2019 Goals: Get Fit, Visit Our Dream Destination, and Scale Our Business

written by local expert Anna Faustino

Anna is a co-founder of Adventure in You and has been traveling the world for the last 9 years. She has spent time living in Thailand, Mexico, Indonesia, and Spain and is our local expert in these areas. Her expertise on travel, gear, and building businesses have been featured on Foundr, Business Insider, Yahoo Travel, and more.

As I look back on the year that just passed, I can’t help but smile.

2018 has been an AWESOME year for us. Actually, I would even go far as saying it’s been one of the best years of our lives. We surpassed and achieved so many business and travel goals-all while achieving a great work-life balance.

To cut the long story short, it was just one of those years where everything seemed to fall into place. Our business grew exponentially, we went on so many epic adventures (more on this later), and we finally started working on our health which was a massive thing for us.

At the end of 2017, I sat down and started writing goals for 2018. Although we didn’t achieve one of them (live van life), we pretty much smashed through our other goals and made new ones mid-way through the year. Blue town morocco

The Power of Goal Setting

Every year, Tom and I set aside time to talk about our goals for the upcoming year. We usually go to a quiet cafe where we reflect on the past year and what we want to achieve together for the year to come.

This yearly tradition has become such a pivotal part of our relationship and business and is something I recommend to everyone.

In fact, I would even go as far as saying that goal setting and taking the time to really plan out where you want to be and how you want your company to grow makes all the difference in the world. Goal setting is something we teach all our Blogging Fast Lane students and is something we stand by.

With that in mind, here are our 2018 reflections, our 2019 goals, and a general update on our life.

2018 in a Nutshell

As mentioned, 2018 was incredible. We started the year off by making the following goals:

  • Trek to Everest Basecamp
  • Live Van Life
  • Reach $20,000 in Revenue per Month

If you want to read the full post, check it out here. For our last business goal, we also created an action plan on how we were going to achieve our target as, after all, goals are just goals without direct action.

Everest Base Camp

Hands down, one of the highlights of our year was completing our challenge of hiking to Everest Base Camp. It was an awesome experience and one that we will never forget! Although some people find it easy, I actually suffered from altitude sickness and almost didn’t make it.

Luckily, I had Tom with me to who kept cheering me on. He may or may not have also stopped me from walking off a cliff amidst my altitude delirium. Despite the -20 degree weather and the 13 days of non-stop walking, the entire experience was definitely a highlight of our entire year.

everest-basecamp

Van Life Fail and the Silver Lining (We Traveled ALOT!)

So as some of you know, we had to cancel our van life plans mainly due to my ankle. Upon completing Everest Base Camp, we flew to the UK and on one of our first weekends out, two dogs hit me from behind and broke my ankle in 3 places.

I was rushed to the ER and had an emergency operation which placed 1 metal rod and 11 screws inside my ankle. It was a gutting accident as we had so many travel plans! Because I had to stay in bed with a cast for over 7 weeks, we ditched our original plans of traveling around on a van and decided to slow travel around Europe instead.

Editor’s Note: A broken ankle didn’t stop me from having fun. Check out this silly video created by our friends from Goats on the Road.

Because of this decision, we ended up having the best time in Europe. We lived in Las Palmas and Barcelona, Spain for a month each. We traveled across Morocco and went camping in the Sahara Desert, we threw tomatoes at each other in the La Tomatina Festival, drank waaay too much beer in Oktoberfest, and went on an epic road trip in the Czech Republic.

Overall, 2018 was a great travel year, allowing us to visit 15 countries in total (5 of them were new countries) which is pretty epic for us. camels-morocco

Adventure in You Blog Growth

Apart from achieving our travel goals, we also managed to reach our ambitious business goal which we set for ourselves last year. In 2018, although our traffic didn’t grow that much, our revenue skyrocketed. I can now proudly say that our blog makes 2x more a month than my YEARLY salary as a principal in the Philippines. #socrazy

This year, we also fully paid back our investor (with interest) which means that Tom and I are back to being the sole owners of our company. The initial investment was for an app (Get Stoked) which we ended up pulling the plug on, as it was just draining our resources.

Being able to pay our investor back is a huge milestone in our business as we didn’t want to leave him hanging without seeing a direct return for believing in us, despite the failure of the app. We’ve honestly come a long way since then (our blogging journey has been filled with so many ups and downs) and can’t wait to see what the next year will bring for us.

This year, we also managed to create new revenue streams, grow our affiliates and passive income, and build an amazing community around our Travel University and Blogging Course.

This to us is actually our biggest achievement because we feel it has made the biggest impact on other people’s lives. To date, we have helped thousands of people start a blog, giving them an outlet to pursue their passions. Out of those people, a few hundred joined us on our very first Blogging Course and have already started making money from their blogs.

Coming from the Philippines where wages are low, I feel like the online world can really level out the playing field when it comes to earning money. Blogging has personally given me a sense of freedom (financially) which is why we want to help as many people as we can!

Our Blogging Fast Lane Course is the result of months of hard work. In fact, just before the New Year ended, we rolled out new updates which makes it one of the only blogging courses our there to teach funnels and advanced email marketing.

Two strategies which we think are essential to help monetize blogs nowadays.

The community that we’ve built and our Fast Lane Accelerator Course is one of our biggest achievements to date. Being able to help others on their blogging journey and achieve financial freedom is one of our biggest motivations because we know that this life that we live isn’t possible if we didn’t start Adventure in You ourselves.

travel-university

Our 2019 Travel and Personal Goals

Our Travel Goals

Although we’re not really planners, this year, we already have a couple of trips lined up. First off, we decided on setting up base in Thailand. We’re back living in Chiang Mai and have an awesome apartment which we love. We’re here because we love the general culture and have found a great circle of friends.

Chiang Mai also has amazing food and a great digital nomad scene for networking which we love. Combine all these things with our big business goals, staying put is something we’re excited about so we took out a lease until July.

With that being said, we just booked a trip to Japan this coming March (holler at us if you have any recommendations on where to eat) and another one to Taiwan straight after. Japan has been one of our dream destinations for so long, so we can’t wait!!

After that, we are eyeing up another adventure with Large Minority (driving a tuk-tuk around India) and a couple of other cool stuff before we make our way to Europe.

chiang-mai-apartment
Our apartment in Chiang Mai (now it still looks the same except with more plants!)

Personal/Work Goals

For the year 2019, Tom and I are planning to stay put and really focus on three things.

1. Our Health
2. Our Blogging Course
3. Our Travel Content

Before 2018 ended, when we moved back to Chiang Mai, one of our goals is to get fitter which is why we decided to hire a personal trainer. One of our biggest motivations when building our business is to be able to reach a point where we can afford personal trainers mainly to keep us accountable and motivated.

Although our routine has been disrupted over the holidays, we are back to the gym again today, ready to get strong and healthy. Working on our health and fitness is a huge part of our goal this year as Tom and I want to get in our best shape. As always, with a goal comes an action plan! We’ve meal prepped for the entire week and have a plan for our fitness and diet routines which we are super excited about.

Aside from working on our health, a few other personal goals on my end:

✅ Read 52 books by the end of the year (1 book per week)

✅ Make time to do creative things outside of work. I used to love to paint, do arts and crafts, and just generally unwind by doing things not work-related. This year, I want to do more of that!

reading a book in pai

The Blogging Fast Lane + Adventure in You

Last year, as mentioned, Tom and I put a lot of effort into creating a blogging course which we know can help make a difference in other people’s lives. We took everything that we learned from almost 3 years of blogging and structured it into a 7-week program to help people start monetizing their blogs.

Every day, we are humbled by the kind messages that we receive from our students which is why we love continuously working on the course to keep improving it. In fact, before the year ended, Tom rolled out 14 new lessons on funnels and email marketing.

Sidenote: If you’re interested in checking out what our students have to say about the course and get a link to our FREE training on how to make a full-time income from blogging, check out this link: bloggingfastlane.com/reviews.

This year, we want to grow this course out even more, which is why we hired a marketing team to help us scale. Tom and I are determined to keep helping our students grow their own blogs and make money from it so we’re going to give it all we got this year!

We’re planning on doing all this and more all while continuously working on growing Adventure in You. We’re currently in the process of looking for a full-time editor to help us grow our brand. We know that these are huge changes but we’re excited to keep growing and working on something that we love.

Your Turn

What about you? What are your 2019 goals? Send us a message or leave it in the comments below. Remember, goals will remain goals if you don’t create a concrete action plan for it. In our case, we reverse engineer what we want and set ourselves monthly targets.

Hopefully, this post will inspire you to get writing on your own goals for 2019. Whatever it is, wishing you all a happy and fulfilling year ahead.

Keep on adventuring, folks! tom and anna adventure in you


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