To Stay Productive When You Run a Blog & Have a Full Time Job

Blogging hasn’t just provided me with the incredible freedom of doing what I love the most in the world, but it’s also brought some truly remarkable people into my life. Before I started this journey, I never even knew that Bow existed and now she’s one of my absolute best friends who I talk to pretty much every day. Blogging has helped me form friendships that I never knew I needed but it’s one of the things that I treasure the most about my space in the online world.

Related post: On Finding My People

I’m immensely grateful for the life lessons I’ve learned as well as all the incredible support I’ve received from my parents, Matt and the amazing communities I’ve built online too.

I’ve no idea what the next year holds for I’m Just A Girl but I sincerely hope you continue on this journey with me as we make our way around South East Asia and beyond. My plans for I’m Just A Girl are pretty big at the moment and I need to find a way of curating everything I want to put out into the world.

For now, you can expect to continue to see all my documentations of our trip, including travel guides, budgeting tips and advice, travel planning as well as hotel and restaurant reviews. I’m also planning more lifestyle and blogging based posts such as how I got into blogging and freelancing, plus so many more exciting things!

Thank you so, SO much for reading and I really hope you stick around for a long while to come!

Some of my favourite posts of the last 12 months:

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Is this your first time reading a blog post of mine or have you been around for the full three years? Let me know in the comments or on Twitter @imjustagirl_16.