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Meet Mike Shubic

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Today we’d like to introduce you to Mike Shubic.

Mike, can you briefly walk us through your story – how you started and how you got to where you are today.
During the economic downturn in the late 2000s, I had a successful online marketing and web development firm. By 2009 I lost most of my clients and had to lay off my team. As 2010 rolled around, I lost my house, sold my belongings, embraced insecurity, and hit the road for a trip of uncertainty.

I created a travel blog to keep my friends and family up to speed as to what I was doing and where I was going. Low and behold, people started reading it. By the end of 2010 MikesRoadTrip.com was named “Best Travel Tips Blog” of the year by GotSaga (a travel website). In 2012 I did a Travel Channel Show called, “Best of the Road.” Since then many opportunities and accolades have since followed.

I’m now an award-winning videographer, writer and public speaker. I’m also the author of the book “Lines, Signs & Forks – Diary of a Nomadic Road Tripper.”

While I didn’t set out to be a professional travel blogger, it has become a pretty good gig. People actually pay me to travel the world. It’s not as glamours as it looks, I work seven days a week and rarely have a day off, but I’m not complaining, I have the best job in the world. And, you know what they say, if you love what you do, you’ll never work a day in your life.

We’re always bombarded by how great it is to pursue your passion, etc – but we’ve spoken with enough people to know that it’s not always easy. Overall, would you say things have been easy for you?
Hell no! Nothing in life is “smooth.” In the early days of my blogging career I made very little money. It was tough to carve out a value proposition and sell it to people who were still holding on to the old ways of marketing.

Today, no destination would even consider spending $50k on a single full-page ad in a newspaper. The travel industry has completely change the way it markets itself. Most of the marketing budgets are invested online and with content creators and influencers.

2016, 2017 and 2018 were amazing years, but now I see the industry becoming very saturated with people who claim to be “travel bloggers” just to get free trips. It can be a challenge competing with “free.” It’s also a big challenge for destinations, hotels and tour operators to determine who to work with as they are inundated with inquiries.

We live in an era of constant change, we all need to continually re-invent ourselves and our value to others. Every generation has its challenges, ours, is keeping up with the rate of change.

We’d love to hear more about your work.
I am a content creator and promoter. I have an audience in which I can promote destinations, experiences and goods/services that are related to travel. Content is the holy grail of marketing today in nearly every sector. International tourism has increased from 400m in 1995, to 1.3b today. Needless to say, I’m in a growth industry.

I specialize in creating and promoting video content. YouTube has been the second most popular search engine for over six years now. 74% of all web traffic is for video content. If you have a business and you’re not creating video content, it’s like not having a website back in 2000. You’re way behind the times.

Always learning and trying to improve. Consistently producing quality over quantity. Striving to exceed expectations. Finally, always doing what I say I will do.

So, what’s next? Any big plans?
I want to work on bigger video projects. Rather than creating a single video for a client, I want to produce a series for a single destination. Perhaps even in longer-form videos up to 25-30 minutes. A true episode if you will that could be sold to a streaming service like Amazon Prime, Netflix and/or the new Apple TV service.

I am also in the midst of developing an inspirational presentation that coincides with my book, “Lines, Signs & Forks – Diary of a Nomadic Road Tripper.” I’d like to work on becoming a better public speaker and start to monetize that.

Everyone tells me what a wonderful voice I have, so I think it’s time to start listening to that praise and start doing voice-over work for corporations and ad agencies.

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